I Was Here(96)

             He’s looking at me now, running his thumb across his fingers. His nails are neat and trimmed, much better kept than mine, which are ragged from scrubbing sinks and toilets.

             “You lost the better part of you,” he says. “That’s what you wrote. It was her. Meg. Your ‘better half.’ And you’re trying to redeem yourself, because she left you out of the decision.”

             He has my number. He always has. Even when we were corresponding over a message board, he saw through me. All at once, the folly of my plan, of “catching” him, drains out of me, and so does the remaining strength in my legs. I sink onto the couch. “Fuck you,” I say, because whatever script I came up with is useless now.

             Bradford goes on in this almost gentle voice. “Except maybe you don’t mean she was your better half. Maybe she was your other half.” He takes a sip of his drink. “Sometimes we meet people and are so symbiotic with them, it’s as if we are one person, with one mind, one destiny.”

             He’s talking to me the way he would on the boards, circular, so it takes a minute to understand what he’s suggesting.

             “You’re saying I want to die, like Meg?”

             “I’m just repeating your words.”

             “No! You’re putting your words into my mouth. You want me to die. Like you wanted Meg to die.”

             “How did I ‘want’ Meg to die?” he asks, now making air quotes himself.

             “Let’s see: you told her how to get poison. How to write a suicide note. How to keep it from family. How to alert the police. How to erase incriminating emails. You told her not to go on antidepressants. You told her not to keep living.”

             “I told no one any of this.”

             “You told her all of that! You told me that!”

             He stares at me. “Cody. It was Cody, wasn’t it? What exactly did I tell you?”

             My mind spins as I try to recall the specifics, but I can’t think of anything except for a collection of stupid quotes.

             “Now it’s coming back to me. . . . The sunless planet. That was also you?” he asks.

             Yes. That was me.

             He sits down, settling in, like he’s about to watch one of his favorite movies.

             “I thought that was an interesting way to put it. Would you want to go on living if the sun went out? But, Cody, do you actually know what would happen if the sun died?”

             “No.” It comes out a squeak. Like a mouse.

             “Within a week, the temperature on Earth would drop to below zero. Within a year, it would fall to minus one hundred. Ice sheets would cover the oceans. Crops, needless to say, would fail. Livestock would die. People who didn’t die of the cold would soon die of starvation. A sunless planet, which is what you called yourself, wasn’t it? It’s already a dead planet. Even if you’re still going through the motions.”

             I’m a planet without its sun. I’m already cold and dead. That’s what he’s saying. So I should just make it official.

             Except, why then is there this heat traveling its way up my body, like a circuit? Heat. The opposite of cold. The opposite of dead.

             There’s a click at the door. And then a kid—zits, backpack, frown—walks in. My first thought is that Bradford lures people here, and this is another one of All_BS’s victims. Only this time, this time I’m here too, and I can save him. It’s not too late.