And Flowers Bloom

His name was Jackson. Or maybe Mack. Unless Mack was someone else entirely, and I was wrong about that part of it too, but then, everyone has a little bit of Jack inside of them.

This whole story is insane in so many ways. I don’t even know where to begin or how it was that I knew Jackson, except that I was fifteen and some people just slide into your life, sideways, like a landscape that rolls in with the bus. I guess I did give Jackson my phone number because he called me to say he was in trouble, that demons were after him, so, could I meet him in the quad across from South Common Mall?

When I got there, I saw he’d meant the demon-thing literally. Because there he was, darting back and forth across the quad, dripping with sweat, yelling and batting his hands at something in the air, arms waving. Maybe demons are nasty immortals, but the size of houseflies. I stood there blinking at him as the bus pulled away, and when the bus was gone from my eyes, there was Jackson, running back and forth, waving those arms—and I wondered, is he doing this for me? How long? Since one minute before my bus pulled up? Since we talked on the phone? Before that even? Or, every time a bus pulled up, did he just start running like that?

So, I was staring at Jack. Standing perfectly still. Like somebody else’s photograph of me. I guess I was wondering if I could just leave. If I should just leave. But then Jack spotted me and I knew he knew I’d considered ditching him and his eyes were this mix of things, the kind of things you’d feel if you were him, I guess. Which would suck worse even than being me.

So I thought he was acting. And maybe that’s why I wasn’t as scared as I should have been. I was scared, just not enough. Because somehow, and I don’t remember how or why exactly, I went with him and we got on another bus. And this one took us away from my home and out of my neighbourhood and to another place where I’d never been to before, where I saw his mother’s house, and the house was three stories tall and freshly painted and very hard to be afraid of.

He left me standing at the end of the driveway, arms crossed, and when he came back out, his mother came and stood in the doorway, getting a good look at

me—and I was looking back at her like, do you even know who your kid is? Do you know what he was doing in front of everybody at the mall? But no, she couldn’t have known. She was just his mom.

Jackson didn’t even look back at her because he was in a hurry, because there was this place, he said, and he really needed to show me. We started walking and already, at this point, the mood had changed. Maybe because we were in an entirely different neighbourhood now, with houses bigger than any I knew, and in a way, this made everything feel sort of like an adventure. The houses were big, and instead of little patches of lawn out back, these houses trailed swaths of forest behind them. I guess, too, the fact that we’d stopped off to see his mom made me less scared than I should have been. Because, after all, she’d looked right at me. She’d seen my face. And she’d looked normal enough, so I figured he had to be okay. Besides, there was the shack he was telling me about, the one abandoned behind the golf course, and I thought it could come in handy for a place to go.

I don’t know if he had the knives with him at this point—if that’s why he stopped at his mom’s house, for knives. I guess that would make sense. But just as easily, he could have stashed them at the shack ahead of time. Either way, I had no idea. If he had them as he walked, I couldn’t tell. But maybe Jackson was the kind of person who sews deep pockets inside of his coat to hide sharp things, I don’t know.

We left the road behind us and crossed the kind of green lawn that could only belong to an enormous estate or a golf course or a newly incorporated cemetery, and then we walked into the trees beyond. They were tall, serious trees and something about them made the whole mood change again. Slow and ancient and intent on the sun, these trees leaned over the grassy places, greedy for light. And honestly, I don’t think I knew which side of Mississauga Road we were on, or which river we’d passed, whether the Credit or the Humber. I was failing grade eleven geography that year. Maybe because places just won’t sit down cross-legged in my head. Places just sort of float, half-formed in the air, until they get so heavy with ideas I have to set them down again. But I’m always losing track of where.

So, the next thing is, we come up on this old wooden shack, there, deep in the woods, and it’s dark and spidery inside, and he brings me in and I sit down facing him, cross-legged on the floor. Jackson lights a few candles and sets them out, a dozen long-legged things scuttle from the light, and then he closes the door to the

shack. His back is to me, just for a second, but when he sits back down, he has the knives. Two of them. Lays them between us. Perfectly parallel.

Right away, I know what they mean.

A dare.

I know he’s waiting to see if I’ll go for one of the knives. I know it’s like a fucked-up game of chicken or something. Only I don’t really know what he’s thinking, and so I look at those knives and suddenly, this isn’t fun or an adventure anymore, and I’m not so sure he was acting back at the mall. I’m really far away from everyone, and even if I am somehow a disappointment to my family, I’m scared and in trouble. These are kitchen knives, not butcher knives or anything, and I know them for what they are, but they’re easily ten inches long—they’re really long—and the way they are laid between us like that is really bad.

That’s when Jackson decides he’s not Jackson anymore.

We’re calling up the spirits, he tells me, and I say no fucking thanks, but he’s calling them up anyway. And then, next thing, Jackson is talking like he’s one of them, an old-time sea captain, in this drunken ahoy-matey slur of a voice, and it’d be a big fucking joke, for real, if there wasn’t something in his throat that was splintery and strange. The shack is dark and the light from the tea candles licks up against the dark edges of nothing, and it’s almost like I can see the ghosts of the dead all around me, all around us, because they’re here now, with us, in this shack.

It would be ridiculous, I swear to God, and I know it’s stupid, even right then, and I want to laugh—like spitting in his face—except that here I am, and there are two knives between us, and we’re in the middle of nowhere and I can’t remember the last person I saw on my way here. But yes, I can. It was a man on the bus, and thirty years on I still remember him. I guess I was already sort of worried on that bus because I made eye contact with a carpenter or plumber, some trade guy— stared at him for a good half a minute—because I wanted him to mark my face, so if something happened, he’d remember, he’d know. And then, after that, I saw Jackson’s mother too, but after her, our path forked into these woods and we walked for a long, long time. And there was no one after the woods.

So, I don’t have a choice. I go along with everything Jackson says.

I go along with Jackson/Not-Jackson.

I ask the stupid spirit about his stupid fucking boat, but Jackson/Not-Jackson has got other ideas about the direction of our conversation. It’s like, now, as a

ghost, Jackson is even more fucked up than before. Maybe Jackson/Not-Jackson is even more dangerous, I realize, when he’s pretending he’s some creepy old ghost. Jackson-Jackson owes me at least a little bit, because I did go to meet him at the mall after all. But Jackson/Not-Jackson doesn’t owe me shit, and this whole thing is creeping me out and now, the old sea ghost is hinting that things are about to go truly bad. It’s like, psychically, the old ghost is already reaching for a knife. I can fucking feel him working himself up to the moment in which he draws blood. I take a deep breath.

There, on the dirt-encrusted wooden planks between us, are two kitchen knives. The handles are wooden, and there are little round circles dotting each handle. The blades are sharp. I can see the edge of each blade shining in the candle light— and I think, if I’m fast, if I’m really fast, maybe I can grab one of the knives. Maybe I can grab my knife first.

But then what?

Could I actually kill somebody?

So, if I grab the knife, if I even get it first, then what? Could I put the knife in the body of the boy sitting cross-legged across from me?

It’s hard to imagine, but I work at it. It occurs to me that you’d have to push really hard, that maybe you’d even feel the skin break under the blade and—pushing still harder—maybe you’d feel the muscle parting. And then I imagine the shink of knife on bone—and I don’t—I honestly don’t know if I can do it. And if I did? Then what? Then I’d be here, all alone, with a dead body or worse, a dying body, and I don’t even know where here is.

The next thing that happens is this—and I truly don’t know if it makes me some kind of a sociopath, but something inside of me, something old and smart and cold as a machine clicks. And a second later, all of that hidden knowledge cyborgs into my flesh and my mind is a flower, only what it blooms with is a special kind of fear.

“I want to talk to Jackson,” I say. “Please, I need him, please tell him to come back because I need him.”

In the shack, an old ghost is running a thumb along the knife’s edge, then sliding a second finger along the blade, and I know he’s trying to motor me along. If this was sex we were having, what he’d be doing now, with this knife, would amount to three-fingers deep, which is practically all-in already—as in, fuck it all to hell, might as well just go ahead and do it at a certain point.

But the blossom in my mind petals outward and I beg the old ghost.

I mean, deep down, so deep I can barely hear the whisper, I completely hate the skinny little fucker across from me. And like I said, maybe this makes me some kind of a sociopath, but my whole brain has been taken over by this sad flower and each petal is filled with how much I need Jackson and how scared I am and how dark it is. It’s like the flower believes that Jackson is some kind of fucking superhero in a cape, who we need to come back and save us.

My eyes are looking at the old ghost across from me, but they’re seeing the knives on the floor. My ears are listening to the old ghost talk, but they’re hearing each stumble in his words. I may wear the face of a sad flower, but my brain is awash in distilled hate. And Jackson, who I’m crying for, who I’m begging to return, is someone I’d kill in an eye-blink if I thought I could manage it. But I don’t, so I make a flower out of the fear instead.

Whether Jackson likes begging more than the old ghost does, I don’t know, but in front of my eyes, the old ghost shuffles off his Jackson suit. The shadows curl away from the walls and the candles flare up, and there is Jackson, blinking back at me, once more wearing his own skin.

When he blinks back into his skin, Jackson either is seriously confused or seriously committed to his bullshit. “Like what happened?” he wants to know.

Maybe it’s plausible deniability, maybe it’s complete and utter bullshit—maybe not—but I feed the flower, because we all have a role to play. And if this skinny little shit-burn across from me, the one with damp hair and bad skin, is less than nothing to me, to the flower in my brain, he is the sole source of light and water in the universe.

And the thing is, even now, today, I couldn’t tell you if Jackson was crazy for real or crazy for show, but I do know that he took me out there that day to kill me or at least to roll the dice on a pair of knives. And somehow, my brain is the kind of machine out of which flowers can bloom, and so I talked him down. For years and years after, I’d find myself talking down Jackson. I’d be all alone in a change room at the swimming pool, rinsing the chlorine out of my hair, when I notice how creepy it is to be all alone, and I picture myself riding in a car with a complete psychopath and telling the story I need to tell in order to survive. For years, that goes on. A long and shifting series of talk stories that bloom in my head, all of them to disarm killers born in my brain.

I never saw Jackson again. But one of us blew out the tea candles and two of us walked out of the forest, and side by side, we rode the bus to South Common Mall and then, alone, I took another bus home, and no, I didn’t tell my mom anything about where I’d been. I told a couple of my friends, but they got stuck on the part about how I’d gone anywhere with Jackson in the first place. Him? they all said. I guess if you don’t live with people who are silently ashamed of you, just quietly humiliated by your existence in a way that makes your belly hurt, it might be hard to understand how you have to say yes to things a person shouldn’t say yes to, just to get outside of your own skin. Anyway, I never saw Jackson again, at least, that’s what everybody said. But just the same, Jackson was there. The next time I saw Jackson, it was from my seat in the back room of the Streetsville Inn—the so-called hotel we always went to when blowing off class. Jackson was sitting up front, in the restaurant proper, at a table with two friends. I looked up, saw Jackson’s face, his eyes hidden by reflective sunglasses. Each lens, a mirror. And when I looked at him, two of me stared back. “That’s Jackson,” I said and my voice dropped low. There’s this funny whisper that your body makes when things are fucked up really bad, and my body made that whisper when I saw Jackson again. And maybe that’s how I knew it was really him. Somebody, one of my friends—curled a lip and said, “No. That’s Mack.” This isn’t fiction or a short story or some made-up bullshit. This is all completely fucking true and for real from my life. Seriously, my friends—well, not my friends, not really—all looked at me and said, “That’s Mack, not Jack. He works at the autobody repair shop.” “Jack, Mack,” I said. “Doesn’t that sound a bit fucking mysterious to you?” But no, at least, not so according to my friends. The man in reflective sunglasses barely registered my presence that day. And no, he wasn’t darting madly in a quad and he wasn’t swatting at little demons that emerged from his mind. No, he was smiling, laughing with friends. Like he had not a care in the fucking world. And maybe that had everyone else fooled, but not me.

Or maybe I was wrong. But even so, I was right, because when he left that day, auto-body Mack stopped at the door of the Streetsville Inn and for just a moment, he looked back at me. He took off his smile, and those shining sunglasses too, and if anybody else had been looking, they would have seen it too.