My first decent death scene, I think. This is cause for celebration. Which, yes, sounds horrible and wicked, but such is the way of we authors. Neil is Tuesday's (elder) brother. I have no idea who "They" are just yet, or what happened "the previous night"--probably the usual leaping-from-roof-to-roof thing & all that.

“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper”
- T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”


It was one of those days when nothing went right.

The previous night had exhausted Ian so thoroughly that he slept through the ringing of the alarm and woke fifteen minutes late. There was a mad, reckless race to the subway, in which he thought he might have nearly hit someone or something more times than he cared to count, and an exasperating five-minute wait for an outbound train, since he’d missed his usual. He slept on the train, cradling his head in the crook of his arm against the filthy, mottled window. It was rare that he was tired enough to sleep through the bumping and rattling, or tired enough not to care what people though of him, with papers spilling out of his bag and circles cupping his eyes like bruises. He jerked himself awake every few moments to see that he hadn’t missed his stop. Finally, he forced his eyes open, propping his elbow at an uncomfortable angle against the cold plastic wall in the hopes that the soreness would keep him from drifting off again.

Teaching was something he didn’t want to imagine.

He didn’t remember much of it, anyway. His students were probably aware that there was something wrong with him—although, given the crowd, they’d likely be speculating as to what he’d been smoking the night before, not something more innocuous (though leaping over buildings in single bounds and the like was far from what he used to term “innocuous”). He thought that maybe this was what it was like, being hung-over, but he’d never experienced it.

He stumbled through the lessons, thinking all the while, If this was any other country, they’d fire me straightaway. And when the long day ended, he stumbled out of them and found his way back to the subway station, and the train, where he slept again, curling against his book bag. He felt as if he might never sleep enough. Later, he supposed he oughtn’t to have been driving. It had begun to rain, drearily, and he pulled into his driveway as the sky let loose a veritable torrent. He thought he’d like to sleep all day. Maybe he’d ring Tuesday in the evening to see how she was holding up; it would be nice to hear her voice. It would be nice to hear a human voice. It would be nice.

He let himself collapse onto his well-worn sofa and sink into unconsciousness.


The jangling of the telephone woke him, slowly, reaching into his consciousness and pulling him from the deep well of fatigue. He sat up, elbow scraping on the rough fibres of the couch, tie tangled around his neck. He’d never bothered to take it off. The telephone rang again: insistent, shrill, angry. He got to his feet, feeling vaguely more alive, and fumbled along the wall for the phone.

“Hello?”

Static buzzed in his ear.

“Hello?”

“Ian—” He barely recognised Tuesday’s voice. It sounded crumpled, somehow; grasping through a tunnel, muddled with distance and stretched to some phantom breaking point.

“Tuesday? Are you all right? What’s going on?”

Silence again. He fancied he heard her gasping for breath, or maybe sobbing. Something thundered within him as wild thoughts hurtled themselves round and round in his mind.

“Tuesday!”

He heard her struggle for words, choking over the sounds coming out of her throat. Finally, they tumbled into words, barely, like some strange macabre hiccup. “Neil,” said the ghost of Tuesday’s voice. “They killed him. They killed Neil. They killed him, Ian.” And she fought for breath across the phone line once again.

Ian stood there with the phone pressed to his ear, and thought he could feel his stomach dropping down, plummeting through the floor and taking his emotions with it. The kitchen enveloped him, in all its drab greyness, and the clock ticked its painstaking seconds.

As the world slowly began to return, all he could think was that he might be about to be sick. But his mouth worked out the words “Stay there; I’m coming” without his ordering it to do so, and he hung up the phone and stood in the kitchen and listened to the clock and the emptiness.

He found his way down the streets to Tuesday’s flat, and pushed the door open. Things sounded so curiously silent in the wake of...this. It wasn’t real quite yet. It wasn’t anything.

He didn’t dare to call her name; he didn’t dare to speak, for fear that words would disrupt the silence that he thought might be holding the world together.

He found her in her kitchen with the phone still cradled in her hands, the cord looping itself around her wrist. Beneath her patched jeans, one foot was sockless, and he noted it with a sort of tenderness that surprised him through his fog. And he said nothing, only stood in the doorway until she looked up with the blank eyes of a bird flying into glass.

She said, “Damn!”, suddenly and viciously, and then she collapsed in on herself with her arms crushed vertically along her chest, the phone crashing to the floor in a tangle of plastic and cord and wires. She was sobbing, in that strange, gulping, horrified way he’d heard over the phone, this way that was so thoroughly unlike the Tuesday he thought he knew, and quite unexpectedly she grabbed a plate from the counter beside her and dashed it on the floor.

They both stared at the pieces.

Ian crossed the room, his body once again operating without the benefit of his mind, and he put his arms around her, tentatively at first, but the curious warmth of another human being against his skin sent all of the colour rushing back into his head and he realised that he was sobbing, too. He thought he was the comforter, but he was clinging to her as much as she clung to him.

He thought he might have been whispering “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry” into her vivid hair, but what he was sorry for, why the world was spinning so blackly on the edge of everything, he didn’t know.