The Fading (34 page)

Curtain. Machine. Earlier he’d said something about an eraser at the end of a pencil. Now he was talking about emotions, blinding
people. Noel thought about his mother’s weak mind. His father’s strong one. A few kids on the playground, then Julie, then
half a dozen people inside a jewelry store. Gestation, pressure, the casino floor. Something clicked inside of Noel, lighting
him up with epiphany.

‘We don’t disappear.’

Dalton raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

‘We don’t go anywhere, or change at all,’ Noel said. ‘It’s them. The witnesses, observers, whoever they are. My mother. I
did it to her first because I could, because I was closest to her, and maybe … she was weaker, afraid of losing me. Then some
kids on the playground when I was angry, scared. When I was a teenager it ran out of control like a hormonal rage. That’s
it, isn’t it? We don’t vanish. We blind them.’

Dalton winced. ‘Eh, “blind” is a wee bit of hyperbole. They don’t lose their vision.’

‘No, no, not everything,’ Noel said. ‘Just us, to us. We make them blind to us. Holy shit! This explains so much. The reason
it works on our clothes, stuff in our pockets. That’s us, we see that as part of us, right? But it has to make sense, or,
or, no, it’s like we have to
believe
it. We can’t take something with us unless we know we can take it with us! We have to factor that in and
assume
—’

‘Calm down. If you learn how to get a grip on this, a grip on yourself, I can show you how to take a lot more than what will
fit in your pockets.’

‘Like what?’

Dalton leaned back to enjoy the fawning. ‘Oh, I don’t know. A pair of sunglasses, a suitcase, a car. Maybe a house in an empty
neighborhood.’

Noel thought of the Funhouse, where he had found Julie. The way his time with Bryan Simms had kicked things to another level,
walling him off from the party, screening death from thirty years ago by way of a haunting while all around him the furniture
was hidden. He thought of Julie.

‘What about people, another person?’ Noel said.

Dalton grinned, nodded. ‘If they don’t fight it, sure. But there are limits. Remember that the observers are always compensating,
whether they know it or not. Their eyes continue to see us, but somewhere behind the eyes, in the visual cortex, the portion
of the brain which translates visual sensory input, our eraser swipes. The body doesn’t like it when the brain does not respond
to its office memos, so it works harder to relay the message, panics, sends out an SOS. The brain doesn’t know what to do
with that blinking red light on the dashboard, or, in our case, the vacancy in its field of vision. If we blot out too much,
there can be an equal toll on the gray matter. Some of my overtaxed witnesses
have reported black spots, dizzy spells, crawling bugs of negative space in the broad daylight where I was standing. Plenty
have simply fainted while I worked. Or worse. I believe I gave my father a stroke when I was sixteen.’

Noel was aghast. ‘How did you learn all this?’

‘Experience. Once you get it under control and realize you don’t have to run like the Gingerbread Man every time you want
to go out for a coffee and newspaper, you notice things. And I’ve, ah, interviewed some of my quote-unquote victims, but I
fear we’re getting ahead of ourselves.’

Noel rubbed his eyes and laughed with relief. ‘All this time. The way people get uncomfortable around me. It’s like they can
feel it. And they do, because it’s in me. It’s so obvious. How could I not see it?’

‘People are usually blind to what’s sitting right in front of them,’ Dalton said. ‘Many of them are grateful, because who
wants to look at the problem? Who wants to deal with the unpleasantness? See no evil? That’s our want ad. We just push their
own desires to ignore the problem. We tidy up the messy scene. I like to think of it as a sponge. A clean little sponge that
I can slip beneath their skulls and smear away the stupid pictures on their television-rotted brains.’

‘My God. My God.’ Noel was lost in a string of memories. Seeing himself change so many times over the years, making himself
vanish not
before their very eyes
, but in their minds. In the mirror, in his own mind, from himself. Hiding from his problems, then unable to do it for
Julie because he wanted to be with her, not lost. But to himself? That didn’t fit Dalton’s explanation.

‘One thing,’ Noel said.

Dalton sipped more Pepsi.

‘If what you’re saying is true, this works on us too, on the self. When I blinded others, I blinded myself. I could not see
my own face in the mirror, the clothes on my body. How do you explain that?’

Dalton parried with a sly smile. ‘Are we not as others see us? Do we not construct our models of ourselves on the reactions
of those closest to us, on the lingering glances of strangers passing by, on the face in the mirror? Why is it that some people
see a green shirt and call it blue? A blue shirt green? We call this colorblindness, but all it really implies is that reality
is not fixed, is not ultimate, is nothing more than the collective perceptions of a family, a society. There was a time when
automobiles didn’t exist, computer chips, the Bible. A thing has to be imagined – seen by the mind – before it can be born.
Whatever is in us that allows us to do what we do, it must be wired into the imagination, literally where things, including
the self, are imagined so that they may become real. Or, in our case, real but invisible.’

Noel laughed. ‘You know something crazy? I think I can feel it. Just knowing all this makes it feel more … accessible. Is
that possible?’

‘Confidence matters. You see this in the arts. With musicians, painters, writers, and in sports, where winning breeds winning.
A man who believes he has control of his talents is much more likely to execute
his passions. Doubt is the killer. Hesitation doesn’t keep twenty spinning plates from crashing to the floor.’

‘But is this really, what’s the word? Innate? Natural?’ Noel said. ‘I was born this way? Or did I grow into it? How do we
know it’s not environmental?’

Dalton yawned. ‘Maybe it’s both. Nature and nurture. I have to believe that at some point the seed, whatever kernel of it
is there to begin with, finds its reactive property for germination.’

Noel continued to nod, drinking it all in. Something big was missing, though. Something he wanted to know but was afraid to
ask. It would sound crazy, but then so did everything they were discussing.

‘What about the dead?’ he said. ‘The lost ones. Spirits.’

Dalton became very still. ‘What about them?’

Noel took a deep breath. ‘They appear before or during for me. Do you see them? When you are in the bub— when you are, whatever
you called it, faded? Do you see the dead?’

Dalton seemed to melt in his seat a little. ‘Noel, I do. I see them.’

‘I thought I was losing my mind.’

‘Yes, I get headaches.’

‘It’s fucked up, isn’t it?’ Noel said, wound up and glancing around in all directions as if vengeful spirits would at any
moment spew forth from the stores and Dalton would show him the trick to vanquish them. ‘I didn’t know what they were, not
for a long time. I saw
them when I was a kid. I thought they were my imaginary friends. People from TV. Actually, one was.’

Dalton chuckled. ‘Oh, yes. Just like on TV. They aren’t really human, are they? Another trick of the mind. It’s easier to
see them that way.’

‘My scratches,’ Noel said, turning his arm over to reveal a faint pink welt. ‘Ten weeks ago I looked like a cat’s scratching
post. They did this to me. Or maybe they made me do it.’

‘“They made me do it.’’’ Dalton repeated, his eyes full of wonder. Admiration. ‘My, you are a special one, aren’t you? They
want to be released. They sense we have the power to set them free.’

‘That is exactly what it feels like,’ Noel said. ‘I hate them.’

‘I’m just amazed … it’s incredible that you understand all this, Noel. I might have underestimated you.’

Noel did not understand why this seemed to please Theo so much, but he was relieved there was one more thing that was not
his burden alone.

Dalton stood abruptly, excitedly patting his pockets, sat back down. He looked at his watch and removed a pen and a small
spiral notebook from his jacket’s inner pocket. He jotted something with a flourish, tore a slip from his pad and handed it
over as he rose once more.

‘Where are you going?’ Noel said.

‘Stop by that address this evening, around six or seven.’

Noel was unable to mask his disappointment. ‘Is this your house?‘

‘One of them.’

‘But—’

‘All this talk,’ Dalton said with a wink. ‘It’s easier if I show you.’

Noel sat a while and wondered what else there was to see.

If Dalton was a slob in public, he became fastidiously composed at home. After a light dinner of curry skewers he’d grilled
with a small kettle on his ninth floor terrace, served with a dry white wine and a large salad rich with avocados, the professor
was at the sink, his blue striped shirt cuffs folded crisply to the elbows, washing dishes with nary a splash. Noel remained
at the small but elegant dining table set beyond the alcove holding a plaster statue, a copy of something he’d seen in a book
before: the woman with no arms or legs, reduced to a turning bust with a wreath at her curls, flat white eyes undefined, cast
downward as if in modesty or shame.

The rest of the condominium, one of several Dalton ‘kept around the country’ for when he tired of hotels and ‘felt the need
to repair to a habitat of my own making’, had been appointed with thick brown drapes and white crown molding above the fibrous
beige wallpaper. The place was tidy, the furnishings spare but soft, with lots of extra throw pillows and folded blankets
tossed around the armchairs and small sofas. Track lighting beamed warm cones of light into all the right spaces
without becoming intrusive. A tower shelf had been stocked with oversized art books and a few small, meticulously tended plants,
and a discreet Bose system that suffused the apartment with classical music.

Noel had to admit he had been expecting something weird and dismal out in the desert, the kind of place where one expected
to find abandoned cars in the front yard, a dungeon basement outfitted with shackles, chains and glory holes. So he was relieved
when the taxi driver took one look at the address and delivered him just five blocks west of the Strip, to this clean white
stone and black glass plaza among commuter traffic, amid grocery stores and what appeared to be mild-mannered business executives
and well-dressed young couples with nice hair and normal lives.

‘Put it in real estate,’ Dalton said at the sink, pausing to sip more wine between soap bubbles. They had been discussing
money, how to maintain an income between fades, during the ups and downs of the lifestyle. ‘Tangible assets, preferably of
the sort that can be lived in or rented. Hire a property manager. I get rent checks in the mail every week, at half a dozen
PO boxes. Oh, you need those too. Use the little strip mall kind, the ones that provide other services. They can forward your
mail, fax you things, run a new passport photo. Quite handy.’

‘Good advice,’ Noel said. He raised his wine glass, sniffed it for the third time, and set it back down. He didn’t care much
for wine. He was growing restless again. In addition to finances, they’d talked about
Colorado, Noel’s parents, Dalton’s short-lived marriage to a woman in Tacoma, Washington (it ended when she came home to find
him singing in the shower and peeked around the curtain to discover there was no ‘there’ to Theodore Dalton). Dalton had talked
of his travels through Europe and even threatened to haul out the slide projector, but so far they’d discussed nothing more
of the strange talent they had in common. How to manipulate it, turn it on and off.

Dalton paused in his humming. ‘More wine?’

‘I’m good,’ Noel said. ‘Mind if I use your bathroom?’

Dalton turned and appraised him, wiping his hands with a waffle-textured towel tucked into his tubby waistline. ‘Second door
down the hall.’

‘Thanks.’

Noel headed through the living room, past the small foyer, down the hall floor of what looked like lacquered bamboo, until
he came upon the second white door. He flipped the switch and shut the door behind him. He urinated briefly, but stood there
over the toilet longer than was necessary. He hadn’t needed to go that bad, but something about sitting in Dalton’s presence
made it difficult to think, to steer his own thoughts, to focus on the more serious business at hand. The condo was on some
kind of climate control, but Noel had felt a chill during dinner. Echoes from another apartment that sounded too close. The
subtle impression that someone else was watching them, or listening to them, or maybe had left the condo just minutes before
Dalton opened the door with a smile
and declared, ‘You found it. Welcome to
Chez Dalton
!’ in a terrible French accent.

Yes, something was a little off here, but Noel couldn’t figure out what.

Maybe it was simply the man himself. Dalton was … odd.

Earlier today at the hot dog stand, the professor had shifted from goofy to cryptic, controlling to enchanted. But tonight
he seemed content to offer nothing more than the polite but smothering company of a lonely middle-aged man. Did Dalton really
think they were going to become friends? Partners in the calling, the mission, whatever he had called it? The sense that Dalton
was lonely and wanting of a … companion of some sort, this was stronger than ever. Noel did not know or care whether the man
was gay. He only wanted to avoid implying that he was open to whatever kind of budding apprenticeship Dalton had in mind.

Noel flushed the toilet and moved to the sink to wash his hands.

No, we’re not going to be friends, Noel decided. I need information. He’s excited to play teacher. I’m humoring him with my
company, but if he wants to keep doling out the instruction manual in tidbits, I’m skating town tonight, taking my money to
California, to Julie. The hell of it was, the more time that passed without Dalton bringing it up, the harder it was for Noel
to interrupt the fuddy-duddy and ask a direct question for fear of coming off rude.