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There’s something grotesque about seeing his cousin’s name on the marquee. Kevin stares up at it, feeling his palms itch. He touches the pill bottle in his pocket like it’s a talisman. Everything is fine.
The grey uniform is too tight around his neck and wrists. Now that the thrill of it all—the cameras, the crowds, the screaming—has worn off, it’s become a bit tiresome. Besides, there’s something that—well, it doesn’t frighten him exactly, but it makes him uneasy—there’s something that makes him uneasy about the way time and space and the moon and sun unspool and reform under Tommy’s hands.
Kevin felt it first way back in the Walkers’ house in—in—Where was it? He’s forgotten. Oh well. It doesn’t really matter; it was so long ago. Or was it only a few years? Kevin can’t think straight, and he’s not sure if it’s the pills or the light, which is unrelenting, blazing hotter than Hell. He can’t look up without it flashing into his eyes. He’s halfway blind already.
Anyway, Kevin’s uneasy, and a bit bored, and there’s a tiny, tiny part of him that wishes—
Wishes what? There’s nothing that can be removed without the whole thing falling apart. There’s no perfect wish that makes it all feel the same as it did. Kevin wishes he didn’t know, that’s it. He wishes he didn’t know what it was like. He doesn’t think about it much, doesn’t like to. But if he lets himself be for too long, it creeps in. He tries not to look straight at Tommy unless he’s onstage, because onstage, the lights are too bright to really look at Tommy. He looks like nothing more than a smudge of white up there, and it’s comforting in a way, to let it all blur and fuzz until Kevin doesn’t have to think anymore. Until he doesn’t know anything, and there’s just light and sound and a bit of air against his face.
But now’s not one of those times, and so Kevin stares up at TOMMY WALKER blazed across the marquee in letters bigger and brighter than the sun and fingers the pill bottle in his pocket.
Tommy feels that he’s overextended himself. Like he’s reached so far forward that his arms have popped from their sockets and are now floating along as if everything is fine. Tommy feels that every part of him has been detached and carelessly thrown to the winds for whatever might take fancy upon him. Tommy feels that he has cracked open and revealed some new part of himself, or maybe something wholly different, whether it’s alien or simply who he was all along.
Tommy has become nonlinear. Colors and lights and shapes whirl past him and are gone. Tommy is the only thing that Tommy trusts anymore.
He doesn’t think about his parents. He doesn’t. He doesn’t think about much of anything. He does. He does things; he can do things now: He can speak, he can lead, he can reach out his hand and twist just right, and set everything into its proper place. People listen when he speaks. They seem fascinated, but Tommy can never tell if they’re really hearing him or just watching, trying to parse out the miracle in him.
He tries to tell them, tries to explain it, but it’s hard when the lights are flashing in his face, and he can feel everyone trying to get a picture of him. It feels like they’re tearing away chunks of his flesh sometimes, like they’re vultures and he’s dead meat. It feels like he’ll be dead by morning.
In the brief moments when he can spot the sun beyond the crowds and the stadiums and the buildings made of slick glass, reaching up like the hand of God, he feels something like a stone on his chest. Something rounded and smooth, close to his skin. He doesn’t know if it’s a nice feeling. He knows he feels it when he’s away from the lights. He’s not away from the lights often.
Kevin’s is the only face he’s confident that he recognizes in real life anymore. Sometimes the reporters and the crowds and Kevin’s little flock look familiar, but sometimes Tommy could swear that he’s never seen them before. He tries to speak to them but there’s always a crowd. When he sees his parents staring at him from a newsstand or a screen, he feels sick and numb, all over and all at once.
He stands beneath the lights and can’t see anyone. He sees the shapes of heads. They could be mannequins, for all he knows. They could be wooden silhouettes. Tommy opens his mouth and tries to speak. His words come out as poetry. Tommy doesn’t know how to explain himself in a way that means anything to anyone but himself.
It started with that stupid jacket. Tommy’s jacket, that he’d picked up from God-only-knew-where, that’s so garishly yellow against his dark pants and white shirt. Kevin’s always had a problem with yellow, and now he’s crouched on the floor of a public bathroom stall, his back pressed against the locked door, trying to breathe normally. Kevin can’t stop seeing yellow. It was the jacket first, and that was fine. Not ideal that he had to see it so often, but he’d surely survive.
But once he’d gotten used to the jacket, he couldn’t stop. He sees yellow everywhere now: A girl’s beret, someone’s tie, a scrap of paper lying in the road. The issue isn’t that all the yellow exists. It’s that it’s become something that seems to be hunting Kevin, pressing in on him even as he scrambles to get away. His heartbeat races like yellow is a bear chasing him.
If Kevin closes his eyes and does the opposite of concentrating, the floor falls out from under him, and he can see it. He can see his whole life, everything that he remembers, laid out in front of him. Except now, he remembers it in colors. It’s so close to being red, his life is, and Kevin can do red. Red is fine. Red is great.
But Kevin tips his head back against the door and looks a little closer. He looks more carefully, and the first thing he sees is white. The Walkers’ house was white inside; it seemed like the kind of place where someone would die. It looked too clean. Something bad would happen there. But Kevin knew all that already. Kevin was the bad thing that happened there. Or—catching sight of a darker red staining the carpet, and a muddy, murky brown under the bed—he was at least part of it.
When he looks harder, when he really lets himself remember, Kevin sees yellow. It’s out of place, in a way. It looks like it’s been pasted in intentionally, to draw attention this way and that. The Tommy who wasn’t a miracle yet, only a tragedy, holds a balloon: Yellow. A vase of flowers on the table: Yellow. And then, something that Kevin always remembers with the bizarre clarity of something he shouldn’t have seen: A trifold pamphlet, small enough to fit in a pocket, glimpsed first through a downtown window, and then again a million times. On the counter in the Walker house, on the table, in a magazine rack, more worn by the year but with words still legible, Sanitarium in particular blazed into Kevin’s eyes. The color of the cardstock is eternal. Yellow.
Kevin opens his eyes. The walls are grey around him. He doesn’t look down, because there’s a thread of yellow running right down the center of his frock coat and around the collar like he’s been marked for dissection.
He slips his hand into the pocket of his coat to touch the pill bottle (which is yellow, for fuck’s sake) as he shoulders open the door and fades back into the crowd.
Tommy isn’t sure what’s going on. Everyone is following his lead, but he doesn’t give any thought to how he moves or where. Tommy isn’t sure where he’s been for the past year. Two years. Decade. Century. Tommy isn’t sure where he’s been for the last…while.
He wonders if this is what it’s like to be high. He’s not so naïve; he’s seen Kevin’s pills and shaking hands, and there’s usually a haze of smoke and wine-thick breaths when he appears offstage. But he hasn’t taken anything, or he doesn’t think he has. His memory is spotty sometimes, though, taking things away or putting them in the wrong places, or, on occasion, making everything too clear, returning memories he doesn’t need in high definition at times when he’d rather be alone.
Anyway. Tommy probably isn’t high, but there might be something wrong with him. He isn’t sure. He knows that he can do this; everyone can follow him if they want. This is what was always supposed to happen to him, he suspects. It was written somewhere in the sky, up there with the sun. He was always meant more for others than for himself.
Because Tommy isn’t a real person. He’s more like a collection of every idea his mother and family and the newspapers and all the rest of them had about him. He tries not to think about it too hard, and he keeps trying to explain himself, though he sometimes thinks that everyone else knows how to explain him better than he knows how to explain himself.
Tommy isn’t sure what’s going on, but he got up at a reasonable hour this morning and did the crossword. On days like this, where everything is suddenly clear and normal—as normal as it can be while Tommy lives—he goes to the arcade down the street from wherever he is and plays pinball. It’s not what he does anymore, not since he spun himself out of time and place. At least, he doesn’t think it’s what he does. Sometimes, Tommy wishes that his brain worked like a normal person’s.
At least he’s good at pinball. At least he has that. No one cares about that anymore. Not since Tommy has become whatever he is now: A rockstar without a guitar, a voice that can’t speak like a normal person. He gets tired of all those faceless people caring about him. The silvery sheen over their faces, the shining blankness that shuts him out. It’s the opposite of what he wanted, but it’s more than he ever expected. He’ll take it. He has to.
He stares at the pinball machine, watching the ball fly back and forth like the sun rising and setting.
Everyone’s angry. Maybe angry isn’t the word for it, but that’s the word Kevin’s using, because Kevin’s fucking furious. He’s not sure where, exactly, the tipping point was, but it’s tipped, and he can feel them all on the decline. They’ll lose their footing soon and tumble away.
His cousin’s face is everywhere, cast up on walls in black and white with that damned splash of yellow that he can’t get out of his eyes. Kevin has never known when to quit, and even he can see that this is unsustainable. This is unstable. Tommy—or this thing that Tommy is now, this idea—has grown topheavy.
He feels her coming a thousand minutes away. Kevin knows Tommy’s game, even though Tommy doesn’t, or pretends not to. Kevin knows something’s out of joint, but it isn’t as if he can do anything about it. That’s the thing he hates about his cousin: No one else can move independently of him. Tommy’s the center of gravity. Kevin feels something—someone —tugging at that gravity. He stands still for a second, his hands deep in his pockets. Curled into fists. Kevin’s never liked long periods of subdued momentum. He’s never liked long periods of time when he’s not the center of attention.
He feels it under his skin, and he feels it with everyone else, too. The masses are restless, ready to shift into something. They want something more, something life changing. He doesn’t know what it is that they’ll flock to next. He doesn’t know what’s left.
And what’s left for him? Kevin has known forever that his function is to stick with Tommy. When he tries to remember his family’s faces, they’re blurry, and the house he grew up in would be unfamiliar if he ever went back. Whenever he traces that yellow line back, whenever he tugs it, he always comes up with Tommy.
The collapse of Tommy also means the collapse of Kevin. And the collapse of Tommy is coming.
The first thing he feels is hands on his face. Every time, it’s the same: Like the dawn breaking, something brings him back. It’s a relief every time, he supposes, but there’s something frightening about it, too. It sets something alight in his stomach, tingling up into his sinuses and behind his eyes. It feels like cocaine and a hug and sunlight brighter than anything.
Tommy wrenches the helmet from his head in time to see a girl flying from the stage. For a second, he thinks she’s really flying, that she’d propelled herself of her own accord and her own power. That she’s snapped the strings that keep them all moored to the ground.
But then he sees that she’s reached the height of her parabola, and everything from here is on the downward slope. Tommy shouts, but he can’t hear his own voice in the rumble of voices breaking it. They’re breaking the silence, the stillness that he created. Whenever he’s there, it’s like everyone wants some of the nothingness he was for so long. It’s like it’s the only thing he has to give them. And they’re breaking it.
He climbs down from the stage as quickly as he can, because no one is coming to help him. His face feels hot; everything is buzzing against him, sending stabs of heat into his eyes and hands. He has to shove people to get through the crowd. He can’t be heard over the clamor.
The girl is being beaten. She’s being beaten by Kevin and the rest of his policemen, and there’s a split second where Tommy feels only a vague and blunted disappointment. Of course Kevin hasn’t changed, and of course the girl wasn’t flying, and of course he’s not a miracle or a messiah, and of course here he is.
It’s that moment—numbing, cloying sense of nothing—that pushes him forward, raises his voice over the crowd, shoves Kevin back, rips the nightsticks away from the policemen. Tommy slides to the ground on his knees; he’ll have bruises in the morning. He thinks she’s dead for a second, but then she peeks up at him, eyes huge and shining. Tommy can’t tell if it’s tears or joy or just the lights reflecting that give her eyes that shine, but he knows it’s the brightest thing he’s ever seen.
Her hands are shaking as she holds something up to him. In her hands, like a snake, a silk scarf. Tommy stares at it, and he could swear that it’s the only real thing in the world.
Tommy recovers in record time. He takes off the jacket and lays it over the girl’s shoulders. He turns and speaks to the crowd, and his voice is strong, suddenly void of the magic that it usually contains these days. Kevin’s hands are shuddering. The light shifts; some tone disappears. It all looks flatter. He dips his hand into his pocket. One of his nails is chipped, and it catches on the fabric of his coat. The pill bottle is gone, Kevin realizes with the kind of horror that seems performative.
Kevin closes his hands into empty fists. He wants to go home.
Which is well enough, because it appears that that’s what Tommy wants as well. He leads them all, his arm still around the girl draped in yellow, out the door and down the street, and Kevin doesn’t know how they get there exactly, but suddenly there they all are—the news crews and the groupies and the ones who were picked up along the way and the girl in yellow and Kevin and Tommy—in the living room of the Walker house.
Ernie and the Captain half-stand, but it’s Aunt Nora who stands all the way, moving like a ghost to clutch the girl’s hand and take her to the kitchen, where Kevin sees her run water onto a washcloth and touch it to the girl’s face, washing away the whole thing like it never existed.
In a few moments, Tommy is on the sofa, a polar bear in a snowstorm with a string of sunshine around his neck. The girl is perched beside him, eyes fixed on his face like he knows everything. The camera lights around him look foolish now. The Walker house is dimmer than Kevin remembered. The light looks different, colder perhaps, greyer. Maybe he’s just used to the stage lights that seem to twist everything into what the viewer wants it to be. The Walker house just is.
For a moment, Kevin isn’t sure what he’s feeling. He feels like something’s been taken from him, but maybe it’s only been taken in the way that a tumor is taken. He stares at the news crews and the groupies and the ones they picked up along the way, and he can’t shake the feeling that they’re all intruders. They shouldn’t be here. They don’t fit, and they don’t understand, and they don’t care. None of them can see Tommy, not really. They don’t hear him.
Tommy is speaking again, that voice that’s so grounded, all the way from his diaphragm and resonating in his larynx and sinuses. That voice that doesn’t sound like a pinball wizard or someone who was cured by a miracle. The voice that doesn’t sound magical at all but sounds a hell of a lot like Tommy Walker. In the dim Walker house light, Kevin listens.
Tommy can’t explain it, but he’ll try. He tries, the words rushing out faster than he can think. Because he’s thought about it already. He’s thought about it a lot. “I didn’t live out some fairy story,” he insists, and he can already feel them leaving. The cameras are still pointed at him, but no one’s watching. They’ve stopped listening. They broke it, or maybe he broke it, but he keeps speaking, words tumbling out of his mouth.
He turns to look at Sally, because she’s the only one who’s listening now. She’s with his mother by the table, along with his father and Uncle Ernie, and Kevin stands in front of them, the last barricade between who Tommy is and whatever it is he’s done. Whatever it is they’ve done. Whatever it is that’s happened.
Sally is staring at him, crouched a little bit like she might have to run. Her mouth is open, and her eyes too, staring like he’s holding the secrets of the universe in his palm. He isn’t. He doesn’t know how to explain it to her either, but he’ll try. He opens his mouth, and Tommy speaks.
Everyone’s angry. Kevin can almost taste it in the room, and Tommy will not shut his damn mouth. Kevin glares, trying to tell his cousin to shut the fuck up. It doesn’t work. Tommy keeps speaking, his words phasing in and out of that magical register he’s spent so much time in recently. Between those moments, where he seems to reach for whatever he is onstage, his voice shifts down into that speaking voice that seems so mundane. Everyone expected Tommy to be something great. It makes sense, in a way, that coming back here makes him something recognizable.
The crowd is angry now, really angry, pressing in on Tommy with raised voices and fists. The cameras click and whir. The girl, still clutching Tommy’s jacket, tries to run to him as if she might afford some protection, and Kevin catches her around the waist, shoving her back to Aunt Nora. Hazily, he realizes that he’s taller than Aunt Nora, and then blinks, trying to catch onto something. He’s been taller than Aunt Nora since he was fourteen, he remembers now. The house remembers. How could he have forgotten?
The crowd gets louder, and so does Tommy, and Kevin can focus only on keeping the four of them behind him and praying that Tommy doesn’t ruin everything. It was never a game, but now it’s something real and volatile, and Kevin blinks and sees blood in Aunt Nora’s hair, the Captain lying with fatal stillness. He opens his eyes and sneaks a look behind him, just to make sure they’re still there. The Captain is tall and stoic, though Kevin sees his eyes tracking Tommy through the room. Aunt Nora, holding onto the girl, manages a tight smile at him. Kevin feels something settle.
And then the crowd is loud, so loud that Tommy’s completely drowned out, and for a second his cousin completely disappears in the crowd, and Kevin starts forward. But then the crowd ebbs out like a wave, and Tommy is standing there, his back to the mirror, alone.
Cameras click off. The anger simmers for a moment, then evaporates into a chilling steam of abandonment. The door opens, closes, opens again. People—the news crews and groupies and the ones they picked up along the way—disappear with the same speed and efficiency as they arrived with.
The girl frees herself from Aunt Nora’s grasp. Kevin, still hazy, watches her dart to Tommy and pull the scarf from his neck, then to the sofa, where she lays the jacket down with reverence. She slams the door open, and that’s when Kevin remembers himself, remembers what his purpose is, because Aunt Nora, sparkling and younger than he is now, told him to take care of Tommy, and the girl has upset everything. Not upset in the emotional sense, he reflects as he crosses the room to catch her. But upset as in overturned, upended, tipped over. The girl has upturned Tommy and everything that he was, and Kevin has to catch her for that. Whether he means to question her or punish her or thank her, he doesn’t know.
But he knows he’s supposed to take care of Tommy, and as Kevin stands at the door and watches the girl’s retreating back, he can’t think of anything except the fact that he has absolutely, unequivocally failed.
The mirror is right there; it’s the centerpiece of the whole room, which seems unnecessary to Tommy, considering what it’s done to him. But it’s right there, and Tommy feels that thing he’s been trying not to feel, the thing that sneaks up on him when he’s just come offstage or when he’s playing pinball or when he walked back here without any trouble. Tommy turns and looks at himself. He doesn’t know who it is he’s looking at. If he takes away the pinball, the stage, the cameras, the crowd, Tommy Walker is nothing.
He blinks, and in between blinks, everything dims. Tommy, momentarily, thinks he’s dying. He feels a settling, a loosening, a release that feels like death. He breathes. Everything is silent. He breathes. He sees only the mirror. If he looks carefully, he sees the reflection of the cameras and the crowd, like an afterimage. He looks carefully. He feels the soft impression of everything that’s been and everything he’s done. He looks, and he sees his mother’s lover fall, he sees a chair set askew, he sees a child on a bed with a figure looming over him, he sees and he sees and he sees.
Look closer. Look. And there he is: A beaming four-year-old, untouched, unhurt. A ten-year-old, solemn and silent but with a spark of life in his fingers for the first time. Tommy stares into the mirror. Something like a sunset happens in his chest.
Tommy has seen this room for the first time many times, but every time it makes him feel alive again. Alive is tricky. Alive is terror and rage and sparks behind his eyes. But Tommy is alive anyway.
Kevin closes the door and sees Tommy staring into the mirror. His arms are limp at his sides, like they’ve been yanked from their joints. Aunt Nora’s hands are over her mouth. For a second, Kevin is frightened. He doesn’t have time to lie about it. For a moment, Kevin is frightened for his cousin.
When Tommy turns away from the mirror, there’s a collective sigh of relief. Tommy stares at them, at the bleached-out greys of the Walker house, with shining eyes like the place is new-made. He lets it stand for a moment. It stands still. Everything is back in place, and Kevin can’t believe that he didn’t realize how out of place it was until it was all the same as it had been in the beginning.
Aunt Nora and Tommy move at the same time, like they’re at two ends of an invisible string. They embrace each other like they’ll save each other, and that’s the only thing that exists for a moment.
And then Tommy’s gaze shifts towards the door, and Kevin feels his palms itch, because for a second, he thinks that Tommy’s dead-fish, unseeing eyes are looking at him. But the angle is wrong, and Kevin glances over to see Ernie staring away, staring up. The skin around his eyes is tense like he’s hurt. His leg must be giving him trouble. Tommy doesn’t move, doesn’t touch his uncle, and Kevin remembers again that he’s failed.
Tommy doesn’t look at his father. His father doesn’t look at him. It’s Aunt Nora who touches her husband’s shoulder, not quite shoving him, but close to it. He looks down at her, and she looks from him to Tommy, who is standing in front of the mirror looking like he’s holding his breath. Looking like he’s waiting.
Kevin sees the shaky breath in the Captain’s shoulder. He places his hand on Tommy’s shoulder, looking away. Tommy nods softly, laying a hand on his father’s, and then they almost move away from each other. Kevin doesn’t see who moves back first. He only sees that when Tommy hugs his father, he’s almost completely swallowed in the Captain's coat.
The house is quiet, and the five of them fall into a line. The sun is coming up outside. Kevin had no idea it was that later, or rather, that early. Without knowing why, he steps between Ernie and Tommy. He’d be alright with nothing. Kevin knows his place. Knows his role.
But his cousin turns to look at him, and Kevin sees something in his face. He’s not sure what it is, but it looks…alive. Tommy looks alive. He lays a hand on Kevin’s face, cupping his cheek, and then, affording just enough time for him to feel it, Tommy draws his hand back and slaps Kevin.
It’s like cold water, like a swim in the ocean, and Kevin wants to laugh but the sun is coming up, and all in all, the moment is fairly solemn. So he bites his lips and touches his fingers to the place where the pill bottle once was in his pocket. Out of the corner of his eyes, he sees Tommy smirking, and the sight of it makes him feel like maybe, just maybe, he hasn’t failed quite as horribly as he thought he did.
Tommy watches the sun come up, and there he is. He has nothing left to say, but that doesn’t mean he’ll stop speaking. Tommy Walker is, and he is because of many things. Some of them hurt. Some of them stare back at him from the mirror. Some of them are watching the sun come up with him.
But mostly, Tommy Walker is because he is. He has chosen to be, and he doesn’t take it for granted. Neither does he believe he has to earn it. Tommy Walker simply is. Tommy Walker does and is and sees and hears and speaks and feels.
Tommy Walker watches the sun rise, and he feels it.