Sleep-Rite Motel
Boulder City, Nevada
December 13
An irony: as soon as the realization hits that you will never be given the chance to be mundane, repetitive, boring, you clutch at normalcy any way possible. A spasm, really, neither willed nor controlled. You find a god, pick a favorite color, fuss over your lipstick in the bathroom mirror, open the window and try to determine the exact shade of blue in the sky.
Or in my case, you take a shower.
Hot water pounding around the ears, down the back of the neck, covers a multitude of doubts; when I emerge twenty minutes later I am tempted to be optimistic. There are some factors in our favor, after all. Certainly there have to be, somewhere. I'm not going to bother to name them specifically, perhaps because they would turn up to be more scarce than anticipated. Awareness of their existence is enough. I have learned this much in the past year: don't chase hope down, hog-tie it, and sling it over your shoulder. Just live in faith that it exists, even if it's nowhere near you. It's like silk, it's not for daily wear. The fabric burns too easily; it rips and attracts stains. But you will have to admit that it is beautiful when it first appears, or when it returns after a long absence. It has a tragic weave, you know. It likes to make guest appearances with desperation.
And it is here now. I can see it wrapped around Scott as he plays with his son; they are positively smothered in it. Of course Will does not know this and his father does not seem to care.
They are spread out on the bed, Will on a pillow and Scott stretched beside him moving his son's tiny feet up and down like little gear shifts. I'll have to give the man credit; he sounds more like an engine than the Jeep did last night. This imitation seems to merit approval; the baby's face is wrinkled with delight.
"You make a nice Porsche." I say.
"Family tradition." The corners of his mouth flip up in what might be a grin if you squinted hard enough. "Devotion to all things mechanical must be instilled from birth. If I'm lucky, his first word will be 'engine'." His eyes drop back to his son and the grin turns sheepish. "Plus it makes him laugh."
Vrroom, vrroom. The little feet totally disappear in Scott's hands as they move up and down. Will coos his enthusiasm, arms waving in a calculated grab for his father's nose. He misses but recovers his loss on the chin.
It was not always this easy. I still remember the night they found me, when the bundle of red wrinkled skin and thin screeches scared him more than anything else in his life.
(You're a father, Jean said once, and it was an accusation.
So what am I supposed to do?
Hold him.
How?
Closer to you. He's not a bomb.)
But to Scott, he was. Jean and I never understood it; I still wouldn't if I didn't have a few of his more buried memories floating in the back of my brain. He went with Logan on the rescue missions, when it was really beginning to get bad but Xavier thought we could still win. When they were in time, they brought the survivors back to the mansion. When they were too late, they dug the graves. It was the children that stayed with him, even more than the young women and the old men. They caught him off guard: the lips frozen half-open, the blind questioning eyes, the tiny fingers still clutching the hand of the mother, the torn rag doll soaked with bloody mud. Jean would have been two months pregnant at the time. Now, I believe the children were the reason he decided to run. It finally dawned on him that if he didn't, he would show up at an execution site one day and the mother would be his wife, and the child would be his son.
I remember, too well, the excuses he came up with to avoid the baby, to ignore it, or at the very least to detach himself from it.
(He's your son, Jean said again, and it would have been anger if she hadn't been too close to outright crying. He's your son and you don't even love him.)
No, we were wrong again. He loved too much.
Vrroom, vroom. I watch him drive the feet across the finish line and celebrate the victory with a kiss.
Things have improved. I told you, there is hope here today.
Jean should see him like this; it would make her smile, but she is Not here. She left over an hour ago with Logan to arrange identification cards, passports, and antibiotics for Scott--although she claimed they are for the baby, the only reason he let her walk out the door in the first place. I don't know what's harder for him; the inability to defend his wife and son or the necessity to trust that job to someone else.
"I think he's bigger than he was last week. And cuter."
"He has his mother's eyes."
This is said as a relief.
"But your jaw. And your grip....nearly pulled my finger off two days ago trying to tie it in a knot."
Casual conversation; a polite formality or a justifiable lie depending on how you look at it. It's not that what I'm saying is not the truth, it's the reason I'm saying it. What I'm using it to avoid.
My fingers slide along the vinyl blinds and push slats apart to Allow a view of the street: cinderblock gray smudges of dust stick to my gloves, loose particles of skin and hair and other used body components fly into my face and eyes. A cough or a sneeze, what will it be? As it turns out, neither. The body is absent-minded in moments of impending crisis; it forgets several of the more minor functions. Or it does not forget, but stores the energy for something more important, such as breathing or healing or running away. Or for standing and fighting, if it comes to that, although it is doubtful. This is not the old days, when heroism meant everything and martyrdom wavered before us in the air like heat. Now we have the good sense to turn tail and run.
Of course that doesn't always work. He who flees a doomed battle may live to fight again, or he simply may get himself shot in the back. Sometimes I think I would rather see it coming, but this is bravado. If given the opportunity, I know good and well I'd close my eyes.
"They should be back soon." Scott says. "Logan estimated a couple of hours, if they were lucky."
"Yeah."
Lucky. Does he mean lucky to get the job done so quickly or Lucky they weren't shot on the streets? Maybe that is why I'm looking at the window, to locate the remnants of gun smoke and the blood smeared on the asphalt and the bodies, or what is left of the bodies.
That isn't why I'm searching. Jean's too smart for that; Logan's too strong. There is something else-- a man, across the street, leaning by the wall beside a liquor store and smoking his fifth cigarette of the morning. Smoking but not drinking; this means something. The first cigarette, Logan told me, was not long after we checked into the motel. The second before the argument between him and Scott, the third after. I myself noticed the fourth before my shower.
(Watch,) Logan said, (you'll see an unhealthy interest in this room.
So what do we do?
Count cigarettes and if he moves send Scooter out to blast him. The kid can do that much even with busted ribs.
Why wait?
He doesn't check in to whoever sent him, they'll be on us in five minutes.
Oh.
Don't worry, kid. When I get back and we're ready to leave, I'll have a little chat with our friend and see who he's working for.)
I wonder where he plans to stash the body. Dumpsters are too obvious; maybe he'll leave it in the bathtub. A farewell present.
"He's still there, isn't he. Our inquisitive friend across the street."
Scott says this without so much as looking up from his son; it strikes me that the game I just witnessed might be a diversion. A display of normalcy, of deliberate carelessness. Look at us, it will say, we are blissful in our ignorance of your plans.
"Still there. On his fifth smoke."
He slides off the bed and shares the view with me, the corners of his mouth pulled down in a slight grimace. "Wonder what's holding them off?" A murmur; I'm not entirely sure this question was meant for me to hear at all. He forgets, sometimes, that he is not alone.
"Maybe he's not with them at all. Maybe he just doesn't have any place else to go. Wouldn't you stare at hotel windows if you had nothing better to do all day?"
"Marie."
He says it as a contradiction, sympathetic but firm.
(Don't you know, little girl, that no one is just looking in windows or smoking cigarettes anymore? Don't you know they're all watching for someone? The entire world is eyes and none of them are kind.)
We drift into silence; having done away with the formalities it is now legal to ask the real questions, only as usual neither of us are quite sure how. Well, at least a shot in the dark is better than no shot at all.
"So you think we should have stayed."
"Yes." He turns away from the window, rubs the dust onto his pants. "Not permanently but at least until we could have come up with a plan. Until we knew for sure what we were doing. And until I healed enough to be more than dead weight." A spitting out of words at the end; he's a bad taste in his own mouth. Chalk, I imagine, they say it's the taste of broken bones.
"You're not dead weight, Scott."
"C'mon. Logan had to carry me out of that place on his back. I'm not exactly in fighting condition."
"Maybe we won't have to fight."
"I hope you're right."
Another silence, the silence of dust particles floating through the light twisting through the bent blinds. There was some surprise when I woke up this morning to see the sun on Logan's face, on my arms. You must understand that once you live so long behind wire the sunlight no longer seems real. It is dying all the time, even in midday. Knowing this, you can imagine the shock to see it alive again.
I fold my arms over my chest, fingers drumming against the thick line of my collarbone. Scott leans against the wall; does he know that Logan stood right there an hour ago? Probably not. He has no idea how much alike they are in the midst of their differences.
"I don't know if I could have stayed there any longer." I don't say it to Scott, but to the window. Or perhaps to the man outside the window, explaining my reasons for leaving the world assigned me and invading his. "Not after--" A swallow, thick. "I just don't think I could have. They went too far."
"I'm sorry."
The visor leaves its red shadow on my face. Behind it the eyes will be offering regret or sympathy or both and I am not in the mood.
"Don't be. I don't have the energy for forgiveness today, especially when it's not needed."
"You shouldn't have touched me. Should have just let them finish what they came to do and leave, it would have been easier that way..."
"No, it would just have given them what they wanted. They wanted us helpless and I don't play that part well."
"No, you don't." He grins but it collapses on his next thought. "Tell me something and tell it to me honest."
You know, I'm getting tired of that request. It's usually followed By some deep and probing question that takes more than I want to offer. But I feel I owe them answers, if I can give them. God knows I'd want them to give me the same if they could.
"What?"
"Did we spend months in there for nothing? Was it worse than outside? You've lived both. Tell me straight."
I knew it. Deep revelation time. My teeth pull on the skin of my lower lip as I slowly process the words I will use for honesty. Lies come so much easier; they require no thought at all. You have to put some effort into the truth.
"Honestly, I don't know if you can compare the two." Hands fiddling with the hem of my shirt, twisting the edges around fingers. "Outside, I knew what they wanted....my money, my body, or my genes. If I slipped up, I lost one of the three. It was that simple. In there it was different. Like they were trying to break down who we were, like Jean and I weren't even human or mutant.We were something else, something filthy that was only good for what you could put inside."
His fist clenches reflexively; releases. We uncover sores that have not healed; Jean still wakes up screaming some nights when he touches her and she thinks it is someone else.
"So Logan's right." The muscles of his jaw lock together, rigid, taut. "I failed."
My hands move over his and I look him in what would be his eyes.
"No, Scott, you didn't fail. Neither of you did."
Thick golden light drips through the slats in the blinds and leaks onto our faces, our hands. Invisible stains. I can't look at it directly, everything is brighter when you are free. Garish, almost. It burns the retinas.
"Tell me why."
"Because I would be dead if Logan hadn't left me to get himself captured and gutted in my place. And I wouldn't be human if you hadn't found me when you did."
"You were always human, Marie. More than any of us."
"See, that's where you're wrong. I couldn't even remember how that felt. It was like falling every minute of the day, knowing you could scream but no one would hear. All I could do was hope that someone threw down a rope before I hit bottom. I wanted it to be Logan but it was you. That's all there is to it."
His fingers brush the back of my knuckles. An appreciative gesture, but also a prelude to what he will say next. "If it comes to the worst, if we are separated and you don't make it out, I'm coming back for you. Once I get my family out I'm coming back to find you."
"No, you're not."
He is taken aback.
"Marie--"
"You have to be there to teach your son his first poem. I'll be fine. We'll all be fine."
"So where are we going now? What promises do we make?"
"I don't know. But we don't give up, whatever happens."
"You don't ask much do you?"
"Only from people I know can give it."
Then the conversation is over, a mutual consensus, and we fall back to the different, pointless activities meant to keep us from jumping at the sound of every passing car. I expect sirens any minute, flashing lights and bullhorns but that is not their way now. Lights and noise give a warning, a chance to dash out the bathroom window in the last second and escape. Now they do it with finesse, with silence. The van pulls up in the back of the building or across the street, the black uniforms swarm in silence up the stairs, and then they kick your door down and shoot your baby in the head.
But then what was I expecting? Even sides? Fair play?
Scott confines his fear to metal; he cleans the gun -- our only weapon, a battered but serviceable automatic-- and divides the ammunition into gleaming piles of silver. Half will go to Logan, half he will keep. Everything must be rationed, now, even death, but when he thinks I am not looking he slips three of the bullets into his pocket. Understandable-- Scott would never let them take his wife and son alive. This raises the question, however, of the third bullet. Is it for him or me? He would have some sort of noble instinct like that-- take me down gently, spare me from the inevitable No thank you. If I want to die, I'll do it myself, I'm certainly capable.
But it may surprise you to know that I have not considered that option yet. I have too much life to catch up on to sit around the hotel room moping on ways to end it. I occupy the time by telling Will my memories of favorite encounters with the violin.
/Beethoven in Carnegie Hall, my seventeenth birthday, Logan hadn't stopped chasing memories yet but Xavier bought me my own box and accompanied me himself in a gray Armani tuxedo and silk tie that matched the burgundy Versace gown I had found waiting for me in my room./
/My first public performance since leaving home, Mozart in a drawing room with roses and white marble floors, my fingers sweating at the creases not from the music but from the audience. Diplomats, congressmen, influential businessmen. Anyone and everyone whom Xavier thought worthy to impress with the idea that his children could play the classics as well as any pure human. I was not the only performer but I was the first and I was convinced the spotlights would melt me into sugary mush.)
/Bach Double Violin Concerto by a lake in autumn, Logan appeared from nowhere to disrupt the music and told me he loves me for the first time and, at least this far, the last./
An attempt at passing down a better world; they will want him alive and if the rest of us die trying to stop that, I will at least be able to hope he remembers part of it. That a long time ago life consisted of beautiful nothings like music and expensive dresses and vows of first love. Then again it could merely be nostalgia. My fingers ache to touch the strings, more than that, to touch the notes contained within the strings. Enough of silence; I want to pour out music. I want to live it in technicolor, to obsess about nothing more than the cadenza at the end of the page. I want to be swept away.
It is the insignificant things that will keep us all alive or kill us.
Outside the window, a man lights his sixth cigarette.
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