The Cerebral Catalyst

It wasn't supposed to turn out this way. Trite, I know, but that's the most I can sputter out — not out loud, of course, but in my head, in my chest, thudding against my ribs as Leo and I bolt from the scene. He's faster than I am, but he doesn't pace himself, so I'm caught up within a block, and we duck inside an alleyway, one with no lights in between two buildings. He sinks against the wall, going Damn Damn Damn under his breath, and I just crouch down, trying to catch mine without going into dry heaves.

"Did he make it?" Leo grunts, but the question's rhetorical — I mean, the question's got to be rhetorical because we just saw Jim take a shotgun blast in the chest three feet from the muzzle, and all the denim in the world couldn't stop those shells from tearing through his body. Of course he didn't make it. But it's the kind of question I've got to answer anyway, because Leo saw it as well as I did, which means he's looking for some kind of confirmation from me that he did the right thing by leaving — that we both did.

I don't know what to say. I look at him and nod. Every few minutes, a car speeds by and the headlights sweep the dirt beneath his shoes, turns his breathing into something tangible, like smoke. He's got his baseball cap on, Go Sox, which doesn't make sense unless he got grazed somewhere and is trying to hide some blood, so I reach over to take it off, and he cuts me off.

"No, I'm fine." He looks at me. "You all right?"

I pat myself for bullet holes, ready to make some petty joke about how they'll have to wait a little longer before they get to use me as a sift, when I get a flash of Jim's body lurching back after the blast, and the smell of powder and the ringing in my ears and the look in the cashier's eyes, and whatever I had to say is gone. For the second time tonight, the most I can manage is a nod.

I don't look up for a while. When I do, Leo's gone. I squint in the darkness for his shape against the wall, beside a garbage can, anywhere — but he's gone. Don't know where, and right now, maybe anywhere's better than a freezing alleyway in the middle of the city. I pick myself up and start trying to figure out where I am, and how to get back to campus.

"Ricky? What are you doing here?" I whirl, hand locked into a fist and ready to roll, when I see the last person in the world I'd expect. No, not Jim. He's dead. Just Roselyn. The one Roselyn out of five undergrads named Roselyn — last time I checked the directory — who happens to be Jim's sister. That Roselyn. She's dressed in faded blue jeans, a slim white sweater, and a pair of pink gloves — and I have no idea why I noticed this, and not anything else, like the "guns sold here" sign in front of the convenience store Jim, Leo and I entered half an hour ago.

I disarm the moment we make eye contact, but I'm not fast enough to cover whatever's inside mine that tells her something bad's happened. She hesitates, takes a step back, before making a decision, taking my arm, and walking me out of there and onto the sidewalk, where other people, people who haven't just seen murders at point-blank range, are going about doing whatever people do on Saturday nights in the city.

"Hey," I say. My voice sounds hollow, false in my mouth. "How'd you get here?"

"I couldn't sleep. Went out for a cup of coffee, and ran into Leo a few minutes ago. He looked really messed up — like something had scared the shit out of him, you know?" She laughed. "Anyway, he said you'd probably be coming this way pretty soon, so I just kept walking." She smiled at me. "And here you are. Right on schedule, though a little messy. What happened to you?"

"Nothing," I said. "I'm all right." Of course I wasn't all right. But I wasn't about to tell her everything. Not here, in front of Shaws, which we were passing on our left, or the group of giggling freshmen in front of us, or the green-line slowly cruising uphill beyond the cars on our right. This wasn't the time. This wasn't the place. But when was the time to tell someone you'd just seen a loved one — their loved one — cut down that way? I was a psych major, but we never covered this kind of stuff in class. Not that I'd know from this semester at least. The four of us were seniors, and every day we spent here was just a day between ourselves and our graduation. And now one of us would never make it to commencement, to the stupid speeches and hat tosses and tacky gowns and everything else that came with leaving four years of life beside the Charles River. I felt queasy.

"You're not telling me something, Ricky." Roselyn had been talking about a test she had coming up, something involving equations I'd never heard of, but which she had a way of explaining so they made some sort of sense for as long as she explained them, and how she was supposed to be worried about it since it was effectively the final for the class and that was a big deal but she wasn't worried about it because she'd had this dream last night where she stood in a field surrounded by numbers, all of them moving like blades of grass in a strong wind, and integrating and cascading and tensing themselves through equations that just made sense to her. And I'd been listening. Her voice was soothing when she spoke about that kind of stuff. So I listened, and stopped thinking about the yell of the cashier, or the look on his face when he lifted the gun like a long, barreled sword from beneath the counter, and aimed it square at Leo, then Jim, who didn't have time to duck, to yell, to say this was all a joke, that he was holding a stupid water gun painted black with two-dollar spray paint bought from a party store, and it was somewhere in all this thinking and not thinking that her voice cut through to me, and sounded something like, "You're not telling me something, Ricky."

+++

I don't see Leo again until a week later, at the funeral. It's the week before finals, and the only people there are Leo, Roselyn, and the jazz band. Jim played alto sax, and they had a competition in Chicago lined up for the week after finals, which might be why they look more pissed than sad. Besides them, there are also a few kids who knew him from class or lived on his floor, but those aren't too many, since the guy kept to himself, and had the misfortune of dying just before everyone turned into study freaks for the next seven days. So it's a small crowd. We're ten minutes away from campus, in the Commons, with a so-so view of the Hancock tower behind us, and Lowe's Theatre off to the right. It's chilly, and everyone's in winter coats and jackets, except for a guy and girl dressed in pajamas, flip-flops, and a blue blanket draped over their shoulders, which they huddle beneath like we're all out here to go camping.

"Benjamin Bradley was a quiet man..." and so the eulogy begins. Some guy in a black suit with an electronic Bible. I feel a bitter taste in my mouth when I hear the whole thing, listen to this two-bit lionization of some guy, though definitely not Jim, since Jim didn't do half the things Mr. Suit says he did, and did so many other things Mr. Suit never bothered to find out about before cutting and pasting this Google-sermon together. I get a flash of Leo shouting "shit!," and ducking behind Jim, who looks up and sees the gun, but has zero time to get out of the way himself, and stands right there when it goes off. Leo stands on the opposite side of the casket from me, with the band members, and we all peer in at the polished mahogany. From up here, it looks really deep, and there's a part of me that wants to tell the gravediggers that they dug it too deep, that he's not going to be able to climb out if he somehow finds his strength, that we're killing him by doing this, that the guy was claustrophobic and broke out in hives if you locked him in a closet, which happened once, accidentally, or so Roselyn told me, when they were ten, when the house caught fire during a game of hide-and-seek they were playing, and he almost didn't make it out in time.

"I don't understand it," Roselyn keeps saying. She's in a brown cardigan with matching corduroys, and whenever she says it, it gets a little harder to breathe. I want to tell her something heroic, something out of a film. I want to tear open my jacket and reveal a bright red S, to shoot into the sky and spin the earth back a week until Leo, Jim and I are standing outside the convenience store with our water guns, and crush the stupid things and tell us we're too old for that kind of stuff, that we're all about to graduate, that I'm supposed to be a budding psych with critical thinking skills, that Leo's going to get into NYU law any day now, that Jim's got a twin sister to take care of who's going to lose it if anything happens to him.

But if there ever was a time to be faster than a speeding bullet, it was last week in front of a gas station attendant with a box full of shells and a liver full of liquor. And if I couldn't pull it off then, there's no way in hell it'd work now.

"Why? It doesn't make sense..."

Whenever she started to cry in lectures, people used to rush up to her — guys and girls — to comfort her, to tell her stupid things like it was all right, that she would be okay, that he was looking down on her and would always be with her — the usual Hallmark platitudes. Half the guys managed to hit on her at the same time, before realizing they'd have better luck with girls who weren't grieving the loss of someone they'd shared a womb with. After a while, people started avoiding her, and she started avoiding other people. The last straw was when someone made a joke about The Matrix — harmless stuff, ducking in bullet time or something like that — and she burst into tears in the middle of some freshman bio class she had to get through as a grad requirement. The professor snapped at her for interrupting his lecture, and she flew into a rage, swearing like the best of them, tossing stuff everywhere. Fortunately Leo was there, and he rushed her out, grabbing his stuff and hers and tugging her hand as she tore into the professor, who by then had stopped saying much of anything. I didn't see any of this myself, but she told me afterwards over a bottle of champagne, which I'd bought to pour over the dorm roof like I'd once seen in a movie, but ended up sharing with Roselyn when I found her there, gazing over the edge like she was thinking of it.

"Roselyn, please." That was all I could get out. It was a week after the shooting, a Friday, maybe four or five in the afternoon. I'd come up to the roof with my bottle and a saber Jim, Leo and I had bought over the summer for opening drinks with style. Leo was somewhere where he wasn't answering his cell phone, and Roselyn hadn't picked hers up since I told her that night in front of Shaws, and the freshmen, and the green line, so here I was in the cold, on the roof, saber and bottle in hand, when I saw her at the edge, hands trailing the low wall our cheap school had deemed good enough for suicide prevention thirty years ago. I was too far to reach her if she decided to do it, and I figured the last thing I'd want to hear would be someone screaming at me from behind as I leaned over a ledge ten stories above the ground, so I just said her name, with a "please" after it. It was the best I could do.

"Ricky?" she turned to face me and scowled. "What are you doing up here?"

"I don't know," I said. "Couldn't study anymore." In truth, I hadn't studied at all in the past week, but I wanted to believe it was because I couldn't stop thinking of Jim, and not because I didn't give a damn about my classes this semester. So I cut myself off.

"How are you holding up?" I ventured. Walking toward her, I saw her breath coming in cool wisps, and wondered what the hell I was doing on the roof with my best friend's sister and a bottle of champagne. I figured if he was looking down at me, or up, or wherever he was besides the local funeral home, he'd understand. And if he didn't, that would make two of us.

"Why the hell did you have to go there? What the hell was wrong with you?" She was screaming at me, streaming tears in the cold air, pounding her fists into me, and I knew I was supposed to stand there, to take it because it was what I deserved, because I was supposed to look out for him the way he'd always looked out for me, but it was four in the afternoon and I hadn't slept in days, so I just turned, and started making my way back to my room without the decency to take the least and the worst she could do to me. This was when she stopped.

"Wait. Ricky, wait."

I turned around again, staring dumbly at her. I still held my saber and champagne in each hand, wondering why I'd ever thought coming up here with them would solve anything. I wanted to tell her everything. I wanted to tell her those shells were meant for Leo, that he was supposed to be the one we'd bury in a week, that her brother was supposed to be the one on the roof with her, with me, mourning Leo's death. But none of that came out. I've never been good at telling her things.

"As long as we're here, we might as well use it," she said with an edge of hardness. She took the bottle and saber from me, and walked back to the edge of the roof. I followed her, and we shivered together, staring over at the edge. Below, a delivery truck parked beside the building, and someone went by on a bicycle. There were few people out. Farther ahead, on the horizon, the sun was low in the sky, pale and threading through thin clouds.

I sabered the champagne. The cork flew off, arcing gracefully through the air and landing somewhere in the field past the road beside the building. Roselyn and I sat down, and she told me stories about Jim while we passed the bottle. Some of it was stuff I already knew. Some of it was stuff I didn't want to know. But I listened. Every now and then, she'd look at me with such anger I'd get nervous, and wonder what I'd do if she grabbed the saber and ran it through me. But then she'd go on talking, and I'd go on listening. We went on that way long after the bottle was empty and the sun had set, until her teeth chattered too much for her to speak clearly, and mine were chattering too much for me to hear her.

So today at the funeral, with Leo ducking eye contact, and everyone edging away as Roselyn flies into a rage, I walk with her after everyone else is gone. I listen and keep quiet when she blames me, blames Leo, blames Jim and every last person in the city. This is the best I can do. Because I'm all busted up, just like she is, just like Leo. I could have been a hero once. I could have jumped in front of Jim, the way Leo jumped behind him; I could have traded my life for his, the way Leo traded Jim's life for his. But I could have done something earlier, too — much earlier. All it would have taken would have been to steer her brother away from that store. Not the convenience store, even. The party store, where he found the water pistols — "look at these things, bro!" — and point him towards something else. Something that wouldn't have gotten him killed in such a stupid way, that wouldn't have led convenience store man to close down a week later after being unable to live with killing a foolish college kid. But I didn't do any of this. I went along with everything. So the best I can do now is to tell Roselyn I'm sorry, over and over again. And tell her it's my fault for as long as she needs to hear it, for as long as she needs to believe it.

______________________________________
Michael Obilade lives and writes in Massachusetts. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Fantasy Magazine, TQR, Verbsap, and Cafe Irreal.

posted 11.19.07.

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