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Michael

  By Roman Theodore Brandt

  Copyright 2013 Roman Theodore Brandt

  Table Of Contents

  Michael

  About the Author

  Michael

  On the night of my fourteenth birthday, brushing my teeth before bed, I heard a tapping on the window. I looked at my shirtless reflection in the mirror and then at the window behind me, and I saw Michael’s face pressed against the glass, grinning.

  “Hey,” he said, his voice muffled by the insulated window panes. “Open up.”

  I tried to ignore him, but he kept tapping, and I bet he was cold; he never wore anything but underwear. Eventually, I went to the window and slid the sash up. He came through effortlessly, dropping down onto the floor and standing up quickly.

  “Took you long enough,” he said quietly. Through the open window I could hear the roar of the freeway in the distance, and I looked at him in the quiet bathroom. It had been a long time since I’d last seen him. The last time had been right after Mom told me he wasn’t real, and she still would have told me that.

  “How old are you now?” I asked him.

  “How old are you?” He asked me in return, dew dripping down his bare chest.

  “I asked you first.”

  He shrugged and smiled again, and I remember all the times we had run around town at night in our underwear, breaking store windows and heaving soda bottles at parked cars, alarms piercing the quiet and announcing our departure as we scurried half-naked into the shadows between buildings.

  “Do you believe I’m real yet?” He wanted to know, and he waited for my answer.

  Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t know. The only thing I actually knew, I realized as we both stood there in our underwear, was that I had missed him. Years had passed. We had both gotten taller, filling out, growing hair in all the places we were supposed to around this age.

  Finally, I opened my mouth to speak. “No,” I told him, and that one simple word struck him so that his smile faded completely, leaving only the face of a boy I knew years ago, now grown old beneath a teenaged face. He came over to where I was and looked in the mirror with me, and we were visions of youthful manhood reflected side by side. We could have been brothers.

  He looked over at me, his hair still wet from the night air outside. “Maybe I don’t believe you’re real,” he said to me, and he looked in the mirror again.

  “I am,” I told him. His reflected eyes grew colder, and there were the beginnings of tears in them. He blinked them away and sniffed.

  “So am I,” he said finally.

  “Mom says you aren’t.”

  Without warning, he punched the mirror, his fist sailing into the glass hard and sending mirror shards everywhere, slamming the toothpaste and deodorant and rubbing alcohol beyond it into the wall.

  He looked at me, and my heart was pounding in my chest. “Fine,” he said, and he went back out the window, leaving a trail of red drops across the tile floor in his wake. I stood there breathing hard after he left, my chest heaving, and I heard Mom running up the stairs. She burst into the room, looked at the smashed mirror, looked at me, and her eyes went wide.

  “What on earth happened in here?” She asked.

  I looked down at my right hand, bleeding on the tile floor with a shard of silvery glass stuck in it. The trail of red now led from the sink to where I stood, rather than to the window. “I don’t know,” I told her.

  *

  College brought new grades, alcohol, finals, and thousands of strangers, all trying to be someone else. My dorm room was a place where I spent hours asleep, or recovering from the night before with my head pounding over the blurred words on my computer screen. Type, I would think, staring at the monitor. My hands frozen over the keyboard, my head pounding, I would think about all the brilliant things I ought to have written by now. My hand had healed over since the incident with the mirror, leaving only a scar.

  I was invited to parties, of course. I was a patron of so many backyard gatherings, secret beer-drenched festivals and naked bonfire keggers that I showed up to class nearly every day in some stage of a hangover. I drowned my high school fears of college in Smirnoff Ice, downing pills in filthy bedrooms, stepping over pizza slices on my way to fill the toilet with shit and desperation, crying out in lonely tile bathrooms: Who am I?

  Bleary eyed on couches with second-hand smoke rolling in my lungs, I learned the word cool from hipster mannequins. I found my way to one party in particular, in a house no different than the other houses where I’d found myself dancing in dark basements and peeing in backyards. I ate too many nachos and I drank way too much, which is what you’re supposed to do at college parties. My path up the stairs was treacherous. There were clothes and bottles everywhere. I laid down in a bedroom at the end of a hallway and had started to succumb to the void of drunk sleep when I heard a tapping on the window, so I opened my eyes. There he was, crouching on the branch outside the window, looking in at me. “Michael,” I said under my breath just before I finally fell passed out, the sound of his tapping echoing in my brain. I vaguely remember flying an airplane, an image of Amelia Earhart flickering on the backs of my eyelids. I was the first, she said to me, and then I knew I was walking, braced against a strong body. Looking over, I saw him, wet in the streetlights of campus. We crossed yards where cars slept in garages; we stumbled across sidewalks that split apart driveways like tree roots. I felt them growing up my legs, slowing me down, and I almost fell a few times.

  “I’m sorry,” I kept telling him with pressure building in my stomach and climbing my esophagus, “I’m sorry.” I don’t know what I was sorry for. Once, I fell forward, and he caught me with his arms around my chest, propelling vomit out of me and onto the night sidewalk, splashing onto our bare feet. My vision went out and I heard my own voice echoing in my head. I remember glimpses of dark hallways, and then being taken into the showers inside my building. Michael pulled my sweater over my head, and I almost slid down the wall behind me, but he grabbed me. Then, I was naked in the shower, water stinging my eyes. I heard Michael’s voice behind me. “Turn around. You’re puking on the wall.”

  I turned to face him, and I looked into his eyes. Suddenly, the water slowed, falling around me in slow-motion, glistening pearls of all the things I had ever learned half-asleep in class, math equations and philosophical arguments colliding across our bodies and swirling down the drain at our feet.

  “Do you believe I’m real now?” He asked me.

  I stumbled backwards, and the water began to fall again from the showerhead, crashing into his chest as I crumpled against the wall behind me, my heart pounding. This time, he didn’t try to help me as I went down. “I’m sorry,” I said again, and I still had no idea why I was sorry. Maybe I was sorry for being drunk, or for being naked, or for vomiting.

  I sat staring up at him, tears forming in my eyes, combining with the water from the showerhead. He looked so sad. “Stand up,” he said finally, and he knelt and tried to pull me up, sending another wave of sickness through me. I painted his stomach and his underwear with vomit, and I forget the rest. I can’t remember what happened after that.

  I woke up the next day and went to class with bubbles popping over my head. I was the god of amateur philosophy creating theories. I did complex math problems in my head. Only around noon did I remember Michael’s face, standing over me in the shower. I stopped walking, my backpack suddenly too heavy, pulling my shoulder down. My pulse thundered in my ears, electricity igniting memories of two boys in the night, running away. His name was faintly alien now, so I forced it out of my mind.

  *

  My mother got sick while I was away at graduate school, and I made it home in time to see her final deterioration from sick to bed-ridden to a silent husk
on a hospital bed awaiting taxidermy. Was she an organ donor, they wanted to know at the nurses station. Did she have hepatitis? I signed papers just to get them out of my face.

  In the restroom down the hall, the face in mirror was not a man anymore. All through college, I had begun to see a man in the mirror, but now I was looking at a lost, scared boy. I don't know how long I stood there staring at my reflection and watching other men come and go from the toilet stalls behind me and the urinals against the far wall. I lost track of which face was mine. I'd look up and see a face hovering over a sink, hands washing with soap, and I'd think "that's me. I've changed." When the face left the mirror, though, and I still stayed staring at it I realized that nothing really changes.

  Eventually, the restroom emptied completely, and I stared at my own eyes in the mirror. I thought of my mother down the hall, waiting to be wheeled on a gurney into eternity. At the far end of the room, a restroom stall door opened, and I looked up.

  "Michael," I said aloud, and he watched me from the stall, then came out into the open. I thought of all the times Mom had told me he wasn't real. Right now, he was more real than she was. My mom was a corpse on soiled bed sheets, and Michael was standing behind me.

  "I guess it's us, now," he said, and he smiled. I'm sure he meant well, but I hated him right then. I hated him more than I had ever hated anyone in my life. I turned to face him and we stared at one another.

  "She's dead," I told him. I shrugged and looked away. "You win. You're real."

  I knew he was coming toward me, and I could feel my hands becoming fists, fingernails biting into my palms. No, no, no I told myself, but as he got close to me, I just started to hit him. The first hit caught him off guard, right in the mouth. It sent him crashing to the tile floor, lips and nose starting to bleed.

  I hit him again and again, sending my fists into his face, his nose, his mouth. "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!" I screamed, my fingernails collecting his DNA. Eventually, though, I had to stop. There was no point. He didn't kill my mom. I stood up and stared at him, his breath coming in ragged gasps from his ruined face. He struggled to sit up, looking around, coughing and choking.

  "Michael," I said again, this time realizing I couldn't undo what I had done.

  He spit blood out onto the floor, and then he stood up, his legs unsteady. "I'm sorry," he said, gurgling from his ruined mouth. He started to fall, and I stepped forward and caught him. I stood there letting him bleed onto my shirt, and the tears finally came.

  *

  I saw him through the years, a stranger in different places. He put on clothes at some point, and would show up when I least expected, climbing out of my head into the shadows, watching. I got divorced when I turned thirty-six. I found myself drunk in a bar restroom, and I saw someone come up to the urinal next to mine. I knew who it was, and I left the room, my head full of things I never wanted to say again. I left with my brain full of my mother’s voice.

  Michael is not real, she said, her voice echoing in the empty rooms of my childhood. Outside the bar, I crossed the street, and I squeezed my eyes shut against the sound of footsteps behind me. I turned once to see him standing on the other side wrapped in a coat, staring at me. He was lost, and so was I. We were still the same age; we were adult boys now, sad and angry and helpless on streets we didn’t know.

  I stopped walking and turned again to stare at him. Our eyes locked across the passing cars, honking into the night, rumbling down the road toward stoplights we’d never know. “Help me,” I said finally. He looked away, backing into the shadows between the buildings. I started to cross the street, but he was gone. My body went cold, my heart pounding, my head swimming. “Help me!” I screamed. The sidewalks finally claimed me then, sending roots into my brain and searching for love.

  *

  I received a gift when the kids came home one Christmas eve, a new wife and a new house filling the void. There was a knock at the door, and I was the first one up, so I went to the hall and answered it. The house behind me was full of music and voices, not at all the usual silence I shared with my wife. On the concrete stoop just outside the door was a little box, wrapped in newspaper and illuminated by the fencepost lamp at the end of the sidewalk.

  For a few minutes, I just stood there like an idiot staring at it. When I knelt to pick it up, I looked up. Standing across the street, I saw him again in the artificial light. He was hard and unapproachable. He nodded at me, and I felt my stomach tighten. I opened the box carefully, the newspaper falling away. Under the lid was a folded piece of paper. I opened it up, my heart beating against my ribs. I am just as real as you are, it said. I looked up, but he was gone.

  Silently, my stomach rejected everything I had ever been, and I stained the snow with my insides. A spleen came first, then some intestines. My heart was the last thing to come up, painting the snow red, beating and beating. I was a god of lonely life choices, dying in the dark winter. Maybe I didn’t actually throw up my insides, just the usual bile and half-digested turkey. My god, I wanted to die though. Everyone came out to help me back inside.

  “A bit too much to drink,” my wife said quietly, and she shut the door on the world behind us once I was inside. She put me upstairs in our bed, crying.

  *

  Michael stopped appearing after that. I started to look for him. I found people who looked like him, but they weren’t him. I was lit by fluorescence and alcohol most nights, riding the subway for hours, waiting for Michael to materialize. I even dug up the shirt I had worn the day Mom died, only to find it clean. I hadn't washed it, his blood was simply gone.

  One night, I realized that the world was empty, and I gave up. Over the years, I had started to pick at the scar on my hand, just to watch it re-heal.

  *

  I feel a lot older, these days. I speak in present tense, because I live in the past. It’s been years since I left the house, or even my room, beyond the occasional trip to the bathroom or around the block in my chair. I feel like a stranger in my daughter’s spare bedroom, lying awake nights, sleeping during the day. I have a medication for everything. My body is falling apart. I wish I could take it off like a coat.

  There’s a tree outside my window, and I watch it most nights as it moves in the night air. I’m a log of old flesh in a twin bed, watching through the glass as the tree starts to shake. With some effort, I manage to sit up, my bones rubbing together and hurting. I see a hand grasp the limb outside my window, and the tree shakes again as a half-naked boy pulls himself up onto the limb. I pull the covers up to my chin and watch as he turns to look in the window. It’s Michael. He’s grown young again. He can’t be more than fourteen, and he’s staring into the room at a sad old man. He taps on the window once, his breath fogging the glass.

  “Michael,” I say under my breath.

  He taps again, pointing to the bottom of the window and grinning at me. “Open the window,” he says through the glass, crouching on the limb. My legs hate me as I work to get them out from under the covers, swinging them like dead sticks over the edge of the bed.

  “I can’t walk that far,” I say to him, and he laughs motions for me to come over to the window.

  I guess it’s not as hard as I remember to walk ten feet, because I get up out of bed without a lot of pain, just the dull needles that are always there. Then, walking is a slow process, one foot in front of the other, my back crackling and my brain coming alive with nerve endings firing pain signals to every part of my body as I reach the window. Michael waits outside, watching me with his eyes dark in the light of the street beside the house. Miraculously, I find that I can open the window easily, and Michael reaches in and pushes the sash up the rest of the way. He enters the room quickly, landing on the hardwood floor with bare feet, his hair wet from the night, and he looks at me.

  His eyes are as clear as the first night we met, our small hands colliding through the open window of my bedroom decades ago, when he first told me his name. He was such a small boy back then,
just like me. I remember us breaking into houses down the road, setting off car alarms when we turned eight, running in our underwear down the freeway throwing stones at cars and darting into the woods at ten. I remember that night in the bathroom, ages ago, when he asked if I believed he was real.

  I look into his eyes now, and he smiles. “Do you believe I’m real?” He asks finally.

  I would believe anything right now, seeing him as a teenager again.

  “Yes,” I say, and he nods, backing toward the window again.

  “Come on. We’re leaving,” he says with one leg out the window.

  I just stand there, and I think of how silly I’ll look in the morning, shattered into dust and bits on the ground. Silly old man, the neighbors will say on their way to work.

  “Where are we going?” I ask him.

  “You know where we’re going.”

  “I can’t go out the window,” I say to him. “I’m too old.”

  Michael laughs and holds out his hand. “Give me your hand,” he says.

  I can’t argue with him anymore. He’s as solid as I am, hanging half out of the window, and I can see his breath in the cold night air, so I hold out my hand. Only it isn’t my hand. It’s a young hand, a teenaged hand, with no spots or scars or veins sticking up like roadmaps. It’s attached to me, and Michael takes it. We climb down the tree one after another, and then we take off running across the yard, leaving the sash open upstairs. In the windows of passing cars, I catch the reflection of a boy running past them, and before we dart into the woods at the end of the street, I realize it’s me.

  Table of Contents

  ***

 

  About the Author

  Roman is not my legal name, but it's the name I've chosen to call myself because it sounds much more interesting than my real name. I was born nearly thirty years ago in the Midwestern frontier. I am an indie author, which makes me part of a very large group of authors who write independently of traditional publication. I have a lot of respect for authors who are able to publish traditionally, because it's a difficult business to break into that way. It takes a great deal of talent and determination.