This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Michael Christie
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.
Simultaneously published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Christie, Michael, 1976–
If I fall, if I die : a novel / by Michael Christie. —First edition.
pages cm
1. Boys—Fiction. 2. Mothers and sons—Fiction. 3. Agoraphobia—Patients—Fiction. 4. Mothers and sons—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.4C48825I35 2015
813′.6—dc23
2014011662
ISBN 978-0-8041-4080-5
eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-4081-2
Jacket design by Anna Kochman
Jacket photography by Tim Georgeson/Gallery Stock
v3.1
For my mother
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
The Inside Out
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Relaxation Time
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Relaxation Time
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Relaxation Time
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Relaxation Time
Chapter 9
Relaxation Time
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Relaxation Time
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Relaxation Time
Chapter 15
Titus
The Outside In
Chapter 16
Relaxation Time
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Relaxation Time
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Relaxation Time
Chapter 23
Relaxation Time
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Acknowledgments
Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear
—
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
,
The Prelude
I lived on dread—[she wrote]
To those who know
The stimulus there is
In danger—other impetus
Is numb—and vitalless—
—
EMILY DICKINSON
, “770”
1
The boy stepped Outside, and he did not die.
He was not riddled with arrows, his hair did not spring into flame, and his breath did not crush his lungs like spent grocery bags. His eyeballs did not sizzle in their sockets, and his heart’s pistons did not seize. No barbarian lopped his head into a blood-soggy wicker basket, and no glinting ninja stars were zinged into his throat.
Actually, incredibly: nothing happened—no immolation, no bloodbath, no spontaneous asphyxiation, no tide of shivery terror crashing upon the shore of his heart—not even a trace of his mother’s Black Lagoon in his breath.
Somehow Will was calm.
The day’s bronzy light, shredded by a copse of birch, tossed a billion luminous knife blades onto the front lawn. And he dared to continue down the walk—where he’d watched hundreds of deliverymen stride to their house bearing fresh food for them to eat and new clothes for them to wear—with the paving stones granular and toilet-bowl cool under his naked feet. Venturing out into the unreal arena of his front yard for the first time in his memory, he discovered only early summer crispness in the air—this Outside air—its breeze slaloming through the jagged wisps of his cut-off shorts, in and out of the straps of his Helmet. Will had felt this same air sweep through the window in New York on those rare occasions he opened it, despite how it worried his mother, but something was sapped when it came through. He’d never immersed himself this way, not since his memory got impressionistic and gauzy as if it had been transcribed by a stenographer in full Black Lagoon.
Will was Outside because he’d heard an odd bang while painting a six-foot masterpiece his mother had commissioned for London, a composition she twice in passing compared to Mark Rothko, who was a genius painter, just like him. At first he’d thought another bird had struck the big picture window in Cairo. Will once watched a blue jay—he’d identified it with the bird book he used as a drawing reference—palsying there in the ochre dirt beneath the glass, its neck canted grimly as though trying to watch an upside-down film. Blood rimmed its eyes and its beak was shattered like an egg ready to be peeled. It had thought it would go for a nice flitter through Cairo, over the burnt-orange velour loveseat, through the high, bright cavern of the hallway where Will’s masterpieces were hung, past dim London with its ravine of bookshelves and credenza display of his sculptures, over the staircase with its twin railings she’d installed on either side (for safety), and pick off some food scraps around the slow cooker in Paris. Had its mother never warned it about glass? Will had wondered, sitting there fogging the window until the creature finally stilled and Will startled himself with a sob, both of pity, and of thankfulness for their safety Inside. Nothing ever died in their house—except for bugs, lightbulbs, and batteries. Outside, however, was another story.
Though his mother feared pets, other creatures had more successfully entered their home. He’d found trickles of ants in the basement, mouse turds peppering the pantry, and crews of flies sprinting across the windows. Rogue moths snuck through the door when Will opened it for deliverymen, their wings powdery and fragrant like the makeup that sat unused on his mother’s long teak dresser in San Francisco. He’d cup the moths in his hands, feel their desperate clatter between his palms, then cast them through the only unscreened window in Venice.
Sometimes people had come. Once the furnace was repaired by an ancient man who smelled of pastrami and wood smoke. And for a time the paperboy would leave his strange, grubby shoes by the front door and play LEGO with Will on the carpet in Cairo. At first it was thrilling, until Will noticed the older boy’s proclivity for breathing exclusively through his too-small nose and building only uninspired bunkerish structures, mixing colors together like an architectural test pattern. After a few weeks, Will stopped answering the door when he knocked, telling his mother that he didn’t need friends because he was an artistic genius. “Don’t toot your own horn,” she’d said, smiling.
Of course he’d considered going Outside thousands of times—as he’d considered executing a standing double backflip or walking around with his feet magnetized to the ceiling or chainsawing a trapdoor in the floor—but had never dared. Even when he lobbed their garbage bags as far to the curb as he could manage from the front foyer, or watched shirtless neighborhood boys plow their BMXs through the meaty summer heat, he’d never been sufficiently tempted. Mailmen over the years had asked why he and his mother were always home, and Will often replied, “Why are you a mailman?” with one raised eyebrow, which usually shut them up.