Blue Heron
Walter and Linen fly
[Another story of The Sanguine Experiment. This one takes place immediately after Disgusting. It’s a snowy Friday night in February, 1998. The house just exploded. Our heroes are flying through the air somewhere between Bellefonte and Milesburg. To catch up or find other stories or essays, check out the Table of Contents.]
They spun up through snow. White stung their eyes. Linen’s side burned. Emerging above the low cloud cover they found the wind blowing hard, buffeting them but mostly streaming along, toward Milesburg as best they could tell, carrying them with it.
Linen saw Walter clutching in all directions. Paper fluttered away from him like pigeons from an errant pedestrian. But he could not control his movement; he merely spun.
She clutched her hair and wept.
In a second Walter had righted himself and was focused on Linen. He managed to hold her shoulders. “What is it, what’s wrong?”
“Your notebooks … ”
He smeared tears across his face with his palm. “It’s all right. I’ve started over before.”
Those hundreds of notebooks, she thought. Started over before. She looked at him. Gentle exhaustion. He was even smiling.
“People are always taking my notebooks,” he said. “Or they used to be. Every time I got locked up. One reason I don’t interact much now, you know? Someone might get at my notes … ”
“No, but that’s just it,” she said. She held his face. “I was like those people. I thought, I thought they were just insane, disturbing … not because of the blood or food or … were those enemas? … but the difference between the enormity of scale, thousands of entries, and the minuteness of the scope, a line item for a single pinprick … they gave me vertigo. But they were your favorite thing. I didn’t understand. And now they are lost.”
“It’s okay, Linen, it’s really okay.” He studied her face, then pulled his cuff over his wrist to wipe her tears. “Normal people always think my notebooks are a pointless obsession. Normal people always think I’m disgusting and gross. Honestly if you resembled me I’d think you were too nasty to talk to. I’m not a nice person that way, I don’t have a lot of empathy … and besides, my La-Z-Boy is officially my favorite thing.” His eyes creased in a smile. “And it’s also lost. At least life’s predictable, right?”
“We’re sailing through the air. How is that predictable?”
“You’re right. This is wonderful. I’ve never been in a tornado before.”
“Wasn’t a tornado,” Linen said. “Tornadoes come with a noise like a freight train. This was just us, just your house, I think.”
“I can’t begin to understand that. But look.” He pointed. Clouds flowed beneath them, low snowy ones. They were above the snowfall now. They could see constellations: Orion, the Bears.
“We’re traveling north,” Linen said.
“Wonder how fast?”
“No idea. But wait. What if we aren’t? What if this is a dream? Or an allegory or something? What if it’s not real?”
He looked at her with interest. “You mean the house never blew up and we’re down there doing our thing, not knowing that figments of us are here flying through the skies?”
“It’s not flying, it’s like that scene in Narnia where they’re sailing on Aslan’s breath.”
“I don’t know what book that is, but we’re definitely not flying,” Walter agreed. “Feels like the wind’s kind of winnowing through me. Do you feel that? Like going through a sieve of air all very fast.”
“If this is a dream, what do you suppose our bodies are doing?” Linen asked.
“Probably having sex … ”
“You said you couldn’t!”
“Sure, but I didn’t mention how I have a vivid imagination and the full contents of an 18th-century surgery in a big box under the bed … ”
This time he couldn’t hold his deadpan expression. He rolled away, shaking with laughter. Linen, meanwhile, threw both arms over her head. “Nooo! I will never unimagine that.”
The force of the gesture sent her somersaulting away from him. She whooped at the spinning motion.
“Wait, come back!” Walter grabbed for her and caught her heel. “I’m teasing, I’m teasing. We’re probably just asleep in the armchair … ”
His arm passed through a warm curtain.
“Linen? Linen, what’s that on your shirt?”
She was still laughing. It took her a moment to understand and lift the hem of her sweater.
A rough board, perhaps, had torn her left side, hipbone to ribcage, in a wide jagged gash. Fat gleamed in the moonlight. Black blood, white bone. Black blood trailing out of the wound and disappearing behind them as they flew.
Linen had never seen such a thing. Or in a movie, maybe, not in real life. She tried to puzzle it out, then lifted her head to meet Walter eyes, waiting for him to repeat, I’m kidding. Just winding you up.
He looked back steadily. The stars seemed to veer all around her, big swoops then a jerk. She clung to his gaze as she had the night of the Gift.
“That’s your gift,” she said, “when I look at you nothing hurts.”
Walter wrapped her in his arms, clasping both hands as hard as he could over Linen’s torn side. “Must have been a broken beam,” he said, “something with a jagged edge. This is bad.”
“Your eyelashes are the most beautiful thing … ”
“Linen, it isn’t working. My hands. They’re not holding it back, your blood is oozing right through them like, like they were gauze.”
“That’s right, we’re turning to air. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“It is, but better, because I won’t be alone.”
Linen held his face with delight, cradling it. She felt Walter’s hand on her side. A little tug and drag at her sweater. He said, “My hand pulls right through the fabric.”
“See if it pulls through skin.”
“I won’t let you go.”
“Wait, try like this.”
They experimented, cheek against cheek.
Not quite, but the surfaces seemed velvety, as if the boundaries were nubbing up into a forest you could traverse if you were persistent enough. Wind buffeted them, and also blew through them. For maybe 30 seconds they held each other, happy as they would ever be in life again.
Then Walter lifted his face from hers.
“We can’t.”
Linen did not understand his distress.
“We can’t.” He spoke all at once. “The thing we did. Your Gift. It seemed beautiful and it was beautiful and I’m not blaming you but you really can’t do things out of mad crushes, you can’t. Don’t you realize there was only one soul left, just yours? You did a wrong thing, even if it was for kindness, you helped someone commit a murder. We did together. And the other soul, the one that left my body when I died, where’s he?”
The wind picked up. The sailed northwest, just off Polaris. Linen’s blood ribboned across the firmament.
She whispered, “I’m not sorry.”
“No, never be sorry. I’m not sorry either. But you can’t die, no matter how lovely this is, you’ll take both of us, and we have to find him. I don’t know where he is but he’s up to no good.”
Linen resisted the pull of a deep downy dream. “What’s he like?” she asked. It felt like asking about the plot of a movie she didn’t much care to see. “What are we up against?”
“He’s me. He’d have to be exactly like me, wouldn’t he, except he wants to kill people. That’s the only part of me that’s changed since the Gift. And he knows everything I do up through the night of Jan. 4.”
Linen sagged against him.
“Remember how you had a crush on me and then you didn’t? Maybe he’s why. I have, he has, this malevolent energy, I keep it under wraps as best I can, but he’s a gravity well. The more vulnerable you are the harder you feel it. He’s the one you’re in love with.”
She opened her eyes long enough to smile. “You’re wrong.”
“Then live long enough to enjoy it.”
Walter could see stars through her forehead. His hands sifted her blood.
His eyelids fluttered. For a second he saw ranks of numbers. Then he removed his hands from her side and instead embraced her.
“Remember the blue heron? The picture you gave me. The future.”
“Mmf.”
“Think about the outside of the heron. His feathers. A waterproof surface. Than the inside. Down, soft downy feathers, you can just sink in.”
“Allegory all along, then.”
“Hoping so.”
Walter folded his arms around Linen. He felt a velvety warmth, then a gentle tug, then a terrible invasive tug that seemed violate him at every point. Then nothing.
But Linen, who had been nearer dissolution, entered him easily as an inbreath. The blood still flowing from her side now joined his bloodstream, circulated and returned to her.
Then she felt something new. Wintry air in her now-larger lungs.
Walter?
“Holy shit, don’t do that. I’m sorry, but you have to be still. You have to sleep.”
Turn all the way heron. Then you can fly, really steer. You can decide where you want to go.
“This is seriously creepy. If you don’t stop talking I’m gonna tell my body to write on yours with a Sharpie.”
I think this is all the body we’ve got.
A blue heron, untroubled by human speech, pumped his wings a couple of times and flew west northwest, racing the dawn.
Sun spiked off the crust, skimmed the lemony surfaces and skirted the few azure smudges of footprints. Beams spindled up from the ice and bored into his eyes.
He had always lived in the dark, years and years now. A locust underground. And this year, his 28th — four sevens, one lunar cycle — he was a new creature, born but to live a few months, weeks, hours, born only to mate — he couldn’t help thinking that — not feed — cicadas have no mouths, lucky bastards — and all this time to take in sun and more sun.
He fed upon light.
A shot echoed across the valley.
He blinked and turned his gaze south to the treeline. Someone with a .22 was hunting squirrels or pigeons.
Walter had been living on light and ice for days now — apotheosis of pica, he thought — and wondered whether he would be visible to the men who might be descending the ridge to the south. He’d see them long before they saw him, anyhow. Except for poplars and willows that lined the frozen creek, the valley was an open meadow, humped over with snow-covered bracken.
He wondered what they would make of him — a bone-white figure with a hint of pink sunburn on his shoulders and forehead, sitting comfortably naked on a battered La-Z-Boy in the sub-zero air, possessions scattered around him and half snowed-under, a double-barreled shotgun resting across his thighs.