The Night Country

39

Finch always thought he was the center of the story. Who didn’t? And he was heartbroken every time he learned, again, that he wasn’t. That he’d known nothing, or all the wrong things, all along.

He could’ve stayed on his knees listing his regrets as the Spinner swallowed the world, or he could respond to that note in Alice’s voice, that said all hope wasn’t gone, and made her words work on him like an incantation. We cannot let her go in there first.

So he’d run headlong toward an actual black hole, the scariest thing he’d ever seen or imagined. It wasn’t long, between deciding to do it and falling in, the Spinner screaming after him and Alice crying out and the jellied black air folding him up. But time slowed down for him. There was still so much he wanted to consider.

That Iolanthe had betrayed him. That Alice had gotten his letters. That his time on Earth was nothing but a layover. He couldn’t actually think about the world ending. It should go in fire or flood or supervirus. Not like this: its life sucked out like soda pop.

Then he went into the Night Country and couldn’t think about anything at all.

He was himself, falling through. Then he was—bigger. He landed on all fours in a soft black nothing, and his sense of himself expanded in all directions. He was water flowing into a basin. He filled the endless dark—he was it, it was him—until a stray thought floated by like a message in a bottle. He seized it.

I’m so thirsty. The thought came with words, and with the words came the water: his feet were wet, he was standing in a river. He could see it shining silver, then it was gone; his terror dried it up.

Terror and elation: he’d done that, spun something out of the Night Country’s fertile air. He tried to hold reason around himself like a slicker, but the insidious air was the rain that got in, running into his nose and eyes and open mouth, as dim and drugged as the water of Lethe.

A teacup, he thought, and held it. Thin-sided, pink and gold, filled with an inch of milky tea. The last time he’d seen it was on the table of his mom’s apartment, years ago, before she’d died but after the divorce.

“Coffee,” he whispered, and the cup’s contents changed.

Mom? he thought, inside his mind, but without conviction. She didn’t appear in the dark.

He was glad. Then he shuddered, as the weight of this settled over him.

A new-struck world, his for the making. This was what Alice meant when she said they couldn’t let the Spinner in first—they couldn’t let her have a whole new canvas on which to paint her horrors.

What if she was wrong? The thought came crooked and cowardly. But what if it should have been the Spinner here, weaving reason out of the dark? He pictured all that she’d made out of nothing: the ice caves of the Hinterland, its deep woods and articulate stars. A secret part of him wished for them, and their ghosts rose up, spectral and shimmering, then drifted away.

The Spinner was a maker of worlds.

He was a boy in the dark with a teacup.

No. He fell to his knees. He dug his fingers into the ground, which was nothing before but became dirt under his nails as he wished for it. Daffodil, he thought. Daisy, clematis, rose. They grew from his dirty palms, petals raining from his hands and vines twining up his arms.

But he lost his words for the flowers, looking at them. They were red and yellow and blushing and white, and he couldn’t put names to their faces. That terrified him enough that he clamped down on his mind, don’t think don’t think, and of course that made him think of

Blacktop. And a basketball drumming

A yellow dog with a red collar

A table with three plates on it, salmon and rice

His father looking at the newspaper, shaking his head

All of it but his father came and went in the dark. After, he felt rubbery, wrung out. Like he used to feel just before sundown on Yom Kippur, watching out the window as the sun slipped below the tree line of Central Park.

(Trees grew up in the air around him, then blew away into molecules.)

“No,” he said. “No, no, no.” Everything he dreamed up siphoned more life from the world he’d left behind. What had just died so his visions could take stunted shape? He pictured the steps of the Met emptied out, gone pale as ash. The sun bleached out like a stain, the streets of his city preserved below dead skies like insects under glass.

The city. His abandoned city, now lost to him forever. In dreams he’d walked through Manhattan with his mother again. Paged through bookstores with Alice. Memories and longings swelled up, and the Night Country wanted them. It was hungry for them.

He wasn’t strong enough to deny it.

The city flowed from him. Streetlights, skyline, cherry blossoms and gutters and the sound of a street performer’s violin. Benches and buses and stolen wine on a rooftop. Streets of pitted blacktop lined with trees and ice cream trucks and stars you could barely see. An afternoon in summer so still the clouds looked like paint on blue enamel, and cast shadows on sunbathers in the park.

The memories rushed out of him on the back of a sweeping wind. It was cold and had a thousand hands and they reached into every corner. It’s a fearsome thing, to make a world. He was unmade in its making. The theft leached the black from his hair and the bend from his bones.

It might’ve stolen the bones, too, before it was through. But two figures came barreling out of the dark.