FIFTY

ALONE IN HIS ROOM, GRIFF CONSIDERED THE PARACORD.

Over six hundred known uses.

“You’re on lockdown until further notice,” his father said. “No contact with those two.”

“We can get you someone to talk to,” his mother said. “We want you to be okay.”

There were games. If you had a friend, you could do a cat’s cradle.

Hold the paracord in such a way that if you had a partner to play with, you could trap their hand in a rectangle of strings and then let that person go.

They could trap you and let you go.

That week, the fires returned. Creeping up the coast. The air quality meter was so red it turned purple. Particulate matter hung and made the landscape look like charcoal etchings. Griff picked at his paracord. He could make a pulley system to lift water jugs. Dampen their roof to guard against embers. He could tie a mask on his face.

No red circles on the calendar. Empty boxes.

He had one standing appointment on Wednesday at eleven, when the whole town shook with the weekly test.

bbbadabadabadawwwEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Griff was not allowed to work with Thomas. Thomas was out there picking up roadside trash. Doing ocean cleanup. Cutting gorse. Worse than SubWatch. Winter-thick gloves in summertime, chopping the thick, sticky stems to stumps. Swabbing poison on the blunted ends.

Thomas had been right about the tape. Griff needed it. Every listen, like a quick breath.

But he couldn’t keep air in his lungs.

Without weekdays, weekends, or school, or reliable daylight, everything became a slow, dark circling. The sun had burned out in its socket, like a dead bulb. One twilight, his father opened his bedroom door without knocking. Red-rimmed eyes. He said:

“I just don’t know who you are, Griff.”

He stood a minute longer, shifting his weight. Silence.

“Can you just tell me why? Was it drugs?”

Drugs.

That would’ve been easier. How could he explain the value of music? That he would give anything to see the Band and meet the people who loved the Band. Explaining this to his father would be like trying to explain a shuttle launch to a golden retriever. The dog might love you, the dog might wish to understand, because it loves you. But the dog could not understand.

When his dad left, Griff sat on his bed swallowing his spit and breathing and trying to survive from one minute until the next.

Hold on, Thomas had said.

Griff listened to the radio, but Thomas was never there.

The coast burned father north. The air was a gray stew and the sky fell in small dandruff flakes on the black truck like God scratching his head. The smoke killed small things. Dead fruit flies in the kitchen. Tiny corpses on a pile of brown bananas. One day, a larger thing died. In the endless twilight, that day emerged like an alligator wandering from the fog to clamp its jaws on your leg and remind you things can still get worse.

Griff did not hear the car accident, but he saw the furry thing at the base of his driveway and thought it was a rat. Large ears. Small face and a golden coat. An Abyssinian cat with a broken leg and internal injuries and it chose their home as the place to die. With a paracord, you could make a cat leash to keep it from running into the road. You could make a tourniquet or hold a splint in place but you could not make it better when it was too late. You could not, with a paracord, tie the cat back to this world.

Music stopped working.

At some point, the Band was intoning the wrong things. Emphasizing words like dark and the end and black and knotted and Griff could tie twenty-two different knots so he listened to K-NOW, but Thomas was out cleaving gorse because he had lied to a police officer and no longer had a show:

bbbadabadabadawwwEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Wednesday again.

Scruggs had taken their shifts on K-NOW but did not say anything mean about them. One afternoon, he played a new PSA for Lost Coast Student Government.

“This is Charity Simms, one of your Lost Coast Student Leaders. We want to tell you students at home, we are here for you. A safe place. You can find us, September in the student union. Just hang on. School will be here before you know it.”

GASP!

A red-circle day. A lungful of hope! The air should’ve lasted for days, but as soon as the red ink dried, he felt like he’d made the whole thing up. Griff listened all day for a few days and the announcement never played again. The lilac bush across the street—Griff’s favorite, which dripped with fragrant cones of the deepest purple in the spring—died from the ashfall. The neighbors came outside in N95 masks and lifted drooping branches, shook dead leaves. Griff had never seen that before, with a plant. Limp and brown all at once. Just decided—enough.

That same night, Griff woke in a panic. Breathless, like he’d forgotten something. Slept too long. One word ricocheted in his head:

Terrible, terrible.

He went to his window.

He could not see it. No flash. No glimmer. Could the ash be that thick? He padded out into the hallway. Deactivated security. Laced up his boots, stepped into a still night that smelled like a concrete fireplace. Stinging eyes, closing throat, and a clawing feeling in his lungs saying run run panic run. You learn fast that all five of your senses are designed to tell you when something is burning.

“Please,” Griff said. “Please.”

He rubbed his eyes and screamed.

“Hey! C’mon!”

Screaming at the lighthouse.

This is where you lose your mind, Griffin Tripp. Complex metal alloys such as cadmium, atomized by 800-degree fires, have melted like mercury butter in your brain and driven you batty.

Shhhhh, the ocean said back. Shhhhhh.

Paracord use #437 would be to tie it to the guardrail at the edge of Marine Drive and rappel down to the mud flats. He’d make it. Five hundred pounds dead weight, two hundred swinging. Across the mud flats, there was no light. Really. No light. He walked home in the dark. Showered off the campfire smell and lay watching his window. He tried to summon with his voice:

“Whoomp,” he whispered. “Whoomp.”

No one to hear it, he said it louder.

“Whoomp!”

At breakfast his dad told him:

“They shot up the lighthouse.”

Probably two people in a truck, they left tire tracks in the mud. Tired of waiting, they shot out the handmade Fresnel lens with bullets from a semiautomatic gun. Over 370 individually cut panes of glass. They could not replace the shattered lens with any amount of money. They don’t even make them anymore.

“It survived the ’64 tsunami,” his father said. “Couldn’t survive Clade City.”

Paracord use #137, to choke the ones who did it.

“Who?” Griff said. “Dad, who did it? You know. Tell me who. Tell me. Tell me.”

“Please stop, Griff,” his mother said. “Please.”

Her voice choked off. What was he doing? Grabbing the skin on his forearm. Pulling until it bled.

Ah, he’d done that before. All coming back.

Instead of clothing, he’d grabbed loose skin on his arms and pinched his throat and grabbed fleshy fistfuls from the back of his neck. In the hospital, they’d asked him:

Have you ever slipped something around your neck? Do you have a plan?

“Come to work with me tomorrow?” his mother asked. “It will be fun.”

Tomorrow. Too many tomorrows. They stacked up heavy beyond his bedroom door, which he locked. One specific use for a paracord. He tested his desk chair. Five hundred pounds dead weight. His pants hung looser than ever. It would work fine.

He sat on the chair and unclipped the bracelet. The thing was, you had to unlace the paracord and would not be able to lace it back the way it was, resembling the black-and-white piano keys. That would be challenging to explain, if he decided not to. A permanent thing, unlacing the cord. He stood and unlocked his door and went to the piano room.

If he was ready to die, he could at least play it.

Sheets of music, unmoved since October. Like the shoes and hanging clothes, they didn’t know Leo was gone. It was time to be honest with the music. He removed sheets labeled duets, piano four hands.

I’m sorry.

He removed more.

I’m so sorry.

He removed more sheets and the piano seemed to spring up a little, like a sagging pine bough, shaken free of snow. Griff sat on the bench. The sheet facing him was familiar.

Andante.

His piece. It was okay for him to play it.

A nervous jolt, placing his fingers. Like a current ran through them. At first, he just let them sit. Felt the weight of the keys and the hammers behind them. The tension of strings. Slowly, he allowed fingers to wander like strange animals across the keys—not too fast, not too far, still tethered by the cord around his wrist. The notes slipped like a key into a lock deep in his chest and he could breathe.

He could breathe.

It came. The flow. He could play.

Crying with gratitude. Head above water. He clung to his piano like a hunk of driftwood. Could not let go, or he would be lost. The keys saved him. They gave his fingers something else to do today and so afterward he hauled in his sleeping bag and a pillow and slept at the instrument’s rounded, brass-capped feet. Right where Leo had left them.

Hold on, he remembered. One more day. Hold on.