102 - Fable of the Skull-Peeler [September 11th, Age 15]

It didn’t take as long as I worried it would to get Talia on board. Sometime between our last outing and Matthew’s call, she must have done some serious soul-searching, and she must have arrived at the same sentiment that I brought, unwillingly, to Matthew: that the path to salvation started and ended with me, and if she wanted anything in the next few weeks of her life to make any ounce or semblance of sense, she was going to have to cozy up—or, at the bare minimum, tolerate me.

So it was a nice surprise when she came to our apartment that later that day and was civil with both Matthew and I.

Neville took me out to various locations two more times in the following week, but didn’t give me much in terms of relevant information. He talked about his family some. I relayed that back to Matthew and Talia, who found it interesting or amusing but not particularly helpful.

I didn’t have much to say to them. I was giving them everything Neville gave me. I was giving this partnership my all—and they were too, I guess, since Talia hadn’t had me assassinated and Matthew hadn’t thrown me in the dry room for my insolence.

So I guess we’d navigated to a truce. A place where we were all equals.

That was nice.

0 0 0

On September 11th, Neville took me out again.

I half expected, because of the date, for him to take me to the memorial, but he didn’t. We just went to Bryant Park. I’d never been to a place like that before, and it was a bit odd for me. It was more of a city block in itself than an actual park—a wide spiral crisscross of flat stone paths dotted with little greenspaces and filled with a low ivy that felt more like a plastic plant to me than an actual live growth. In the center was a huge steel pavilion that was still under construction—beyond that were smaller, similar growths that contained little pop-up cafes and such. Down the sides of the park were long lines of the same: empty pop-up stores that Neville told me came and went seasonally.

We sat at the end of the park near a big stand-alone arch. Underneath the arch was a statue of a man sitting on throne—Neville told me it was William Cullens Bryant, a poet. Not the sort of person who’d need a throne. Neville chuckled at that sentiment, looking up at that statue for a while. I remember asking him why that was funny, but here in the future I don’t think I need him to tell me.

“It’s kind of a weird day for me,” Neville confessed, after we’d sat down at a little steel table. “I was half-thinking that we should go to the memorial, but it’s probably busy. If you ever get the chance, you should go, but it’s the sort of place you should go by yourself. It’s not a good group visit.”

I nodded.

It was a warm day, but not uncomfortably so—just on the edge of it. A tiny bit too warm for September. I’d gotten pretty good at detecting changes in humidity over time, so I’d pocketed the knowledge that it was going to rain later based on the how wet the air was. I didn’t say anything about it because I didn’t know how cloudy it was—maybe it was obvious, maybe not, but I didn’t want to look stupid in front of Neville.

Neville leaned back. “It’s a weird day for me,” he repeated. “Most people don’t think much about 9/11 anymore, but people in my position do pretty frequently. I don’t think you were even alive then, right?”

I wasn’t, so I shook my head.

“Did your dad ever talk about it?”

At his mention, I paled—and I shook my head, again, before I said something I knew I’d regret.

Neville shrugged. “Yeah, I guess he wasn’t really from the city, so he probably treated it like anyone else. Most people think of it in terms of how big a tragedy it was, but people like Loybol and I tend to use this day to reflect on how lucky we are that exactly no part of that disaster was magic-related.”

It had never occurred to me to think it was, but now that it was brought up, I wondered why I’d always just accepted that. “Really?”

“Yep. It was exactly what it said on the tin.”

I angled my face away from him, toward some ants I’d found with droplets scurrying around the edge of the concrete path-tiles. “Weird.”

Neville nodded. “I remember the day it happened. Loybol had taken power in Hinterland maybe two months before. She gave me a call as soon as she found out about it and asked what happened, and…man, that was a rough day. In my lifetime, I don’t think I’ve ever been that afraid of magic coming out. Even though, in hindsight, there wasn’t any chance of it from the disaster itself, it still seemed to me like everything I’d worked for was ending. Looking back on it now, though, I’m not sure it’d have been so bad. I know Benji and Prochazka felt this way about the Vietnam War. If people found out about magic right then, in the aftermath of that disaster—well, it’s easy for us here in the future to say it all would’ve worked out, but maybe adding a little more to the pill we all had to swallow wouldn’t have made a difference. It was a different world after that. I’m not sure it would’ve mattered if we put magic in the mix.”

I knew he was only telling me this because he was getting to something. “What’s the point here?” I asked him, blunt.

He chuckled. “Obviously. The point here, Erika, is that sometimes things just fall apart, and it’s not anyone’s fault when they do. Sometimes things just don’t work out. Sometimes things just…fail, arbitrarily, for reasons beyond anyone’s planning or understanding.”

Neville looked out, across the park, at the buildings that stood tall and wide. All this wondrous creation of man. At the people who sat in tables near us, none the wiser, and the people who milled around the edges of the lawn and on the sidewalks across the way. Those people, the distant sidewalk ones, felt so far away in that moment that they might as well have been in a different country. Neville spoke softly, as someone would talk to a small animal, or to a child—but he didn’t say it to me. I had to struggle to hear him over the road noise.

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He spoke it to the world. “Erika, I’m thinking of ending things.”

I had no response. I knew this was coming. The story couldn’t possibly have meant anything else.

But I still kept myself still. “Ending things how?” I asked, even though I already knew.

Neville sighed. He didn’t speak for a good long moment. “The longer we wait, the longer the sword we have to fall on gets. It’s the quiet part none of us say out loud. This game of chicken with time isn’t winnable. One of us has to cut our losses and be the martyr.”

He looked down at the concrete. “I’ve been thinking about what you said all week,” he said, suddenly. “About the narrative. Well, I guess it’s what Talia said.”

“Yeah?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I’m not sure I can do that. I don’t know if it’d work. But I’ve spent a lot of sleepless nights trying to devise a way out of this where nobody gets hurt, and…well…I’ve come up empty. That plan, though, might be our best bet. For the fewest.”

To die, he meant. To die.

“I have a friend in Baltimore,” Neville said. “He calls this problem the skull-peeler. That’s his codename for it. He told me it was like all of us regional heads were lined up in a big row and God goes around with a knife and takes a little bit off the top of each of us in turn. The game stops when the knife hits gray matter. It’s funny, and he laughed when he explained this to me, because when you think of it that way, the person with the thinnest skull is the one who gets reveal of magic dumped on their shoulders, and the dumbest—the thickest skull—is the one who was in the least danger all along. As if plugging your ears and singing loudly enough could keep the future away. The situation we’re in rewards doubling down, no matter the cost—because the first one of us who does the smart thing and cuts their losses has to become the martyr.”

Neville crossed his arms. “That friend from Baltimore always used to tell me that the smartest thing to do would be to wrench the knife away from God and decapitate yourself, but none of us were brave enough. We’d rather all sit in a line and compete, passively, for the Thickest-Skull Award.”

He shrugged when I didn’t laugh. “I don’t know. I thought you’d find that funny, too.”

“I don’t know either,” I said, faint.

“Yeah, that’s how I feel about it too,” Neville said, looking away from me again. “But that friend thought it was the funniest thing in the whole damn world. Just goes to show how unique everyone’s sense of humor is. I think, personally, that he laughed because he knew he wasn’t strong enough to decapitate himself, and he knew none of us were, and that someone would get stuck with it eventually like someone gets stuck with fruitcake leftovers. He had to laugh about it because otherwise he’d cry. That kind of thing.”

I was familiar. “That makes sense.”

The corner of his mouth scrunched up for a second. “Anyway. Talia’s story is…kind of appealing to me. I’m not entirely sure how to initiate it, but…it’s definitely something I’d consider. That said, it’s not really my call to make.”

He paused. “I can’t do it without your cooperation. At the end of the day, this is…well, I guess there’s no point in sugar-coating this. It might be the most important decision anyone makes in this decade. Maybe in the century. Presidents are making confidential decisions that’ll never come to light that probably mean less to the future of every random person than this will. The choice we’d make here would…well, it’d split the world into two. A timeline before the world knew magic and a timeline after. Absolutely nothing would ever be the same.”

His words thinned and hollowed, like empty tubes. They struck my ears and rang them, until everything echoed like church bells.

He was right, of course. This was the one thing that mattered.

“So…” Neville made a slicing gesture across his neck. “I think it’s in our hands. To decapitate ourselves, as my Baltimore friend would say.”

“Is it suicide?” I asked, quietly. The sounds from my mouth barely audible to him or me.

And Neville shook his head. “I don’t know, Erika,” he said. “But God keeps peeling, and the clock keeps ticking, and…I’m not sure we get a better chance to end this charade on our terms than this.”

He looked down. “I know it’s a lot to drop on your shoulders. And I know you’re already carrying so much. But I can’t force this on you. If we go forward with this, and we take Talia’s tale as our own, we have to be in dead-even lock step. Everything has to be ironclad. It’s gotta be perfect. And it’s still not going to be completely foolproof. Nothing is. Nobody ever plans for everything. But if it’s the best we have…well, I don’t know how many more opportunities we’re going to get. And I know that…the number of lives this will save, and the way it’ll change the world—it’s going to be for the better, in the long run. It might be a pretty long run, but it’s a net positive. And we’ve both done so much evil in our times. If there’s anything resembling an afterlife out there—well, I’m getting older now, so that’s something that I think about with a bit more urgency than I used to. I’m sure you, as a lifelong soldier, think about it a lot, too.”

I did, despite my best efforts. I have always been a soldier. Even before my magic, I was. I rose to the sound of the bugle and I went off to war, and I fought my battles, and I came home to the barracks where I slept and nothing more, and I did not question, and I did not fear—because I was not allowed.

So I nodded, silently, and he nodded too when he saw it. “If there’s a world beyond,” he repeated, slow, “I want to have just one thing I can hold to my name for God. I want to be able to say that I tried to make things right. And I don’t know if that’s going to count for atonement, because—well, the list of things I’d have to atone for is so long. But hopefully someone will see my heart’s in the right place. And I think all of that applies to you, too. And if we do this together, we can hold each other accountable. We can make this world a better place, Erika, but I think we have to do it together, or we won’t make it.”

He frowned. “I’m not going to make you give me an answer now. Feel free to discuss it with Matthew. I’m sure he’s seen the contents of our talks already.”

“Will Loybol know?” I asked. It was the first thing that popped into my head.

“She’ll know that I’ve killed Prochazka,” he said. “And I will send her advance notice of my plans—long enough for her to prepare some statements of her own but not long enough for her to stop me. I think that’s fair, if that’s one of your conditions.”

I did not reply for a moment. I expected to find a better answer with time, but I didn’t. Instead I held droplets around the edge of the concrete tiles where they bordered the grass and I felt the ants scurry—those little mindless ones running around.

When army ants go into their death spiral—when do they realize all is lost? Do they ever?

But they follow—lockstep, ever-frozen, ever-onward, until their demise. Do they know and do nothing, or—even worse—do they simply extinguish one day, convinced fully that they’ll find food or shelter?

Does everything just come to a sudden, unstoppable halt, with no warning? No bugle, no drum—just a moment before and no moments after?

“You don’t need to answer now,” Neville said. “But I’d like an answer one way or another in a week. We’ll see each other a few more times during that, but I won’t press you for it until the eighteenth. Okay?”

I nodded. I said nothing.

The sun came down upon us, pleasantly warm, gently dry.