Words to Tie to Bricks (12 page)

The eyes have stopped stinging. Now they’re glazing over with wet, as if to blind me from the present and force me to remain in the past. Fine by me. I’m here. Our
goal is just a short way away, now. I could stay here for hours, days, years, if I wanted to, remembering you.

Words come into my mind. Words from before everything went wrong. They haven’t fit anything here, anything in this place, for a long, long time. But they fit you.

If I close my eyes and still my breathing, I can almost feel you lying beside me.

Almost.

I reach out an arm to touch you. You’re there and not there at the same time. I hold you as best as I can. But you’re slipping. Everything’s so hard to remember. Your hand,
both in mine and not, my arms, both around you and not, your laugh, shaky and distorted by the Com you spoke through, ringing loudly in my mind but silently everywhere else.

I wish the ground hadn’t eaten you. I wish it a lot.

I’ve never wished for anything before.

I try to remember why we did this, why we came here in the first place. It was important, the reason. We talked about it. Neither of us could remember. That happens here; memories die, new ones
come in to replace them. We tried to eke out our story as we went along. We’d come from a safe place, a happy place, maybe, and we’d been chosen to go out and do this. To reach it.
Whatever it was.

I can’t remember and I don’t much care. The kind of safe and happy that place made me feel pales in comparison to the kind you could provide. I’m angry. Not at anything in
particular. But I’m angry that you died. I want you back. It isn’t fair, and it isn’t right, and I’m not going to press on because I want you back right now, right now, and
if the ground doesn’t produce you and give you back to me then I don’t know how I’ll do it but I’ll burn this entire planet even worse than it already is, and it will think
back to the cancer ravaging it now with fondness and it will wish it had given me everything I ever wanted because as much as I’m rending and coming undone and splitting apart at the seams
it’s nothing compared to the damage I want to wreak on this worthless excuse for a patch of ground to stand on.

I’ll do it.

I will.

I’ll kill everything.

Maybe that’s how things got like this in the first place.

I don’t know.

Neither do you.

We can’t remember.

No one can remember.

I’m lost and I don’t know where I’ve been and I don’t know where I’m going and I can’t remember who I am and I don’t even have you anymore and soon
I’m going to forget you.

I jerk awake.

No. No, no, no, no, no. No.

But yes.

It’s what happens, what always happens, the memories will leave and die and then I’ll be alone and I’ll never know I was ever anything different.

And then I start screaming. And my memory may be working with a skeleton crew, but I know I’ve never screamed like this before. It’s rage and fear and anger and pain and everything
and all of me, all wrapped up in one fatal gesture, and I turn on the Com as far as the dial will go and everyone, everywhere, for miles around will know this sound and they’ll know I was
here and they’ll know how I felt and then, and then,

Then they’ll forget.

And I want to make some sweeping gesture, some wonderful speech, a pledge to never forget and to always remember, but no matter what reminders I make for myself, no matter how
many times I carve your name onto my skin, the reality is that the memory will die and then I’ll be alone again.

Can I even remember your name?

No. I can’t.

I chase the memory all around my head. I can’t quite manage to catch it.

And then my thoughts are quiet for the first time in a long while and I hear the ocean bubbling two miles away and I hear the wind rustle over this bleak rocky wasteland and I hear the gas
shifting in the air and I hear the far-away scuttling of whatever lives here and, I have to say, to me at least, it all sounds pretty much the same as silence.

And then I see light, cutting through the gas like a knife.

Emanating from the hole you fell into.

And I’m only thinking one thing: That light’s artificial.

No. Sorry. Two things.

That light’s artificial,

And that light’s
you.

No. Not yet. I can’t have you come back and then be torn away like this. I can’t believe it yet.

I won’t.

It’ll hurt too much.

I run to the edge, and I stare down the depths. The beam of light cuts my eyes but does little to disrupt the black shroud below, underground. The light begins to flicker, on and off, and
something registers in my brain, dots and dashes and pieces of a code I can’t name, much less use.

Your Com is broken. Must be. This is you communicating. That would make sense.

It’s also impossible. You’re dead.

Dead. Dead dead dead dead dead and not coming back. I’m not doing this. I’m not hurting myself like this. I refuse.

Coms.

I have spares.

It’s like someone loaded a shotgun full of buckshot and let it off inside of me. I feel so happy, it’s like my organs are rupturing. I didn’t know relief could feel this
cancerous. This isn’t real, it isn’t, and all the happiness I let it have in me will sour and rot and I’ll feel all the worse for ever having let it in and just be
quiet.

I whisper into my Com: ‘If you can hear me, turn the light off.’

Abruptly, the beam cuts.

‘Throw it back on.’

The light beams back into existence.

And there it is, there you are, there’s the proof, there’s the miracle, there’s the sign that you’re fine, there’s all the things that I didn’t let myself
want, there’s you and there’s you and there’s you and there’s you and there’s you.

Alive. Lung-breathing, heart-beating, blood-boiling, mind-whirring, jaw-clenching, back-arching, eyes-smiling, properly, truly, alive.

There are no words. There will never be enough words to express any of what I need expressed.

But I don’t care.

You’re alive.

‘
You
,’ I choke. Choking. Gas mask must be leaking. Don’t care. You’re alive.

‘I’m throwing you a Com,’ I whisper, voice oddly broken. I take the small black thing from my pack and drop it as gently as I can. I don’t hear it hit the bottom.

A voice flickers from inside my mask. ‘Can you hear me?’

And I am a child, staring wide-eyed at the sun. ‘
You
.’

‘Me,’ you agree.

This is too much. This is much too much. This isn’t what’s happening. I’m on the rock. My mind is broken. I tossed the mask off in despair and these are the hallucinations that
come as I am poisoned to death. It would explain why I’m shaking so much. This isn’t allowed. Nothing this beautiful would ever be allowed to happen down here. Not ever.

‘Really?’

‘I’m here. I heard you screaming. Are you okay?’

I try to tell you that I’m fine, but I’m shaking, like the tops of those mounds where the poison in the earth’s veins would burst out. We saw plenty of them earlier on, on the
plains. You always got advanced warning, they were shaking so much, and then gas would radiate outwards. The gas concentration was far too high to be filtered.

Neither of us could remember how we knew that.

But, those mounds.

That’s me.

You’re the poison.

I don’t know what the explosion will look like.

‘Are you okay? Why were you screaming?’

You’re concerned, I know, but there isn’t, I can’t, I couldn’t begin ...

‘
You
,’ I manage.

Barely.

And I don’t know what to do or what to say or how I feel, because you don’t let anyone mean anything to you down here, because it all gets taken away, and it’s not worth it,
and I know that, I do, but, I just,
you
.

‘Where are you?’ I ask, trying to shake the thoughts out of my head, like releasing bad fumes from the mask when they build up.

‘Underground. A tunnel caved in. I can follow it.’

‘Or I could follow you.’

‘You’d die. I fell with the cave floor. The harsh rocks and splintering rafters broke my fall.’

I smile. You’re joking. You’re not making sense, so you’re joking. ‘That’s not how falling works.’

‘My leg is broken.’

‘What?’

‘My leg. I can still go on. I’ll follow this tunnel, give you directions, you follow me above. These are old mining tunnels, I can tell from the wooden supports. They’ll reach
the surface somewhere. We’ll just keep on walking.’

Not joking. ‘Your leg? Broken? Can the medi–’

‘Irreparable. It doesn’t matter. We’re already at the end. It’ll be fine. I’m starting.’

The light dies out. You’re putting it to work underground, now.

‘Start walking forwards. I’ll tell you when to turn. Can you do that?’

I can, and I do.

There’s relief, and concern, and confusion, and a bundle of other emotions our language hasn’t been kind enough to name, all bubbling inside of me and I don’t
know what the end result is supposed to look like. So I think about that for a time.

And then I do something else:

‘Your leg. Does it hurt?’

Another silence. Not so long. ‘Of course it does.’