Don’t Let Me Down

By Simon Jimenez

Chapter Seven

“A Beginning and an End”

*

“A fox chases a rabbit,” I recited. “The rabbit jumps over the log, hides in the grass, and waits. He runs into the tree, and falls asleep. No, that’s not right. A fox chases a rabbit. The rabbit jumps over the log and... wait, doesn’t the rabbit jump over a river, then hide under a log? Okay, a fox chases a rabbit. The rabbit jumps over the river, hides under the log, and waits. He runs into the tree... or is it into the rabbit hole. Yeah, that makes more sense. The rabbit runs into the rabbit hole. He falls asleep.”

I looked down at my shoe.

“Goddamit,” I muttered. My shoelaces were still a mess. I tried again. “A fox chases a fucking rabbit. The rabbit jumps over the fucking log and he--” I was so absorbed in my quest to tie my shoes I hadn’t noticed that Gwyn was sitting in her wheelchair by the foyer entrance, watching me with a wry smile.

“You’ve been trying to tie your shoes for five minutes,” she noted, rolling toward me. “Is something wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I said a little too quickly, “I’m fine.” My hands continued to fumble with the laces until Gwyn sighed and put my foot on her lap.

“A fox chases a rabbit,” she recited as her fingers moved nimbly between the weathered shoelaces. “The rabbit jumps over the river, hides in the grass, and waits. He runs around the tree, and into the rabbit hole. He falls asleep.” She tightened the laces into a neat bow. “Was that so hard, idiot?”

“Shut up,” I muttered, retracting my foot. “I have a lot on my mind.”

“Anything you want to share?”

“No,” I said, not wanting to get into the intricacies of my unique situation. My watch beeped. I was already late for the meeting. I headed for the door, but before I turned the knob, I realized this might be the last time I’d see my little sister. After I walked out that front door, my life would be up for grabs. What if I died? I’d never have a chance to say goodbye. “Hey, Gwyn?” I said, turning away from the door. “I’m leaving.”

“I know. I can see that.” She said with a how-stupid-do-you-think-I-am look. “Go.” Then she left the foyer. “Oh,” she called out from the living room, “If you pass by an Armadillo Quesadillo, can you get me a three-cheese burrito? I’m starving like a mother fucker.”    

“Right,” I whispered. As I opened the door and walked out into the frosty dusk air, I laughed, and said, “Goodbye, idiot.”

As I rode the bus to Brody’s place, my mind began to wander. I thought about Gwyn, wondered what she was doing tonight, if she was going to see her boyfriend Jack, or just stay in and watch a movie...she always did like those spy thrillers. Sometimes my mother would watch with her. I hoped they were together. I thought about my classmates at school, imagining them going about their routine, unaware that tonight they might blink out of existence. I wondered which ones would be turning in their sleep, dreaming of the apocalypse. I thought about Melvin, and how much I missed his marshmallow smile. I remembered that his tombstone had so many flowers around you could barely make out his name. He would’ve liked that. 

I thought about his brother, Ellis.  

“If all goes according to plan, Ellis should be fine,” Brody assured.

“He won’t be sacrificed until midnight.” Bethany added. She was leaning against Brody’s kitchen counter. “We have plenty of time.”

“What are we waiting for?” I asked. “Let’s go get him.”

Brody was loading rifles and placing them in a duffle bag as he spoke. “It’s not that simple. Bethany did surveillance earlier. There are over fifty guards patrolling the White Crusader complex, no blind spots in their security. If we want to live through tonight, we can’t just barge in guns blazing.”

“So what do we do?” I asked.

“We wait.” Brody answered. “When the sacrifice goes down, most of the guards will leave their posts and go to wherever the ceremony is taking place, which will give us an opening to place explosives to serve as a diversion. The ceremony will be put on hold. We sneak in, and start busting heads. Hey, soul-eater, did you get the explosives?”

“Yeah, half-breed, I got the damn explosives.” Bethany said. She headed for the front door. “We have four hours before it’s time to go. I suggest you two make the most of it.”

“Where are you going?” Brody asked.

“Taking a walk.” She said just as the door closed.

I looked over at Brody. “What are we supposed to do for four hours?”

*

I lay on my back, watching the living room fan spin in slow circles as blood dribbled out the side of my mouth. Pain. That was the overriding sensation flowing through my body at the moment.

 “You still alive?” Brody asked in-between breaths. He held out his hand.

I didn’t answer, didn’t accept his helping hand. I stood back up, steadied myself, and got back into position. I raised my fists for the next round. Like a dance, we circled each other with nimble feet barely touching the floor, waiting for the right moment to strike. Our eyes stayed connected, trying to psych out the other with concentrated glares. My hands sweated from the heat and strain of the fabric inside the boxing glove. The tension was too much. I couldn’t stop myself.

I swung.

Brody dodged, kicked my feet off the ground, and pinned me to the hardwood. He won again, like usual. Ever since we were sixteen, Brody took it upon himself to teach me the art of self-defense in the form of boxing. We would shove the couches, chairs, and coffee table against the walls of his living room, leaving a good-sized space in which to spar. He beat me every time.

I wheezed beneath Brody’s body, sweating from head to toe. “Fuck you’re good,” I moaned.

“You’ve gotten a lot better,” he said, knocking his thick glove against my cheek. “Sort of.”

I pushed Brody off and stood up again, shaking off my sweat and exhaustion. “Again. Let’s go.”

I peered over my fists into Brody’s eyes, and began to shuffle forward. The clock audibly ticked by as I waited for him to make a move. Brody’s right arm slightly rose: an opening. I swung in from the left, hoping to catch a bald spot on his side, but I didn’t realize it was a fake out. Brody’s left fist came smashing down against the side of my head. My stomach slammed into the floor, sending signals of pain throughout my body. I jumped back up almost immediately, and landed a hit in his gut, and another. Brody brought his hands around my neck and shoved me away. I blocked a punch from the right, from the left, from the right again. The flurry of blows wouldn’t stop, but I kept my arms up in defense all the same. Brody was smiling; I had never lasted this long before.

“That’s it,” he said as he kept attacking. “Keep those arms up, keep those arms up.”

I was getting frustrated. I couldn’t do anything while he had me pinned, so I pushed forward against his punch with all my strength, making his arms ricochet to his sides. With nothing to stop me, I let my fist fly into his face. It connected with his cheek. I could feel the force of the blow ride up my arm.

He stumbled backwards into the wall. I threw off my gloves and ran over to him.

“Brody,” I said, putting my hand on his back. “Are you okay?”

He didn’t answer, just grabbed my collar and kissed me deep. He pulled away, as if to say something, but I silenced him with another kiss and led him into the bedroom. We became a tangle of sweaty limbs. Of all the times we had sex, this was the most gentle, his hands holding me as one would a fragile porcelain doll. He never opened his eyes until the very end, when he came, and cold sobering reality flew in through the window.

For a while, he sat on the edge of the bed, unmoved, simply thinking to himself. When I asked what he was thinking about, he left the room. Figuring he needed time to himself, I pulled on my jeans and looked around for my shirt. Before I could find it, Brody walked back into the bedroom with two mugs in his hand. He handed me one of the mugs. It was full of cool water. I drank as if I had been stuck in the middle of the desert for days. Brody simply sat on the bed and watched me drink. Then, out of nowhere, he started singing a song I hadn’t heard in a very long time:

“I heard a fireside chat, I saw a baseball bat
And I just laughed till I thought I'd die”

I started laughing, spilling some water out my mouth and onto the floor. I finished the verse:

“But I'd be done see'n about everything
when I see an elephant fly.”

We were both laughing near the end of it.

“Dumbo....do you think we’ll ever forget that song?” I asked.

“I hope not,” he said, sitting next to me on the windowsill. “I fucking love that song.”

“Yeah...” I said, feeling a strange calm wash over my mind. My hand loosened its grip on the cup, my eyes began to droop. “I… love that song too…” I said, finding it incredibly difficult to move my mouth. Felt like I was speaking in a tub of molasses. I tried to stand up, but only accomplished spilling my mug of water all over the rug. “I can’t…I can’t stay awake…Brody…”

“I know,” he said, as a veil of darkness began to fall over my consciousness. Brody held me tight against his chest. “Go to sleep.”

I fell asleep.

*

“This is a dream…” I said, not believing that he was dead. I shook his shoulders, but he did not rouse. I screamed in his face, but he did not flinch. I cried, and he stayed silent, sprawled in a pool of sticky, crimson blood, watching me with the empty eyes of a broken doll. “Wake up, wake up. Please… wake up.”

“He got what he deserved,” was all Bethany said before she gingerly put away her weapons. Wide black wings sprouted from her back and she flew away, calling out, “The Tidal Wave is coming.”

“Shut up!” I yelled, but she didn’t hear me. She was already gone. I turned back to Brody and shook his body. “You’re not dead… please tell me you’re not dead. Oh god, what the hell is happening… wake up, please, wake up…”

But despite my pleading, he moved not an inch, and his skin began to pall. The car headlights behind me dimmed out to black, casting me into the darkness. A wolf howled against the violet blue of moonlight, and my tears began to flow, drip by drip against Brody’s bloodied face.

“Don’t leave me alone…” I begged. “Wake up… wake up…wake up.”

*

My face was hot, like it was on fire. I opened my eyes, and realized strips of sunlight were draped across my face.

It was morning.

“Brody?” I called out his name repeatedly, but no answer. Using the phone in the kitchen, I called his cell phone, but no answer. After an hour of searching the apartment for any sign of his presence, I sat on the edge of his bed, my hands shaking.

He was gone.

Time seemed to pass backwards. A quarter to noon, and I was still sitting on the edge of Brody’s bed, hoping desperately for him to call, tell me everything was alright, that he was still alive...but the phone never rang, the door never rattled its lock. Did he fail? I looked outside the window. The world was still there. No apocalypse as far as I could tell, which must have meant the rescue was successful... at least, that’s what I hoped it meant. 

As I thought about the myriad possibilities of what could have happened last night, I noticed a faint tapping sound coming from somewhere in the room. I perked up my head, and saw a crow hitting its beak against the window, trying to get my attention. When it saw me looking its way, the crow squawked and tapped even more furiously.

Cautiously, I slid open the window, allowing the crow to hop onto the inner edge of the windowsill. Before I could wonder why I let the bird into the room, it began to speak. “Greetings, I am here to speak with Harbor Ryan.” it said. “I have a message for him from Brody Gallagher.”

“Brody!?” I screamed, making the bird jump in fright. “Where is he?”

“I’m sorry, but I have a message for Harbor Ryan and Harbor Ryan only.”

“But that’s me! I’m Harbor Ryan.”

“Extend your finger,” said the crow. “I need to make sure you are who you say you are.” Desperate to hear the message, I lay my finger out on the sunlit windowsill, caught off guard when the crow pierced my skin with its beak and slurped up some of my blood. “Yes, you are indeed Harbor Ryan,” it said in between gulps.

“Okay,” I said, slightly horrified. I pressed my cut finger against my jeans to stop the bleeding. “Can you give me the message now?”

“Yes, the message,” said the crow. “The message is...” Suddenly, the bird started to spasm, the feathers on its hide standing on end. Before I could gain enough mental initiative to ask what the fuck was going on, the bird froze in place, opened its beak, and spoke. “Hi Harbor.” It was Brody’s voice, coming in through thick static, as if I was listening to an old answering machine. “How are you?”

“Brody?” I said into the bird. “Brody, can you hear me?”

“Heh, sorry, couldn’t resist.” Brody’s voice laughed grimly. “I can’t hear you, can’t speak to you. This is just a message, recorded Sunday night..., which should be yesterday for you. As I speak, I’m driving towards the White Crusader complex with Bethany, while you sleep in my bed. I don’t have long. If I die tonight, this bird is programmed to be sitting in front of you Monday morning, replaying this message. ”

My mouth opened, but no words fell out.

“I’m sorry I had to leave the way I did, you know, the whole drugging your water business. We all knew this was a one-way trip. Chances are this mission will fail, and the world will end, so I thought I’d make it easier for you, let you sleep through the apocalypse.”

“You... you stupid fuck!” I screamed. “You stupid fucking idiot!”

The message continued. “Feels strange, knowing this might be the last time I can speak to you. Well, sort of speak to you. It’s kind of a one-sided conversation.... I’m getting off track. Have to admit, it’s hard to focus like this, trying to think of what I should be saying. Wish I knew what you wanted to hear... there aren’t any surprise revelations or secrets to share, you know them all by now. You know everything about me.” He took in a breath as I slid down to the floor, unable to carry my own weight. My whole body felt like it was floating through a nightmare. “If Bethany and I succeed tonight, but I die in the process, and this message still makes it to you, there’s something you should know. My people will cover up my death, store away my belongings, and sell my home. There will be no funeral. I’ll be wiped off the face of the Earth, as if I never existed.” There was a pause. “There’s only one thing I want you to do for me.”

“What, you bastard?” I said bitterly. “What the fuck do you want?”

“Forget about me,” he said, his voice cracking slightly. “Go to school, get a job, fuck a hot guy... forget about everything you’ve seen. Don’t remind yourself of the good times we’ve had, or the fact that we never had a proper goodbye. Right now, I’m telling you for your own good to move on. Harbor, you can be angry with me all you want for this, but I know I did the right thing. You deserve a good, normal life. You deserve a huge family and millions of friends and all the money and happiness in the world. You deserve to eat feasts every day, until you grow a cottage cheese ass. You deserve to grow so old and wrinkly that you have to shit into adult diapers.” He laughed. “You deserve a full life, the only one you’ll ever have, so make good use of it.”

I could practically hear him smile.

“Don’t let me down.”

The bird closed its beak. “That’s the end of the message. Would you like to respond?” When I didn’t say anything, it flew away, leaving behind a flurry of black feathers.

I didn’t cry, I couldn’t. The shock was to powerful for me to experience anything other than utter disbelief. How could it all be over, just like that? All that’s happened, all I’ve seen... there had to be something bigger, a higher purpose, some semblance of closure. Why did it have to end like this? No last exchange, no kiss goodbye... only me sitting alone in Brody’s bedroom, wondering what the point of it all was.

“FUCK!” I screamed out the window. I listened to it echo off the walls of skyscrapers, down the long, crowded streets, across the narrow alleyways, and into the wheat fields outside the city border. I sat back against the bed and sighed. I buried my face into the palm of my hands, allowing the warm of my skin to overcome my eyes, my nose, and my mouth. I wanted to disappear.

The crying didn’t start until I got home, when the shock began to wear off. It started slow at first, just a few tears running down my cheeks. Then, when I saw my mother reading the newspaper across the hall, the floodgates broke, and I began to weep. I ran over to her and hugged her, barely able to prop myself up. My sobs were loud and violent, and were probably scaring her, but I didn’t care. I just needed to be touched, needed someone to ground me before I jumped off a bridge.

As I cried into my mother’s shoulder, something unexpected happened. She hugged me back for the first time in eight years. I cried harder.

This world was really too much.

*

Seven Years Later

*

413 Grant Street.

This was it.

I rang the doorbell. It let out a singsong chime, one that I knew would get old quick if I heard it more than twice in any given day. When no one came to the door, I rang the bell again. When that didn’t work, I started banging on the lipstick red door. Just as I was about to call out a name to see if anyone would answer, a voice behind me spoke up.

“Can I help you?”

I turned around. At the bottom of the steps was an eighteen-year-old boy dressed in fashionably torn jeans and a white collared shirt. I smiled. He had grown considerably taller than the last time I had seen him.

The boy looked like he was at the brim of laughing. “I thought I was going to pick you up at the airport,” he said, smiling.

“Yeah, well, I wanted to surprise you.” I met him at the stair’s halfway point and pulled him into a strong hug. “It’s good to see you, Ellis.”

“Likewise,” he said, his voice muffled against my shirt. He laughed. “Your stubble itches like a motherfucker.” 

We went inside the warm Victorian home and did what we always did for my annual visits; we played monopoly. As Ellis set up the game board on his foster parents’ oak dinner table, he caught me up on his life. “Nothing much has changed since the last time you came. Well, almost nothing. I’m in the school play this year.” He said, laying out the chance and community chest cards. “Don’t get too excited. It’s Pinocchio, and I’m just an extra for one of the dance numbers.”

“Everyone has to start somewhere.” I said. I took off my coat. “I have powerful stage fright. Couldn’t even be an extra without shitting myself.”

“Oh, poor baby.”

I laughed. “Shut up, wise ass.”

“How’s your sister?” Ellis asked. He started shuffling out the piles of fake money. “Wasn’t she getting married?”

“Yeah, she got married. Now her name is Gwyn Nightingale Ryan Jack Howard.”

Ellis smiled as he dug around the game box for the dice. “You should call her that each time you talk to her.”

I rolled my eyes. “How have your folks been treating you?”

“It’s been good,” he said, laying the two black dice onto the table. “They’re good to me.”

“You know you can call me if there’s any--”

“—trouble, yeah, yeah, I know.” He played with one of the die. “Believe me when I say it’s nowhere near as bad as the last foster family I stayed with. I like having three meals a day.”

“Good.” I reached into the box and picked up the thumbnail while Ellis chose the top hat. Before I placed my piece on the GO box, I gave him a measured look. “Have you gone to see your brother, lately?”      

“No.” Ellis stared at the table. “I don’t like cemeteries. I still dream about him sometimes, though. Good dreams. Do you still dream about Brody?”

“Sometimes.” I said. That wasn’t true, more like all the time. “Not so good dreams.”

It took me a while to notice that Ellis’ hands were balled up into fists. “I wish...” he began, “I wish I could remember what happened that night, wish I could tell you what happened... but it’s just this big blank wall, like it never happened. Sometimes, when I wake up, it feels like I’m about to remember, and then the memory...it disappears, and I can’t--”

“Hey,” I interrupted. “Don’t worry about it.” I rolled the dice. Twelve. “Looks like I’m going first this time... feeling lucky today.”

Three hours later, Ellis was winning like usual. I looked out the window; dusk began to settle over the city. It was time for me to go. Before I left, I listened to Ellis play the piano. He was really good. I told him so, and he blushed and shook his head.

Then he hugged me goodbye, and I left.

Halfway down the block, my cell phone rang. “Hello?” I said.

“Gabriel’s Bar.” Said a crackling voice. Then the line went dead.

I hailed a cab and went downtown until I arrived at a dank bar hidden in the shadows of greater buildings. I went inside. Cigarette smoke floated in the air like a separate atmosphere, red neon lights glaring from the ceiling. Everything was a mix of ink shadows and blood red pigment. I made my way through the rowdy crowds and sat at the bar counter. The bartender was combing out his thick grey beard with a fistful of toothpicks when I called him over.

“Whiskey, on the rocks,” I said. He nodded, but before he could leave to make my drink, I added, “Do you think you could squeeze a bit of lemon on that?”

“We don’t serve no lemons here.” He answered in a gruff voice.

I smirked. “Good thing I’m human then.”

The bartender shook his head. “Who comes up with these fucking code phrases?” He chuckled and slid a manila envelope across the counter with ‘HARBOR RYAN’ scrawled on the front in black sharpie. “This mission better be fucking better than the last one,” I muttered, tearing off the top of the envelope. Inside sat a pile of documents held together with a rubber band, with a Polaroid taped to the front of the pile. I held the Polaroid up to the light and squinted at it. Took me a while to digest what I was seeing.

“Brody,” I mouthed. The picture may have been blurry, black and white, and all around not well taken, but I’d recognize him anywhere. He was wearing sunglasses and a black sweater, walking through a crowd of tourists. He hadn’t aged a day.

My head started to hurt. I rubbed my eyes and groaned.

“Good mission?” The bartender asked.

“I really don’t know,” I said so quietly it was practically a whisper. I looked down at the picture again, fought back the urge to smile. In a quick swill, I threw the rest of the whiskey down my throat, and coughed from the burn. “Fuck.”

*

I had my first taste of alcohol when I was sixteen. Brody called one night and said he had stolen a six-pack of beer from the 7-Up convenience store, and that if I wanted some, to meet him at the nearby park in the hour. He never told me how he stole the beer without getting caught... I just figured it was one of those things I was better off not knowing.

I’d never forget the grin on his face when he threw that first frosty can into my hands, like he was a father teaching his son about baseball. When I popped open the aluminum top, sticky froth drooled over onto my hands. My eyes squinted from the strong smell. Brody waited for me to take a sip. I did, and although the first thought in my mind was ‘this tastes like piss’, I smiled for him, and drank some more.

We both sat against a large cedar tree on top of a round hill, sipping cool gulps of beer against the warm summer air. For a few hours, we were removed from time, becoming the outsiders looking in as the grass fluttered in the wind, as the clouds rolled over the sky, as the dogs howled to the moon, as the babies cried for their mothers in the dark, as the walking lovers kissed. It wasn’t until the sun broke over the city skyline that I returned to the now, and remembered that it was a school day, and we had to be at first period in a few minutes. 

“Brody, we have to go.” I said, blinking against the bright orange glare of the sun. When he didn’t respond, I shouldered him. “Brody?”

He was smiling in his sleep.

“...yeah, you’re right.” I said with a laugh.

I yawned, leaned back, and closed my eyes.

“The world can wait.”

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