- V -

When the Sun Goes Down, Where Do the Shadows Go?

         Everyone had gone.
         Life had to go on. Nothing ever stopped the world. You could stand there and mourn until you were squeezed dry, until you left the calcified dust of your remains behind like so much bone droppings, stand there and ponder and curse and muse and hate this world that bore us, but eventually life intervened. Through the chill of the upcoming night. The appointment that can't be delayed. The ride that's about to depart. The demands of a waiting family. But not a conspiracy, instead a reminder. The concerns of this life won't pause even when another does.
         Brown had none of those concerns. All he had was time. And so he walked along the rows and paths of those who had given it all up, willingly or not. His footsteps barely made impressions in the soft grass. He did his best to keep to the center, to avoid striding over any graves. For some reason it he felt uneasy doing so. The gently rolling hills of the cemetery made for a pleasant hike. The grounds were well kept, the trees neatly trimmed, even the grass seemed aged, but well maintained. Along the way Brown had passed a mausoleum overlooking a small lake, a fountain in the middle. He had gone up there and paid his respects to people he would never meet, simply to catch a glimpse of the view. Ripples from the fountain formed concentric circles in the water, forever spreading outward. The only sound was his quiet breathing. He had thought he wouldn't mind dying, if he could be buried before a view like that. Staring at eternity wasn't so daunting then.
         He passed row upon row of engraved names, all trying to get his attention. There were no people here. Just names and stones and years. When he was a child it had been impossibly hard to understand that under all these dispassionately chiseled names, lives were buried and tucked away. Those sayings carved on the stones weren't just cold phrases, but a family's last words to a person who would never hear them, chosen with painstaking care to try and sum up an all too brief life, to scream silently at passers-by that this person here, they meant something, they were important, please, come over here. Come over and listen. For a second. Please. Brown walked amongst a thousand stories, generational fables, grubby epics, lone blinding comets, tales built up brick by desperate brick, clawing upwards in a race where the point was to keep the end at bay as long as you were able, striving to reach the top only to find that someone else had already beaten you there. Or worse, that there was no true top and the road spiralled forever upward, endlessly on, for more miles than you had left.
         Brown listened to the murmured stories as best he could, tried to separate the strands of sound with his useless ears. He wanted to say to them I don't understand. You have to speak up, I can't understand. Except they wouldn't hear and he had no time to listen. These stories would never change. One day he might have the time, when he had the experience to decipher, when he had sampled all that life could offer and found himself full and in need of a break. Then, maybe, he could come back. Perhaps. It didn't matter. Nobody here was going anywhere.
         On a low hill he stood and watched a burial, saw the people walk up, step back, form groups, linger and break apart, birds falling away from the ground. He wondered if it was the girl who had died with Don. He had heard she was being buried nearby, which some people had said was ironic and others had said was tragic. Someone else had murmured it was fitting. Brown didn't remember who had said it. They were all wrong. It wasn't anything, it just was. Those kinds of concerns were irrelevant now. What the living argued, the dead had no choice but to accept.
         Part of him wanted to step down there, meet them, talk to them, find out more about her. But Brown couldn't. He knew nothing, didn't even know the girl's name, her life was more of a blank than these huddled memorials surrounding him. His only link to these people was that she had died with his friend. And now that was no connection at all.
         Brown watched the people gradually fall away until there was no one left. The cold tickle of the wind was at his back, causing the hairs on his neck to rise. His shadow stretched long and thin down the hill, curved like space itself, a rainbow defined by where it wasn't. A circle was the universe's perfect shape. Somehow or other, it was reflected in everything, from the frantic orbits of the particles at matter's foundation to the grand arc of all the lives that ever were. Even in the curve of light's absence.
         The rest of his walk was direct and solemn, a pilgrimage to a place neither holy nor terrible. The grave looked just like any other. The soil was freshly shifted, grass lying in discarded clumps, patted down and placed in some semblance of order, like Don had stepped back into his own plot and had tried to close the door neatly behind him. In time the dirt would settle, would seep down. He tried to imagine the coffin down there, encased solidly in the earth, the body entombed and already beginning to disintegrate, and found that his chest grew tight and he had to stop thinking. Being immortal didn't make him any more accepting, if anything, it made all the little things feel that much more acute.
         A breeze breathing across his eyes, Brown regarded the simple headstone. Donald Wintersfield. Beloved Son. A range of years, the later one far too close to this day. Austere. He could run his fingers along the cold groves in the rock and find them smooth, unbeaten yet by the weather, unsullied by time and dirt and a thousand hands like his, trying to somehow forge a kind of connection with the person under the stone, trying to discover just a fragment of what transpired in the gap between the dates and maybe in that fashion come to know the person that much more.
         But Brown didn't move closer to the headstone. Hands at his sides, he stared at it, head bowed only slightly. His throat was dry. It had been a long walk. That wasn't the reason. The air was too quiet. Something needed to be said. Spoken.
         Clenching his hands into loose fists, Brown frowned briefly, wet his lips and suppressed the urge to clear his throat. "Well, Don . . ." he began conversationally, surprised to hear an uncertain scratchiness in his voice, "here we are. I bet you didn't expect to find me here, huh? Or yourself, for that matter," he added matter of factly, frowning again.
         "That was some disappearing act I pulled though, huh? I left everyone confused with that one. Maybe you were wondering where I was all those years. Maybe you were thought to yourself, like a lot of people, gosh, he's vanished off the face of the earth." His smile was a knife's edge. "Or maybe you didn't care at all." He shrugged fatalistically. "It happens. I'll admit, I was so busy for five years it never occurred to me to stop back for even a day. And maybe that wasn't the smartest thing I ever did, but . . . that's what happened. I'm doing my best to make up for it now . . ." he stopped, mumbled quickly, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to come here and talk about me." He opened and closed his hands nervously as he spoke. "No, I'm lying. I did. I did."
         Shaking his head slightly Brown began to pace in a small but tight circuit, more a controlled meandering than a patrolling path. "From your point of view, I've been gone for five years but . . . from my perspective, it's the same. That gap is just a mystery to me as mine probably was to you. That's, you know, that's just part of life, people lose touch, they grow apart . . ." he stopped, halting his pacing, putting a hand to his mouth in thought, almost gnawing on a knuckle. "What happened, Don?" he asked. Pivoting toward the grave, he said, "How did we let this happen to you?"
         Brown stared at the headstone for a few moments, as if engaged in a contests of wills. Then he spun away, nearly stumbling as he did so. "Friends are supposed to care about each other, look out for each other . . . Don, nobody seems to know what happened to you. It's like we looked away for a second and . . . and you're gone," he finished softly. "I don't know, I feel like we . . . failed you somehow, that we had our first real test of friendship, helping you out of this and . . . we screwed it up. Bigtime." Sighing, he took a step back, facing the grave again. "Out of all of us, you know who's done the most for you . . . Tristian. Remember him? Tristian Jacart? The lanky guy we couldn't figure out, who we made fun of because we didn't know what the hell else to do with him? Yeah. Him. How many times did you speak to him, what? five times? Maybe? While the rest of us were sitting around crying, he stepped forward and tried to do some good. No hesitation. For you." He sniffed and shrugged, an awkward smile cracking over his face. "It just goes to show you, I guess. S'funny world." He shrugged again, nodding to himself, after a moment slowly dropping into a crouch. He rubbed his fingers against the sides of his nose, near his eyes, until his features became almost distorted.
         "Don," Brown said harshly, his voice rocks grinding against each other, "what the hell did you do?" Perched on the balls of his feet he stared straight ahead at the gravestone, his eyes intent, piercing. "What the hell did you think you were doing? The things people have told me, the things . . . drugs?" he sneered, hardly able to spit the words out fast enough. "Drugs? God damn, we knew better than that, I mean, I thought we did . . ." he stood up, spinning back into the same pathway as before, "but I guess you had me fooled, Don. What, were the stupid things we did in high school too childish for you after we graduated, you had to go and move to the harder stuff? Dammit, we saw those people ourselves, we'd pass them on the street and they plead with us for money for food and even then we both knew, we! Both! Knew! what they were really going to spend it on. Was that your highest aspiration in life?" Brown's voice was slowly rising, his strides longer, his legs moving like scissors, churning up the grass. "To be like those wrecks, to trade your dignity for a bag of powder and a dirty needle?" His voice peaked like a gunshot and he reeled himself short, his breathing hollow, his eyes wide. "We didn't need that kind of garbage," he added evenly. "I expected more of you than that. Christ, we all did.
         "But we lost touch," Brown continued, looking down at the ground, his voice low and guilty, "and let you slide away right under our noses. That wasn't right." Glancing briefly at the sky, Brown crossed his arms, saying sharply, "Dammit, it wasn't-" before biting the words off brutally, leaving them hanging and bloody in the air.
         He stood still for a minute, head bowed, his body an unyielding rod set up against the wind. When he spoke again, his words were spiked lightning even as his movements were torturous and winding, a fist punching through gelatin.
         "But you know what, Don . . ." Brown said coldly, "it wasn't up to us. We could have helped, but we wouldn't have been able to save you. But all you had to do was ask," the word snapped across the distance like a whip, "and you couldn't, you didn't even do that. Was it so hard? To ask? Was it?" his questions were increasingly bitter snarls. "Instead we go about our lives until one day we get this call and . . . suddenly, it's too late. So is that how it is?" Brown asked insistently. "All we went through and we're not even worth a goddamn cry for help? Just this notice that you've gone and given up on us?" He stood at attention, his posture taut, glaring at the grave. "That's right. Gave up. You heard me. Because that's exactly what you did. You went and because you were stupid you dug yourself a hole so deep that you needed someone to pull you out. But that must have been too much effort, I guess," Brown noted condescendingly. "Because you wound up just sitting there on your ass until the goddamn hole caved in on you and then there was really nowhere to go, was there? So you did it to yourself, okay, you-" he started to point at the grave, his face feral, his voice a strangled grunt. His arm slashed the air and he turned away sharply. "Did you think we didn't care enough?" he asked quietly, his tone pinched. "Or did you just care too little?"
         He took a few steps closer to the grave. "But, no, it's not even a matter of caring," he said, his eyes hooded and dark. "It's about you being a selfish, stupid bastard." He growled out the last word, not relishing the taste of it at all. "Did you ever stop to consider what this would do to your family? Did you? For even a second?" his voice rose again, and he took another step, almost bearing down on the grave, like he might frighten it off through sheer intensity. "Did you at any point stop to give a damn to someone beside yourself? Well?" He looked the grave up and down, his gaze withering. "I guess not," he said simply. "I guess that just wasn't so important, was it? Not when you were so busy trying to do what was best for you and only you . . . God, how much more arrogant can you be?" he nearly shouted. His eyes were wild, his face unhinged. "All those people, all those goddamn people, Don, all there for you! Why didn't you see? Friends and family and . . . all of them people who cared about you, worried about you, dammit they loved you, like a son, or . . . or a brother and . . ." he flung his arms up, a twisted inarticulate phrase escaping from his tensed lips.
         "And you walked away from it," Brown grated, an engine trying to start in the bitterest cold. "Without a glance back or a single thought for anyone else you just left it all. I don't get it . . ." he said, "I don't get why you had to be such a coward, what the hell were you afraid of, can you tell me that? Can you? No, of course you can't, because you're not here . . ." he was shouting now, his voice caught in the pockets of the trees, flung heedlessly to the air, "no, you went and took the easy way out, except it was only easy for you, all the rest of us, we've got to stay here and deal with it, all you had to do, all you had to do was . . ."
         He couldn't finish, choking on the phrases, the meanings crumbling to so much useless dust. "Why?" he finally snarled, almost pleading. "Why the hell didn't you try harder, you selfish bastard," he raged, "who gave you the right to go and leave us like this, make the rest of us go on without you, goddamn callous piece of . . ." he stopped, swallowed, his voice shaking, the engines quivering even before takeoff, "You can't do this to us, do you understand me, that's not how it was supposed to be, nobody said you could just up and leave on us, you hear me, why did you . . ." screaming now, his voice shredding, caught on curled gusts of uncaring air, "Are you listening . . . dammit are you-" a wordless howl threatened to erupt from Brown's lips and he violently and suddenly kicked at the grave, missing completely, throwing himself off balance, falling sideways, landing on his knees, his hands on the headstone to brace himself, his head bent, forehead nearly touching the cool rock.
         "Ah, God . . . goddamn . . ." teeth gritted, eyes closed, his face seemed ready to rattle apart. "Ah, Don why, you useless, stupid, why did you . . . ah . . ." he shuddered, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the headstone harder. The edges of his eyes were glistening. "Ah . . . son of a . . ." he gasped again, his breathing ragged as he gulped air down a throat now too small. "Ah, goddamn, you . . ." he hissed, his body bent and trembling. "I hate you," he gasped finally, nearly hiccuping as he spoke. "I miss you." Something broke in him, and he inhaled sharply, wincing with unseen pain. "I wish you were here."
         Behind him was the soft swish of footsteps on grass.
         "Joe," was all the man said, a voice Brown knew instantly.
         He found he couldn't turn around. His body felt covered in insects, crawling and burrowing, sewn into his clothes. His hands were scraped raw from leaning on the tombstone. The pain did nothing to help him focus. It was just part of his world, as much as the air and the falling leaves and the sky were. And you can't focus properly if you use the whole world as your lens. You run the risk of seeing everything. That's not right. It'll burn out your brain.
         Speaking felt like he was vomiting something caustic. "I . . . there's . . . a question, a dozen questions, more maybe, that I want to ask you, that are just . . . tearing at me, there's so much I want to know so badly, you can't even imagine, it . . ." he took a deep breath through his nostrils, the cool air a pick right to the center of his head. "I won't ask," he exhaled quickly. "I can't. Because regardless of what I want, it . . ." paused again, his voice becoming tight, "he did it to himself . . . and there has to be, no matter what I might want, it . . ." words broke apart in his head, leaving only a truth he couldn't embrace even as the evidence confronted him everyday. Nearly inaudible, he squeezed out, "Everything has consequences. I have to understand that." It was almost a mantra, the worst kind, the type that chained the spirit instead of bringing it higher. Except those were the only kind with any power. Brown felt that now. "I have to. Because it's true." Opening his eyes, he breathed, "Oh God, Tristian, it's true."
         With even and measured steps, his friend drew closer to Brown, until his shadow fell across the headstone, until he was standing behind Brown and to his left. Out of the corner of Brown's eye, Tristian appeared distorted, a photograph taken while standing behind an aquarium, his presence threatening to wash out of existence at any second.
         "Don't make the same mistake everyone else has," Tristian said quietly. "I don't know everything." Brown wasn't sure if his friend sounded regretful of that or not.
         Brown only nodded, too drained to say anything further. He relaxed his position somewhat, leaning back to rest on his heels. The blood rushing to his lower extremities caused his vision to fuzz out for a second, blinking the headstone out of reality in that moment. But when his vision cleared, it was still there, the name the same, the dates unchanged. On an infinite number of worlds, his friend was dead. But on an infinite number, he was still alive. Brown took some comfort in that. But it was small and in the end, not really worth anything. He wasn't on those worlds, he was here. And his friend was dead. Here.
         "Are you okay?" Tristian asked, his knees the only real part of him Brown could see.
         "I'm . . . all right," Brown sighed. "I didn't think it would be easy, but . . ." rubbing his face with both hands, he added wearily, "I think I've forgotten how to cope. I thought by now . . . it'd be second nature, but I . . ." he sighed again, closing his eyes tightly, resting his elbows on his knees and folding his hands together. "My father killed himself, Tristian."
         "I know," Tristian replied softly. "I remember."
         "It was like he just walked out and left me," Brown told him, his voice dead. "My mother was taken and my father left. And now . . . now Don goes and leaves me, too. One by one, they're all just . . ." he swallowed painfully, grimacing. Looking up at Tristian, he whispered, "I have to spend forever without you guys, why is everyone leaving so soon?"
         Tristian glanced at the ground, appeared ready to kneel down next to Brown, decided against it. "You could resign," he advocated simply. "Then it wouldn't be forever."
         "You know I won't," he replied, shivering. "The things I could see, the things I will see, God, Tristian, if you only knew. I . . ." he shook his head. "It's the chance to see it all. I can't give that up. It's too sweet."
         Tristian smiled. "Good," was all he said. "That's good."
         Brown said nothing, didn't even acknowledge Tristian's words.
         After a short time, Tristian bent down on one knee. His face was blurred by Brown's peripheral vision, eyes and nose and features dissolving, a fuzzed skull with skin, wavering in and out of life. Here one second, gone another, maybe back again in the next. It's not dust we become in the end. These graves can never outnumber the dead. These dead cannot outrace the living. Stagnated motion will never replace our brief, frantic bursts of speed. A fifty yard dash is your only moment to do it all, and when the track ends so does this dream. Waking up to find that all the stars have gone black. It's not fair, but it's the only sport there is. The only other option is to not play. Which isn't much of a choice at all.
         "You didn't want me to kill those men," Tristian stated without preamble. Brown could feel his friend's eyes boring into him. In his current state, the effect was mildly disconcerting. God, he was becoming more like the resident deities every day.
         "You're wrong," Brown shot back wearily. There was no time for this. There was no time for anything. So it had to be now. "I did."
         "You knew I wouldn't."
         "I was counting on it," Brown answered, raising his eyes to meet Tristian's slightly puzzled gaze. His smile was the return of the ghost that used to inhabit his face. "Sometimes just because you want something doesn't mean you should be entitled to get it."
         Tristian nodded, his face neutral. "I think I can understand that." A second later he frowned, adding, "But what happened . . . they provoked me, Joe. I didn't feel like I had any choice. That's not a pleasant feeling. It wasn't a great experience. It's not something I enjoyed."
         "I know, I know," Brown replied with a strained tone. "And I'm sorry. It's just . . ." he ran both his hands through his hair, eyes fixed firmly on the ground. "Something had to be done, Tristian," he said without seeing anything. "But it couldn't be my way. It couldn't be me. Yours . . . I could live with it."
         "You should have asked," Tristian said flatly, just barely skirting a chastisement. "Leave the manipulations to the General, he's had a billion years to harden his conscience."
         "I couldn't ask," Brown responded, the word spat out in a wad on the ground. "It wouldn't have been right. I won't have my friends do my dirty work for me."
         "And yet, I did anyway, didn't I?" Tristian said evenly.
         "Do you think I'm proud of myself?" Brown asked sharply, his head whipping to the side to face his friend. Tristian's level gaze met his without comment, the man perfectly balanced, absolutely still, his poise betraying nothing. "Because I'm not," he snarled. He couldn't understand why he was breathing so fast. It didn't make any sense. He wasn't the one in the race. Not anymore. "And I said I was sorry. What else do you want me to do? Would you like me to go finish it for you? Is that what you want?" He didn't know if he was shouting or not. Tristian wasn't reacting as if he had, but then Tristian never reacted the way he was supposed to. Laughing in the rain, a stately doomed waltz for the sunny days. There is no cause. There is no effect. Everything just is. Someone had taken his voice and thrown it down a dark well. All he heard were the echoes.
         "No, Joe," Tristian said simply. His voice was a low pitched bell, travelling under his static, always coming through clear. "You've done enough. It's over now." There was no finality to his voice. Nothing ever ends. Nothing. It was the only lesson Brown had left to learn.
         "Yeah . . . yeah it is," Brown said. He was aware of a vague burning in his calves. His back was stiff, rods spiralling their way up his ribcage. Maybe he would freeze into this position and decay here, leaving future mourners to find his kneeling skeleton, bowing in supplication to his departed friend. His face felt strangely warm, almost swollen, like something was travelling from his chest to his throat, thrashing its way free. Sensitized, he felt its every flail of its barbed body. Numb, he didn't care if it tore him up inside.
         Tristian shifted his stance, straightening up to glance around, not unlike a guardian bird. "We should go," he said. "Are you going to be-"
         "You go," Brown said quickly. His unfocused eyes were fixed on the headstone, only seeing an endless grey wall, with a name written in letters miles long and forever deep. "I'll stay here for a bit. I need . . . to be alone for a bit." Blood was running down his vision, making tracks like distorted slugs. But it wasn't blood. Blood wasn't clear. Blood didn't burn.
         Tristian looked at him curiously, but said nothing. A moment later he went to stand up to leave. Brown's muscles felt wrapped around the wrong bones. A dull ache emitted from his jaw, like he was trying to drive his teeth into his brain. Or prevent himself from speaking. But what was could there be possibly left to say?
         Rising, Tristian stood over Brown, his shadow cutting diagonally, the outline sharp, the proportions stretched. He took two steps closer to Brown, crouched down next to his friend. He didn't touch Brown at all. But he loomed large nonetheless.
         "No," Tristian said calmly, looking directly at Brown. "No, you don't."
         And Brown went to answer Tristian but there must have been an earthquake going on because all of a sudden the world was shaking, a shudder that went straight to his marrow and he couldn't speak and all he could see were rain droplets streaking slowly down a dirty window. The world was encased in water, locked away and it wouldn't stop quivering. Unable to keep his balance, he had to sit down. His face was coming off, peeling away, only his hands pressing tightly against his eyes was keeping it attached. And it was all shaking. His teeth were rattling, his jaw burning with the tension. It wouldn't stop. He didn't understand why this was happening. His friend was dead. Hadn't he suffered enough. Hadn't they all? Now this. Now all of this. He didn't want to leave. But he had to. It must be raining. His hands were wet. Someone very far away was talking to no one in particular. It was a bad recording, poorly edited. Every nuance was distorted. Every defect plain to see. It had to be because of the earthquake. These shockwaves can't fail to touch you all. The voice didn't belong to him. He kept tasting the ocean. But the shore was so far away. How could this be? But it was everywhere, he could hear the waves, hollow and distant, throwing their strength up against an unyielding world. When you put your ear to a shell, you can hear the ocean. When you put your ear to the ocean, sometimes you heard a voice.
         "I'm okay, I'm okay . . ." the waves wept, in the rhythms of the tides.
         On this grey shore, under a melted sky, it crashed against him, speaking through the bitter spray, throwing back words that might have been his, whispering over and over and over:
         "I'm okay. I'm okay . . . I'm okay-"