That Last Onset Read online

  But it wasn’t worth it to me. Jason kept trying. He liked to construct elaborate fantasy lives for us. He would create places for us to live in—island paradises filled with enormous mansions and peopled with servants to bring us drinks, complete with little paper umbrellas. We would sip them under palm trees, reclining on the beach in the sun, staring at blue-green water.

  I don’t know if Jason was really happy in those little pretend vacation spots or not. I know that he wanted to make me happy, and perhaps for that reason, he pretended that they did.

  But I could never really accept them. Deep down, I knew that they weren’t real.

  We had chosen to stay here, in a spirit realm, because if we left...

  Oh, it was complicated. Sometimes I didn’t even think I really understood it. It had seemed so clear at one point. I had been willing to sacrifice the rest of my life for the benefit of the world.

  Jason and I controlled the Spiritus Mundi. We kept balance here between the Dark and the Light. We kept these primal opposites united in each and every human being on the planet. And so we kept the world stable.

  But sometimes...

  Sometimes while sipping margaritas on a beautiful white beach, or while making love to Jason with the splash of salt water embracing our bodies, I wondered if it even really mattered.

  The world hadn’t been balanced before, not when we met. Had things really been that bad?

  Certainly, it had been scary when the two forces had been concentrated in the two of us, and we’d had terrifying powers of influence. We’d caused so much destruction.

  But we didn’t have the power anymore. We’d broken it up and scattered it.

  Sometimes I wondered if that wouldn’t be enough.

  That was why I often slipped out of Jason’s fantasy worlds and went to the edge of the Spiritus Mundi, where I could watch what was happening in the real world, the material world. I couldn’t break through into it without messing everything up, but I could watch the people we loved.

  In this way, I’d seen the birth of Hallam and Marlena’s daughter, Kenya. I’d watched Chance, Jason’s son, on his first day of school. I’d watched him hold baby Kenya for the first time. He’d scrunched up his nose and said, “She sure is little, isn’t she?”

  I cried when I watched. I thought that was why Jason always told me to let it alone. He didn’t like to see me sad. But it wasn’t sadness, not exactly. It was a mixture of sadness and joy. And I went back to watch as often as I did, because their lives were real. There was something solid and definite about their lives. I missed the feeling of reality.

  I think Jason missed it too. For all that he’d tell me to stop spying on them and to try to let go, he wouldn’t drag me away. He’d watch too. I saw his expression when he saw his son, how proud he was. How much he loved him.

  But if I asked him about it, he’d get gruff. “It’s better for him for me not to be around,” he’d mutter. And then he’d show me his next creation in the fake world we lived in. A skiing chalet with hot chocolate already set out for us in huge mugs. Or an expedition to the top of a tall mountain. “Think of the views,” he’d say.

  And I’d say, “The views aren’t real.”

  And then we wouldn’t talk about it anymore.

  In the beginning, Jason had tried to convince me that we could have whatever life we chose. The Spiritus Mundi could make any dream we’d ever had look, smell, taste, and feel real. He said we’d build our dream life. And I went along with it until he wanted us to pretend we were having fake children. I balked at that. I couldn’t.

  We’d argued then. It had been heated and violent, and it had shaken the foundations of the Spiritus Mundi. The whole place grew dark, cold, and stormy, and no amount of dreaming on our parts could change it.

  We didn’t argue anymore. The Spiritus Mundi demanded harmony from us. We gave it that.

  But I still watched the real world. Sometimes I watched Jason and me. Our bodies were in a coma in the hospital, and I stared at our sleeping forms for long stretches of time. It could have been days. But there weren’t days here. There was no way to know quite how long it was.

  That was where Jason found me right then. Watching us sleep.

  He settled down next to me. It looked as if I was sitting on a grassy hill and that the whole sky was a big-screen projection of the material world. It didn’t have to look that way. I could have made a theater or a living room with a wide screen TV. But this was the way I kept it.

  “If you can tear yourself away from the excitement of watching our inert bodies, I’ve got something to show you.”

  Of course he did. He always had something to show me. I stood up. “What is it this time?”

  “Guns N’ Roses in concert,” he said. “I always wanted to go. And I’m in charge of making up the whole thing, so Axl won’t hold things up.”

  I laughed. “Sounds like you’d have more fun than I would. Why don’t you go without me?”

  “Come on, it’s not healthy to sit here and stare at this stuff. We can never go back. You know that.”

  I looked down at my feet, thinking that my feet weren’t really here. My body was only a projection of my mind. My real feet were in that hospital bed. “Okay,” I said. “But only if I get to pick the opening act.”

  I let him lead me away, shooting one glance back at the sky, at the two of us. The real us. Marlena walked into the hospital room. I stopped moving. “Wait.”

  “Azazel,” he sighed.

  “Just wait,” I said. She talked to us sometimes, hoping that we could hear. Since we could hear her, I thought the least we could do was listen. I went back to my seat on the grass.

  Jason came after me. He sat down too.

  But Marlena didn’t speak. She just hugged herself, staring at us and wiping tears out of her eyes.

  I wanted to cry too, but I fought it. Jason didn’t like it when I cried.

  Marlena and Hallam were old, old friends. They had survived the ravages of Jason’s and my powers. And they had been like surrogate parents to us. They were the closest thing we had to family. Everyone else we’d known closely had died, and generally, it had been our own fault. I’d carried a lot of guilt about that, but here in the Spiritus Mundi, I felt peace about my past. I couldn’t alter its course now. Things had progressed the way they had. There was nothing I could do to change that. I still had regrets, but I didn’t punish myself anymore.

  Someone else entered the room behind Marlena—a nurse. I’d seen her before. She regularly came to check our vitals and change our IV drips.

  “Hi there,” said the nurse. “We haven’t seen you in a few weeks.”

  Marlena brushed tears from her cheeks. “I suppose I couldn’t bear it after that last talk we had with the doctor. It seemed like it might be too hard to look at them. We’ve been so hopeful, you know.”

  The nurse gave Marlena a hug. “I see this all the time. I know you’re going through a tough time.”

  Marlena squeezed her back, and then released her.

  “And you’ve got your new little baby, don’t you? You have to be home with her. You can’t miss her life because you’re cooped up in this place, watching people who aren’t awake.”

  Marlena nodded. “She’s nearly nine months now.” She moved closer to my bed. She found my body’s lifeless hand and took it in her own. “But Azazel’s still holding on, isn’t she?”

  “She is. But we still aren’t sure how long that will last.”

  Marlena bit her lip. “I still don’t understand. How is it that she’s so much worse than Jason is?”

  “We don’t know that,” said the nurse. “The truth is that according to our tests, there is absolutely nothing wrong with Jason. It’s Azazel who’s got severe damage to her cerebral cortex. Damage that isn’t healing.”

  Marlena dropped my hand and walked over to Jason’s body. “But if there’s nothing wrong with him, why isn’t he waking up?”

  The nurse shook her head. “We’ve
never seen anything like it. The doctors don’t know. But I have a theory.”

  Marlena turned to her.

  “They’re very connected,” said the nurse. “Sometimes, they seem to be dreaming together. Their bodies will react at the same time, even when nothing’s happening.” She put her hand on Marlena’s back. “I think he’s waiting for her to go.”

  Marlena grimaced.

  “Go?” I whispered. I turned to Jason. “What’s she talking about?”

  He was staring at the images in the sky with a concerned look on his face. “I don’t know.”

  Marlena looked back at my body. “Isn’t there any chance she’ll pull through?”

  “There’s always a chance,” said the nurse. “But, sweetie, it’s very small.”

  “Wait,” I said. “I’m dying? Are they saying I’m dying?”

  Jason grabbed my hand. “It doesn’t matter even if you are. We live in the Spiritus Mundi now. We’re pure spirit. You don’t need that body anymore.”

  He was right. But I felt panic at the idea of dying. I didn’t want to watch the material world anymore. I wanted to run away from the strong terror of it. I stood up. “Let’s go to the concert.”

  “Are you sure?” he said.

  I nodded quickly.

  But later, with Jason’s creation of 1980s rock anthems still ringing in my head, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So, I quietly came back to my grassy hill and made the sky show me pictures of Jason and me lying in our hospital beds.

  I scrutinized the two of us. We looked the same, both listless and asleep. I didn’t look worse than him. Why was I dying? Why wasn’t Jason? Sure, he had the powers of invincibility once upon a time, but neither of us had our powers when we were shot and put into this coma. It didn’t make sense.

  A woman swept into the room, wearing headphones. I’d seen her before. She routinely drew blood from Jason and me. She got out her needles while bopping around to the music on her headphones, which I couldn’t hear. This was a little boring. Maybe I should pop in on Hallam and Marlena. Maybe there was a chance they were talking about my impending death.

  Jason was right. If I died, I wouldn’t leave the Spiritus Mundi, since my soul was already contained here. Nothing would change. Not really. But it still seemed so... final. I didn’t want to die. Once I was dead, I would be really and truly trapped here.

  “Azazel?”

  Jason was behind me. I turned to look at him. “I just don’t understand,” I said. “Why am I dying, and you’re not?”

  “There could be lots of reasons for that,” he said. He put his arm around me. “Let’s not watch this. Maybe this will be a good thing, anyway. You need to let go of the material world. We exist here now, and that’s what has to happen.”

  He was right, and I knew it. But if I was going to die... Well, maybe I would need to see it to know it was true.

  In our hospital room, the woman had inserted a needle into Jason’s arm and was watching as his blood filled up a small tube.

  “I know this seems hard,” said Jason.

  I leaned into him, felt his strong arms tighten around me. But I was reminded again that those arms weren’t real. Not really. They were only a projection of Jason. We made them seem to be here. But everything here was an illusion. “I don’t think I want to die,” I whispered.

  He squeezed me even tighter.

  In the hospital room, the woman was in the middle of removing the needle from Jason’s arm. She stuffed it inside a bag she carried with her and moved over to me.

  Jason spoke low, in my ear. “You won’t be dying, though. Not really. Everything will be the same.”

  I pulled away from him. “We don’t know that’s true.”

  “Azazel, we’ve seen dead people here.”

  “No,” I said, “we’ve seen people who looked and acted like people we knew that died. But they could have been projections. After all, we can make ourselves see things that aren’t here. What if the dead people we’ve seen are only creations of the spirit world? What if I don’t stay here if I die? What if I just cease to exist?”

  “No, that won’t happen,” said Jason.

  He couldn’t be sure of that. We’d have to wait and see. I turned my attention back to the hospital room, where the woman was fishing out a needle. She had two bags, one that has fresh needles, and one that had discarded needles. She didn’t notice, but I did. She was taking out the needle she’d used on Jason. She was going to put it in my arm.

  I nudged Jason. “Do you see what she’s doing? That can’t be sanitary.”

  The woman plunged the needle into my arm.

  And everything around me winked out, disappearing like a fuse had been blown, plunging me into darkness.

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