He didn’t have a car anymore.
The only thing in the world he owned and it was taken from him. He realized something while he’d been reduced to walking on the endless highways between states again. If he wasn’t going to drive, there was no reason to be sober.
It wasn’t being drunk he liked, it was the memories it brought back. The sensations of the world as a place that was new and exciting. When he was a child there was adventure around every trail and magic in the night air. He hadn’t felt it quite the same in so long, but the alcohol brought it back. Suddenly everything was new again and he felt excitement in his chest like an expanding universe. He still couldn’t stop talking to Locust, but now it felt more like a habit than a necessity. Something he only did because he couldn’t admit to himself he didn’t need to anymore. He had no idea if he needed to or not, he’d never tried to stop, but he was too afraid to find out.
Being drunk took the shame out of it. It buried his self-conscious thoughts of ‘this is crazy’ and ‘normal people don’t do this’. When he was drunk he felt no embarrassment as he spoke out loud on busy sidewalks to someone who wasn’t there. He could imagine Locust’s reactions more clearly without the doubt. The nagging voice that told him she wasn’t the same after so long. Told him he didn’t remember what she'd say, or who she was. He found he sang more, with his new self-prescribed medication. He never sang much before but he sang all the time now. Songs his mother used to sing, songs the church had taught him, songs he heard on the radio. He sang her song too, the one he was still trying to remember all the words to. He felt the wishbone through his shirt, and sang it over and over as he walked, until he’d worked out as much of it as he could.
“Distant see the blinding light, persistently the flame invites, resist the pain and reunite,” He limped on one still semi-injured leg, the pain less noticeable thanks to his medicine. “When you’re in the valley, rest your head, and take a count of the dead, who lie among the mountains stead.” The tune was easier after he’d sung it so many days and so many nights that his mouth could form the words in his sleep. He still couldn’t remember all of it, but even if he couldn’t carry any tune at all, he could still passably carry that one.
He was different now than he was then. When he first traveled across the country on foot as a hungry young teenager. He’d never been attractive, but he’d been hopeful. It was a trait that made him more approachable. It made people offer him rides and couches and help as he made his way in the world on his own. Now that he was older he didn’t get those offers.
He realized he hadn’t really been on his own.
Not like he was now anyway. He was 22 years old, somewhere outside Columbus Ohio…maybe Lancaster? He found the towns and the counties had names that were hard to keep track of. There was also a Columbus in both Indiana and Nebraska, there was a Springfield in every state, there were park cities and city parks and Pleasantville's and Sunnyside's…
He was different now than he was when he was sixteen. He was older and he was covered in dirt and gravel from the third locations of the world. He walked with a noticeable limp from a bullet to the leg that he never got proper therapy for. He smelled like death and Svedka and he wouldn’t get to know anyone he met for longer than a day. He wasn’t an idiot, that he could still say for himself, and he’d noticed the pattern. Everyone he was close to, who interacted with his story, met a gruesome fate.
That wasn’t to say he was cursed, just unlucky he supposed. He couldn’t let people become interested in his life, which he still didn’t consider very interesting, or the guilt he’d feel when they were gone would tear another rip in his fabric. Even if the death wasn't his fault, even if there was nothing that could’ve been done, he’d still know intrinsically that it wouldn’t have happened if they’d never crossed paths with Albert. Even though he was Albert the unlucky, he still wondered some nights. He wondered as he lay beneath the bridges the police didn’t frequent during the hours when pedestrians were unlikely to stumble upon him, he’d stare at the underside of the highways and picture the stars. He’d hold his half of the wishbone up to the orange street light that spilled over the sidewalk and marvel at how much smaller it was. How much larger his hands were. As if they weren’t the same hands. The bone was a relic he’d picked up out of the discarded belongings of a young boy named Felix, and he’d never known why it was so important.
He wondered, asking Locust and not remembering how she’d answer, he wondered if perhaps it was a curse. The girl who’d hexed him with an uninvited and unshakable willingness to follow her anywhere.
Anywhere.
She’d taken him to another world, heavy with magicks he didn’t understand. She performed a ritual with him over the fettered corpse of a holy symbol, and together they’d made a pact. A covenant and a promise, forged in superstition and sealed in the breaking of a bone. A promise that he had to uphold since he had gotten the bigger half all those thousand years ago.
To have only her with him, wherever he went.
Sometimes he wanted to get rid of it. He wanted to toss the bone into the endless fields that laid down side by side beside so many jeep-jostling railroad tracks. He wanted the foreign reminder of a life that wasn’t his to be gone. So long ago his Locust had told him to keep the wishbone with him since that’s how the wish worked, and sometimes as he lay awake outside in the gentle constant fear of getting found and having to move, he could convince himself it wasn’t worth it. He could convince himself that if he just got rid of the bone he’d no longer be tied to the wish he’d made, the memory of the girl so faded he could no longer picture her face. He could move on and find people who perhaps wouldn’t die from getting to know him. He convinced himself he should, but he never did. The stubborn young boy named Felix would put his foot down, saying he was in love. Stupid child didn’t know what love was but it still carried him across states and through uncounted hardships. He wanted to let go but he was frightened. Frightened of who he was without this goal, this hope so unhealthy he’d planted his life in its soil and now it was all he had to sprout from.
He was afraid that if he let it go, he’d lose the last bit he had of who he was back then. When the world was new. When the van was a house on wheels that never moved. When he had a brother, a sister, a mother, a community, and it was the best summer of his life. He feared the wonder and adventure would be gone and he’d be stuck here. In this life where despite his best efforts, everything just seemed to get worse and worse. Where people, however much he liked people, would get meaner and more cynical to him the older and more worn he became. Or they’d just die. Where no matter how hopeful, magical, and full of wonder he knew the world was, he’d seen it be, he could never find it again.
Albert was brave, but he wasn’t brave enough to face that.
He wasn’t brave enough to face the idea that scared him most. That the bone, the wish, was his only way of finding her at all. After all this time he’d loved her and sought her and even hated her in dark moments, he still held out the hope he’d find her again.
Maybe he couldn’t say he wasn’t an idiot anymore.
He wondered how far he’d follow her, some nights when he was feeling particularly self-destructive. What if she wasn’t in PA? He’d have to find out where she went and follow her there. He’d follow her to any state. But what if she moved out of the country? Would he follow her across an ocean? Travel like that was outside of his budget but he was a crafty guy, he’d learned ways of making things work out, even things that weren’t objectively the best idea. He’d follow her across any sea.
What if she was dead?
This was the one that made him feel the most. He didn’t know what the emotion was, but it was big and it was uncomfortable and it made his pulse spike and made it that much harder to fall asleep out in the open than it already was. He had to consider this possibility, however, it hurt him, because it was cathartic but more than that was because it was likely. He’d seen every ‘Locust’ die and while he still tried to hold the best opinion of the world around him, he still knew she was likely to have met the same fate. Wouldn’t that just be his kind of luck? All of this…everything…to find out she was never there waiting for him.
He thought of this and he felt that big, uncomfortable feeling, and he wondered what he’d do. Wondered was perhaps the wrong word as it implied ‘wonder’ as a derivative of what he was feeling. He couldn’t name the feeling he had but he knew ‘wonder’ didn’t apply. Agonized was a better fit, though still not quite right. He often agonized over what he’d do if it were true. If Locust was gone then so was his quest to find her. If she was gone, so was his first passion and his reason for carrying on in a world that tried so hard to make him stop. It was almost like spite, the way he’d pushed towards this goal longer than made sense, beyond all reason. It felt like if Locust was dead then somehow the world won their game of chicken, and he’d crack first.
He wouldn’t let it, he had one thing he was going to do with this life if it broke him, or killed him. It was the first conviction he ever felt, it was all he knew, all he was. If Locust was dead then there was no telling where she’d go, but somehow that feeling in his chest was a horrible understanding. An understanding that he’d still follow her.
That scared him. He shivered more than the cold made him shiver when he thought about such things. He was afraid of it coming to that but felt just as sure as he was frightened that that’s what would happen. It scared him to think that. It was not ok to think like that, yet he couldn’t come to any other conclusion. He was delusional, talking to someone who wasn’t there, longing for someone he’d never had, someone he didn’t even remember. His Locust in his head was no longer the girl he fell in love with before he knew what love was, it was a twisted shadow of her that he’d crafted over a decade of these delusions to keep him sane. Or maybe to keep him steeped in his insanity. He was delusional, but he’d always been able to paint it in a sweeter light. He was a lovesick man on a desperate journey to reunite with someone long lost. It made people interested in him, it made them think he was a character that he wasn’t. People liked the story too much to think about the reality of what Albert was actually doing, and he’d benefited from the privilege of it for too long, it had led him too far down a path that would naturally end like this.
Willing to die, wanting to die.
“Now I lay me down to sleep…I pray the lord, my soul to keep…” He muttered the common rhyme to comfort children before bed. The one that comforted Fred in his final moments. “If I should die before I wake, I pray the lord…my soul to take.” It was with hardly audible breath as he pictured it. How much easier it would be to finally stop.
He realized for the first time on those nights, something he’d never realized before. Something that had probably been true for a long time if not the entire time. He realized something he didn’t want to voice and couldn’t begin to know how to. Albert realized he needed help.
There was something fundamentally wrong with the way he was interacting with the world around him, and the more he ignored it the more damage it did. He needed a kind of help he could ask of no one. He needed a kind of help he was never taught how to ask for, and if he didn’t get it soon he wouldn’t make it much longer. He hadn’t cried in a long time, not for Locust, Fred, or anyone who’d gotten caught in the threads of his miserable delusions, but he did when he realized this.
He cried for himself.
It didn’t feel good. It was wet and uncomfortable and it made his chest hurt more, not less. It made breathing harder until he was choking on ugly sobs on the ground. It felt pathetic. It made everything feel so much more real and he’d been avoiding that for so long. Crying wasn’t a good feeling or even a cathartic feeling. It was borne in grief and hopelessness and it gave him no relief. He cried when he realized he was dying, losing himself, and he had no idea how to save himself. He cried for what could’ve been, for what he’d never get to be since he’d already sold his soul to something that didn’t exist. It was obsession, and he cried for what it took from him all his life.
He wondered what would’ve happened if he’d just stayed with his mom. She wasn’t the best mom, he knew that in hindsight, but she loved him. She made sure he was fed and educated and even though they lived in a van, it was still all the home he’d needed. It wasn’t her fault Fred had died, they all should’ve noticed something was wrong. He wondered if he would’ve finished school if he’d stayed. Would they have gotten Olivia back? Would Albert have gone into custody too? Would Albert have gotten back to the commune faster if he’d just stayed? He hadn’t meant for his trip to take so long, but he had no way to turn back now. He wouldn’t, but even if he wanted to, he couldn’t even begin to predict where his mother would be.
Olivia would be turning sixteen this month.
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