Chapter Text
The lightbulb in the ceiling did not hum, but it had a colour that felt like a sound. It was the yellow of old paper left in a drawer. Under it, the linoleum floor showed its seams, little black tracks of grease and floor wax where the squares didn't meet.
"I have to tell you something," Sunny said.
The words did not drop like stones. They didn't feel heavy until they had already left his teeth. Once they were out, they stayed in the air between them, perfectly still, like dust caught in the beam of a lamp.
No one moved. Kel’s hand stayed fixed on the chrome latch of the window frame, his fingers slightly curled around the metal. Hero was looking at the small brown stain on the sleeve of his own sweater, right where the wool met the cuff. Down the hall, a metal cart rattled, a sequence of dull, rhythmic clicks that grew louder and then faded as it turned toward the elevator bank.
White Space was completely silent, but the colour was wrong. It wasn't white anymore. It was the shade of milk that had been sitting for some time. The tissue box next to the sketchbook didn't have any tissues left in it.
Don't look at them, his mind whispered. If you look, the floor will give way.
He didn't look. He turned his ankles until his bare feet found the cold rubber of his hospital slippers. The slippers made a small, sticking sound against the linoleum as he slid his weight forward. His knees felt light, like they were made of dry balsa wood that would snap if he turned too quickly.
"Sunny?" Kel said. His voice was too thin. It didn't sound like it belonged to someone who played basketball. It sounded like a recording played from the bottom of a well.
Sunny didn't answer. He walked past Hero's shoulder. He didn't touch the wool of the sweater, but he could smell it- sour sweat and the faint, chemical scent of detergent. He reached the door. The brass handle was cold enough to make the skin of his palm tighten. He pulled it, stepped into the corridor, and let the latch click back into place behind him.
The hospital corridor was wider than the room. It had a double row of fluorescent tubes that flickered at a frequency just fast enough to mimic a steady glare.
He didn't turn toward the main lobby where the desk nurse sat behind her curved plastic partition. He turned left, toward the fire exit where the green sign hung low over the heavy steel door.
With every step, the red space behind his eyes grew larger. It wasn't the still, flat crimson of his old dreams. It was thick. It was a dark, stagnant pool of old blood rising behind his ears, sloshing heavily against his skull whenever his feet hit the floor. Pieces of things were turning over in it. A single white key from the piano floated past his vision, its ivory cracked down the middle, followed by the black, wet silhouette of a cat that didn't have a name anymore.
You're walking too fast, the thought came, flat and rhythmic. The stairs are thirty-two steps. Then the roof.
The bar on the fire door yielded with a heavy, mechanical groan. The air in the stairwell was different from the ward. It smelled of cold lime and unpainted iron. He began to climb, his right hand sliding along the rusty pipe that served as a railing. His fingers left tiny streaks in the gray dust that covered the metal.
By the time he reached the top landing, the door to the roof was already propped open with a wedge of wood. The wind didn't sound like wind; it sounded like someone holding a heavy sheet of canvas by the corners and shaking it over and over.
He stepped out. The gravel was black and small, crunching under his rubber slippers with a sound like teeth breaking. He walked until he could see the low concrete wall that ran around the perimeter.
"You piece of shit," a voice said from the doorway.
Sunny didn't turn around. He kept his eyes on the gray horizon, where the lights of the town looked like small pinpricks in a wet rag.
Aubrey’s boots were louder than the wind. She didn't walk, she lunged, her fingers grabbing the back of his hospital gown before he could even reach the ledge. The thin cotton ripped at the seam with a sharp, dry pop. She jerked him backward so hard his feet left the gravel entirely, his body slamming into the rough ground.
"Look at me," she choked out. Her face was terrifyingly close, her pink hair whipped across her eyes by the gale. Her teeth were bared, wet with spit. "Look at me, you fucking coward."
Sunny's gaze stayed flat. He looked at the bridge of her nose, where a small cluster of freckles had turned gray under the moonlight.
"Four years," she spat, her voice cracking into something jagged and raw. She struck him across the face with the flat of her hand. Crack. The sound was loud on the empty roof. "Four fucking years I lived in that house. I thought it was me! I thought I was the one who made everyone leave!"
She grabbed him by the throat with both hands, her fingernails digging through the thin skin until he could feel the sharp prick of blood. She slammed his head back against the brick. Thud. Behind his eyelids, White Space was tearing open. The white floorboards were splitting apart with the sound of a tree breaking in winter, and from the black cracks, thick, greasy oil began to spout upward, drowning the tilting piano. The lightbulb on its black wire swung wildly, casting huge, erratic shadows across the collapsing void.
Let it go, his mind whispered. Let her do it.
"You did that to her," Aubrey whispered, her breath hot and smelling of sour mint against his mouth. Her eyes were completely bloodshot, the tears leaking out and mixing with the dirt on her chin. "You and that fucking freak. You hung her like a piece of meat."
She let go of his neck and hit him with her fist, hard, right against his left cheekbone.
His vision went white, then dissolved into a heavy smear of purple. His head snapped sideways, his tongue catching between his teeth as the copper taste of blood filled his mouth. It was the only warm thing on the entire roof.
She didn't stop. She grabbed his arm and threw him down onto the gravel. His hip clipped a rusty iron pipe coming out of the deck, a sharp, white flare of pain shooting through his side, but he watched it from a distance.
I’m sorry
Aubrey stood over him, her chest heaving, her fists shaking so hard they looked blurred against the dark sky. A single, heavy sob broke out of her throat, sounding like an animal caught in a fence.
"Fucking say something," she screamed into the wind. "Don't just lie there like you're already dead! God, I fucking hate you! I want to throw you off this roof myself!"
Sunny lay in the gravel, his good eye pressed against a smooth black pebble. Through the dark, he could see a pool of black space expanding from beneath his chest, a thick, living stain that began to creep toward the rubber soles of Aubrey's boots, ready to swallow them both.
The pebbles didn't let go of his skin right away when he stood up. Several small, sharp bits of crushed limestone stayed stuck to the gray flesh of his forearm, pressed into the skin by the weight of her boots until they looked like tiny white teeth growing out of his arm.
Aubrey didn't look at him while he got up. She turned her back, her shoulders jammed high against her ears, her boots making a dry, crunching circle in the gravel as she moved toward the heavy iron fire exit door.
"Get up," she said. Her voice didn't have any air left behind it. It sounded like something dried out and left on a shelf. "Get the fuck up, Sunny. We're going back down."
Sunny pulled his knees under his ribs. The rubber slippers were gone; one lay three feet away, turned upside down so its black tread faced the moon, while the other had slid into the narrow gap between the concrete deck and the overflow pipe. He didn't look for them. He walked bare-footed across the black gravel, the stones cutting into the soft arches of his feet with every mechanical shift of his weight.
Inside his head, the lightbulb on the black wire had finally stopped swinging. It hung completely straight now, but the glass had cracked from the heat. A thin, perfectly straight black line ran from the brass base down to the bottom of the bulb, dividing the yellow light into two uneven halves. The oil on the floor of White Space was four inches deep now. The cat skull was gone. The white tissue box was floating face down, its cardboard corners softening into gray pulp as it drank the black water.
Stay behind her, the thought came. If you stay behind her, you only have to look at the hair.
The pink hair was knotted. Near the nape of her neck a thick clump of pink strands had tangled into a gray knot of lint and dried sweat. He watched that knot as they entered the stairwell.
The air in the concrete shaft was completely dead. The wind from the roof shut off behind them with a heavy, metallic slam that rattled the iron pipe railing. Aubrey didn't use the handrail. She descended fast, her boots striking the concrete steps with a loud, rhythmic thump, thump, thump that echoed up from the bottom.
Sunny counted the risers. One. Two. Three.
On the eleventh step, his bare heel came down on a small piece of loose masonry. The sharp edge broke through the skin, a thin, cold line of pain registering in his hip three seconds after his heel met the stone. He didn't stop. He left a faint, gray smudge of grease and dust on the next three steps where his right foot touched the concrete.
"Don't go back to the room," Aubrey said. She didn't turn her head around to say it. She spoke directly into the gray wall of the landing, her breath leaving a tiny circle of moisture on the unpainted concrete before it evaporated. "Kel's still in there. Or maybe he ran after Hero. I don't give a fuck. Just don't go back in there."
"Okay," Sunny said.
The word was too thick for his tongue. It felt like he had a mouth full of dry flour that wouldn't mix with his spit.
They reached the third-floor exit. The red plastic handle of the fire door was missing its left screw, causing the bar to tilt at an angle when Aubrey shoved it open. The transition back into the ward didn't have a sound. The white light of the double row of fluorescent tubes simply hit his good eye like a flat piece of glass, making the purple bruise under his cheekbone throb with a slow, heavy pulse.
The side corridor was where they kept the broken equipment. Two vinyl chairs with the stuffing coming out of the armrests stood next to a non-functional ice machine that had a yellow out-of-order tag taped to its chrome lid.
Aubrey dropped onto the first chair. The springs inside the cushion gave a short, metallic screech before settling under her weight. She didn't take off her vest. She pulled the sides together over her chest, her fingers hooking into the frayed denim until her knuckles turned the colour of lard.
"Sit," she said.
Sunny sat on the second chair. The distance between his shoulder and hers was exactly 30 centimetres. He could smell the gravel on her clothes. That cold, wet lime scent from the roof, mixed with the sour mint of the hospital soap she'd used three hours ago.
Behind his eye, the black space was moving through the floorboards again. It didn't care about the linoleum or the grease in the seams. It came up around the legs of the vinyl chairs like dark ink spilled on paper, perfectly flat and perfectly quiet, waiting for the lightbulb to go out completely.
Don't look at her hands, his mind whispered.
He looked at her hands anyway. Her right knuckles were split across the middle joint, three small red slits where the skin had broken against his cheekbone. A tiny drop of dark blood had dried in the crease of her thumb, looking like a ladybug that had stopped moving.
"I hate you," she said. She didn't look up from the floor between his bare toes. She spoke to the black track of grease where the linoleum squares didn't meet. "I hate you so much, Sunny."
Sunny didn't move his chin. He looked at the gray dust on his left big toe.
"But you're staying here," she whispered. The rage was gone now, leaving her voice flat and hollow, the exact same register as the old paper lightbulb in the ceiling. "You don't get to leave. You don't get to go back into that fucking room and you don't get to jump. You're staying right here on the floor where I can see you."
Sunny let his hands drop into the lap of his gown. The cotton was rough against his palms.
"Okay," he said.