The broom changed things.
Bruno took his seat at the table, asked if they would like a refill of water, like he hadn’t just wielded death itself. Lennon said no, they were fine, thank you, but they weren’t fine. And even as they tried to hide it, Kit felt a new weight in the air. Things were heavier, slowed down, as if the whole church had been immersed in a lake.
It was Lennon who finally broke the silence. “We should get going. Don’t want to overstay our welcome. Thanks for the food, it was—”
“Lennon.” What little light had lived in Bruno’s face was gone. He was the unplugged lamp, sad and dusty and broken. “Len-non,” he said again, as if chewing the name, debating its taste and texture. “You know—ever since you introduced yourself, I’ve been thinking about your name. I have to say, I would have pegged you as more of a Rashid. Or Samir, maybe.”
Kit had read of superheroes who could shoot bolts of lightning from their eyes, which he’d always found sort of silly. But there was nothing silly about the bolts of lightning in Lennon’s eyes right now.
Bruno continued: “I assume your parents had a deep respect for the greatest American band of all time, it’s just—difficult to imagine respect for the Beatles coming from . . . Pakistan? Lebanon?”
Voices came to Kit from miles and days away: in a sad, dusty nursery, So long as there are people on Earth, there will be willful ignorance and hatred; on a baseball field, searching for the perfect stick, Doors had been closed to them based on who they were, where they’d come from.
“Not like you picked the name,” said Bruno. “Or like you could be expected to know anything about the Beatles. I just think a parent has a duty to consider their own history—”
“Winston,” said Lennon.
A beat.
“Sorry?”
“John Lennon’s middle name. But you probably already knew that.”
Bruno’s smile was still there, but it was different, strained.
Lennon went on. “After Yoko came along, he tried to change it to Ono, but something about the law wouldn’t let him drop the Winston, so he just wound up adding Ono to the mix. John Winston Ono Lennon. Born October 9, 1940, with three names. Shot and killed December 8, 1980, with four. But again, I’m sure you already knew all this. The children’s book he wanted to write, the UFO he claimed to have seen, how he signed an autograph for his assassin the morning of his assassination. I’m sure you’ve read about how dissatisfied he was with his own work, how of all the songs he wrote, he was only happy with a single lyric. I’m sure, given your deep respect for the Beatles, you know which lyric I’m referring to . . . ?”
Lennon waited a beat; Bruno said nothing.
“My parents—not that it’s any of your business—were Jordanian immigrants. The women who raised me told me my mom made a killer mansaf, that my dad preferred his knafeh with ground pistachios, that they’d rigged a camping trailer to the back of their Subaru, and that they loved the Beatles. I have no way of knowing how deep their respect was, but I’m guessing it was deep enough to know the Beatles were a British band, not American, you smug motherfucker.”
Kit knew of the word. Which is to say, he knew it existed. He had no idea how it could burst from the mouth like a little explosion, lighting up the room with thunder and muscle.
“We’re leaving now.” Lennon stood—and just as he did, there was a zip, a loud crack against the mural wall behind him, little chunks of painted stone crumbling to the ground.
“Gabe must be feeling generous,” said Bruno. “He doesn’t miss unless he means to, and he never means to twice. I would sit down now.”
Slowly, eyes on the woods, Lennon sat.
“That was a real nice little speech you just gave,” said Bruno. “Left me all warm and fuzzy inside. Allow me to return the favor. You know the Bible story of David and Goliath? Kid takes down a giant with nothing but a slingshot. I always found that hard to swallow. But I get it now.” Bruno turned, gazed into the dark woods. “I never was much of a shot. But Gabe always liked the sport of it. Real determination, even when he was little. Once we learned about the Flies’ thirst for blood, we ditched the rifles. Mostly ate what we grew. I figured, weapon-wise, we were left with our bare hands, but—my boy had other ideas. Started with a little Y-shaped stick and a thin rubber band. Before long, the stick got thicker, the band got wider, and the rocks flew faster. He tinkered with different designs before finding the right one. Named it Goliath. Very clever, my boy. See, unlike a bullet, a rock isn’t aerodynamically designed to tear through flesh. Oh, it’ll enter the body easily enough, but depending on where you hit”—he leaned back, put both hands on his lower abdomen—“gut shots, namely—it’s rare for the rock to exit the other side. You’ll bleed some, sure. But in the right spot, with no exit wound, it’s minimal.”
“What do you want?” asked Nico.
“The answer to that is a different Bible story.” Bruno took a sip; afterward, he kept his eyes on the glass, as if talking to the water. “‘Be fruitful and multiply.’ It is our sacred duty to repopulate the earth,” and as he spoke, Kit heard the words in his head before they came out of Bruno’s mouth, so the man seemed only an echo of himself.
Nico will stay here . . .
“Nico will stay here . . .”
. . . to help my son accomplish this.
“. . . to help my son accomplish this.”
He heard Lennon’s words in his head too: Fuck you, no one’s staying . . . “Fuck you, no one’s staying in this madhouse.”
Bruno reached behind his head, removed the band holding his ponytail in place, and let his hair fall in sheets around him. “‘Replenish the earth, and subdue it,’” he said, digging both hands into his head, scratching like an animal. “‘Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’” As he pulled his hair back into a ponytail again, for the first time, it seemed the man’s face was his own, a mask removed. He pointed to the locked closet. “For all the shit we pin on Flu-flies, no living thing has been more fruitful, or multiplied at such phenomenal rates. We can learn from them, but only when we realize we have nothing to fear. They are doing what God created them to do. As are we.”
“I’m not staying here.” Nico’s voice was a quiet-fierce. “None of us are. We each have somewhere to be because of someone we love.”
“We’re not staying here,” said Lennon.
“We’re not staying here,” said Kit.
Bruno laughed. “You guys are cute. Sticking together, power of friendship.”
“We’re family,” said Kit.
“Yes, we are.” Nico pulled a large knife out from under the table, turned it to Bruno. “And we’re not staying here.”
Bruno pointed to the knife. “That’s a big fucking mistake, right there.”
“Funny, I thought it was a big fucking knife.”
“I don’t think you know how to use that.”
“Tell Gabe to stand down, or you’re going to find out.”
He looked from the knife to Nico. “Lineage is everything—”
“You’re creepy as hell. Tell Gabe to stand down.”
“—without it, the world becomes a dark place.”
“The earth is 4.54 billion years old,” said Kit. “Humans have been around for 200,000 years. The planet could blink and miss us. Our extinction would be a return to the status quo.”
Across the table, Nico winked at him; he winked back, and he felt tears coming on, as if his heart was too full of heart-juice, so now it was leaking from his eyes.
“I’ve been around my own kid too long,” said Bruno. “Forgot how goddamn arrogant you guys are.”
“Last chance,” said Nico. “Tell Gabe to stand down.”
“You think you’re the first eligible bachelorette to stumble into town? Don’t get me wrong, given all the things that have to go right in the baby-making department, a second option is not without value. But we already have a primary candidate. You’re expendable.”
The knife held steady in Nico’s hand. “You’re lying.”
“He’s not,” said Kit, and in his mind, he saw the town from an aerial view, as if watching from the window in his projection room: the sign welcoming them to Waterford, the street they’d entered it on, little murals all over, and run-down houses . . .
“What’s the reload time on a slingshot?” Nico asked.
Suddenly Kit knew what she was about to do. And if the panicky look on Bruno’s face was any indication, he knew too.
Lennon reached out, put a hand on her shoulder. “Nico—”
Time slowed, and when Kit closed his eyes, he saw his Dakota’s final hours, saw himself at her bedside, watching sweat pour out of her, wishing he could give his life for hers, as the Mackenzies had done for them. Just sit there, said his Dakota, over and over. Just stay where you are. And he held her hand, told her he wasn’t going anywhere. And now, eyes still closed, he saw himself at this table, saw Nico take a breath, knew she was about to lunge for Bruno, and like so many words this evening, Kit saw the path of the rock before it arrived: from the woods, zip, through the hole in the back of the church, it would pass over his shoulder, zip, across the table, and Nico, mid-lunge, would be hit in the gut. Unless . . .
Just sit there, Kit.
From the open window of his art classroom, he saw his Dakota across the street, on the roof of the Paradise Twin.
Please. Just stay where you are.
That face he loved, in a world so impossibly big.
Please.
In her hands, a potted flower, still growing.
Just sit there.
He smiled at her.
And then stood up.
The church dissolved, melted like snow in spring. The mural, too, everything gone, washed in light, an infinite vacuum of blinding brightness in every direction . . .
In the middle of it all, Kit sat at a table.
A woman sat across from him.
This is from my dream, said Kit, looking around.
The woman put her arm on the table, pulled up a sleeve to reveal a tattoo: Dreams are memories from past lives, it read.
He tried to shield the light behind the woman to get a better look at her face. At first he thought she might have been his Dakota, but she was too young. Then he thought she was Nico, but she was too old. She seemed both strange and familiar, like walking into the Paradise Twin only to find it filled with someone else’s stuff.
I think I’ve lived many times, he said. The same life, over and over.
The woman did not move. She did not speak.
Only—everyone dreams. So why am I the only one who remembers?
She raised her other arm to reveal a second tattoo, this one an image of concentric circles, too thin and too many to count. She pointed to the smaller circles in the middle of the tattoo—and then pointed to Kit.
I’m a small circle, he said.
She lowered both arms, said nothing.
Like eidetic memory. The smaller the circle, the easier it is to remember each lap. So then . . . they remember things too, just not as well.
Still, she was silent.
Where are we?
Slowly, the woman reached across the table, took Kit’s hand in hers. On the back of her hand was a tattoo of an old cinema marquee. Her other hand reached across the table now, and on it, a tattoo of a road winding up into the mountains. Kit looked into the woman’s eyes, and there he saw his beginning and his end, not Nico or his Dakota, but the two combined. The opening and closing of his circle.
Around them, the brightness imploded, broke into pieces as color flooded in.
I’m scared, he said.
As the woman began to dissolve, she smiled at him, turned her hand over, and just before she and the room both melted away, he saw in her palm one last tattoo: a small purple flower.
There was no pain.
Or it was something else altogether: his body was thunder, a radiant shock of I’m here and then I’m there, back and forth. Nico was leaning over him now, he was on the ground, I don’t remember falling. She lifted him into her lap, and when she pulled her hand back, he saw blood, cadmium red. “It’s a natural pigment,” he said. “It lasts forever,” and Nico was crying, told him not to talk, not to worry, and he felt like laughing—he wasn’t worried at all.
Behind Nico, the mural loomed large. That big bright moon lighting up the sky, technology from the olden days shining like stars, and out of nowhere, Harry trotted up, sniffed Kit’s face. “Good boy, Spacedog,” said Kit, the thunder receding in his chest. Harry turned, looked up at the mural, and Kit thought how he’d always loved painting the dog best.
Just like this.
Nico cried, held him in her lap like his Dakota had held him before bed, telling him his genesis story, her dangling necklace brushing his face. “She was on a bad date,” he said. “She was a midwife, and she was there for the baby.”
“Shhh,” Nico said. “Don’t talk.”
From under his shirt, he pulled out her necklace with its bright silver key. “Oh,” he said, lifting his hand, holding the key between the painted moon and the boxy computer and the black dog at the bottom. He closed one eye so the key was part of the mural, giant and shimmery. And he wished Nico would stop crying. He wanted to tell her how wonderful it was, how perfect that it had taken a piece of his Dakota to finally complete his painting. It’s okay, he tried to tell her, but when he opened his mouth, a thick flower bloomed, not purple but red, and he died, the first and only artist to ever truly finish anything.