CHAPTER 22
WINTER COMES EARLY AND WITH FULL FORCE to Paradise, Ohio. First the wind, then the cold, then the snow. Light dustings to start, then a storm blows through
and buries the land so that the scraping sound of snowplows is as consistently heard as the wind itself, leaving a coat of salt over everything. School is
canceled for two days. The snow near the roads segues from white to dingy black and eventually melts to standing puddles of slush that refuse to drain.
Henri and I spend my time off training, indoors, outdoors. I can now juggle three balls without touching them, which also means I can lift more than one
thing at a time. The heavier and larger objects have come, the kitchen table, the snowblower Henri bought the week before, our new truck, which looks
almost exactly like the old one and like millions of other pickup trucks in America. If I can lift it physically, with my body, then I can lift it with my mind. Henri
believes that the strength of my mind will eventually transcend that of my body.
In the backyard the trees stand sentinel around us, frozen branches like figurines of hollow glass, an inch of a fine white powder piled atop each
one. The snow is up to our knees aside from the small patch Henri has cleared away. Bernie Kosar sits watching from the back porch. Even he wants
nothing to do with the snow.
"Are you sure about this?" I ask.
"You need to learn to embrace it," Henri says. Over his shoulder, watching with morbid curiosity, stands Sam. It is his first time watching me train.
"How long will this burn?" I ask.
"I don't know."
I am wearing a highly combustible suit made mostly of natural fibers soaked in oils, some of which are slow burning, some of which are not. I want
to set it on fire just to be rid of the smells that are making my eyes water. I take a deep breath.
"Are you ready?" he asks.
"As ready as I'll ever be."
"Don't breathe. You're not immune to the smoke or fumes and your internal organs will burn."
"This seems foolish to me," I say.
"It's part of your training. Grace under pressure. You need to learn to multitask while consumed in flames."
"But why?"
"Because when the battle comes, we're going to be greatly outnumbered. Fire will be one of your great allies in war. You need to learn to fight
while burning."
"Ugh."
"If you get in trouble, jump into the snow and start rolling."
I look at Sam, who has a big grin spread across his face. He is holding a red fire extinguisher in his hand just in case it's needed.
"I know," I say.
Everyone is silent while Henri messes with the matches.
"You look like Sasquatch wearing that suit," Sam says.
"Eat it, Sam," I say.
"Here we go," says Henri.
I take a deep breath just before he touches a match to the suit. Fire sweeps across my body. It feels unnatural for me to keep my eyes open, but I
do. I look up. The fire rises eight feet above me. The whole world is shrouded in shades of orange, red, yellow that dance in my line of sight. I can feel the
heat, but only slightly as one feels the sun's rays on a summer day. Nothing more than that.
"Go!" Henri yells.
I hold my arms out to my sides, eyes wide-open, breath held. I feel as though I'm hovering. I enter the deep snow and it begins to sizzle and melt
underfoot, a slight steam rising while I walk. I reach my right hand forward and lift a cinder block, which feels heavier than normal. Is it because I'm not
breathing? Is it the stress of the fire?
"Don't waste time!" Henri yells.
I hurl the block as hard as I can against a dead tree fifty feet away. The force causes it to smash into a million little pieces, leaving an indentation in
the wood. Then I raise three tennis balls soaked in gasoline. I juggle them in midair, one over the other. I bring them in towards my body. They catch fire,
and still I juggle them--and while doing so I lift a long, thin broomstick. I close my eyes. My body is warm. I wonder if I'm sweating. If I am, the sweat must be
evaporating the second it reaches the skin's surface.
I grit my teeth, open my eyes, thrust my body forward and direct all of my powers into the stick's very core. It explodes, splintering into small bits. I
don't let any of them fall to the ground; instead I keep them suspended, collectively looking like a cloud of dust hovering in midair. I pull them to me and let
them burn. The wood pops through the flicker and hum of the flames. I force them back together into a tightly compacted spear of fire that looks as though
it has sprung straight from the depths of hell.
"Perfect!" Henri yells.
One minute has passed. My lungs begin to burn from the fire, from my breath still held. I put everything that I am into the spear and I hurl it so hard
that it speeds through the air like a bullet and hits the tree, and hundreds of tiny fires spread throughout the vicinity and extinguish almost immediately. I
had hoped the dead wood would catch fire but it does not. I have also dropped the tennis balls. They sizzle in the snow five feet away from me.
"Forget the balls," Henri yells. "The tree. Get the tree."
The dead wood looks ghastly with its arthritic limbs silhouetted against the world of white beyond it. I close my eyes. I can't hold my breath much
longer. Frustration and anger begin to form, fueled by the fire and the discomfort of the suit and the tasks that are left undone. I focus on the large branch
coming off the tree's trunk and I try to break that branch away but it won't come. I grit my teeth and furrow my brows and finally a loud snap rings through
the air like a shotgun blast and the branch comes sailing towards me. I catch it in my hands and hold it straight above me. Let it burn, I think. It must be
twenty feet long. It finally catches fire and I lift it into the air forty or fifty feet above me and, without touching it, I drive it straight into the ground as though I'm
staking my claim like some old-world swordsman standing atop the hill after winning the war. The stick totters back and forth smoking, flames dancing
along the upper half of it. I open my mouth and instinctively take a breath, and the flames come rushing in; an instant burning spreads throughout my body.
I'm so shocked and it hurts so much that I don't know what to do.
"The snow! The snow!" Henri yells.
I dive in headfirst and begin rolling. The fire goes out almost immediately but I keep rolling and the sizzle of snow touching the tattered suit is all I
hear while wisps of steam and smoke rise off of me. And then Sam finally pulls the clip from the extinguisher and unloads with a thick powder that makes it
even harder to breathe.
"No," I yell.
He stops. I lie there trying to catch my breath, but each inhalation brings about a pain in my lungs that reverberates throughout my body.
"Damn, John. You weren't supposed to breathe," Henri says, standing over me.
"I couldn't help it."
"Are you okay?" Sam asks.
"My lungs are burning."
Everything is blurry but slowly the world comes into focus. I lie there looking up into the low gray sky at the flakes of snow sifting sullenly down upon
us.
"How'd I do?"
"Not bad for your first try."
"We're going to do it again, aren't we?"
"In time, yes."
"That was wicked cool," Sam says.
I sigh, then take a deep, labored breath. "That sucked."
"You did well for your first time," Henri says. "You can't expect everything to come easily."
I nod from the ground. I lie there a good minute or two, and then Henri extends a hand and helps me up, bringing about the end of training for the
day.
I wake in the middle of the night two days later, 2:57 on the clock. I can hear Henri working at the kitchen table. I crawl out of bed and walk out of the room.
He is hunched over a document, wearing bifocals and holding some sort of stamp with a pair of tweezers. He looks up at me.
"What are you doing?" I ask.
"Creating forms for you."
"For what?"
"I got to thinking about you and Sam driving down to get me. I think it's foolish of us to keep using your real age when we can just as easily change
it according to our needs."
I pick up a birth certificate that he has already finished. The name written is James Hughes. The date of birth would make me a year older. I'd be
sixteen and able to drive. Then I bend over and look at the one he is in the process of creating. The name listed is Jobie Frey, age eighteen, a legal adult.
"Why didn't we ever think to do this before?" I ask.
"We never had reason to."
Papers of different shapes and sizes and densities are scattered across the table, a large printer off to the side. Bottles of ink, rubber stamps,
notary stamps, metal plate-looking things, various tools that look as though they belong in a dentist's office. The process of document creation has always
remained foreign to me.
"Are we going to change my age now?"
Henri shakes his head. "It's too late to change your age in Paradise. These are mostly for the future. Who knows what will happen that will give you
reason to use them."
The thought of moving in the future makes me nauseous. I would rather stay fifteen and unable to drive forever than move someplace new.
Sarah returns from Colorado a week before Christmas. I haven't seen her in eight days. It feels as though it's been a month. The van drops all the girls off
at the school and one of her friends drives her straight to my house without first taking her home. When I hear the tires come up the drive I meet her with a
hug and a kiss and I lift her off the ground and twirl her in the air. She has just been in a plane and a car for ten hours and she is wearing sweatpants and
no makeup with her hair pulled into a ponytail and yet she is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen and I don't want to let go of her. We stare into each
other's eyes beneath the moonlight and all either of us can do is smile.
"Did you miss me?" she asks.
"Every second of every day."
She kisses the tip of my nose.
"I missed you, too."
"So do the animals have a shelter again?" I ask.
"Oh, John, it was amazing! I wish you could have been there. There were probably thirty people helping out at all times, around the clock. The
building went up so fast and it's so much nicer than it was before. We built this cat tree in one of the corners, and I swear the whole time we were there,
there were cats playing on it."
I smile. "It sounds great. I wish I could have been there, too."
I take her bag and we walk into the house together.
"Where's Henri?" she asks.
"Grocery shopping. He left about ten minutes ago."
She walks through the living room and drops her coat onto the back of a chair on her way into my bedroom. She sits on the edge of my bed and
kicks her shoes off.
"What should we do?" she asks.
I stand there watching her. She is wearing a red hooded sweatshirt with a zipper down the front. It is only halfway zipped. She smiles and looks at
me through the tops of her eyes.
"Come here," she says, and holds her hand out to me.
I walk to her and she takes my hand in hers. She looks up at me and squints her eyes from the light shining overhead. I snap my fingers with my
free hand and the light turns off.
"How'd you do that?"
"Magic," I say.
I sit beside her. She tucks a few loose strands of hair behind her ear, then leans over and kisses me on the cheek. Then she cups my chin and
pulls my head to hers and kisses me again, softly, delicately. My whole body tingles in response. She pulls away, her hand still on my cheek. She traces
my brow with her thumb.
"I really did miss you," she says.
"Me, too."
A silence passes between us. Sarah bites her lower lip.
"I couldn't wait to get here," she says. "The whole time I was in Colorado, you were all I could think of. Even when playing with the animals, I was
wishing you were there with me playing with them, too. And then when we finally left this morning, the entire trip was hell even though every mile we
traveled was another mile I was closer to you."
She smiles, mostly with her eyes, her lips a thin upturned crescent that keeps her teeth hidden. She kisses me again, a kiss that starts as slow
and lingering and goes from there. Both of us are sitting on the edge of the bed, her hand on the side of my face, mine on the small of her back. I can feel
the tight contours beneath the tips of my fingers, can taste the berry gloss on her lips. I pull her to me. I feel as though I can't get close enough to her
despite our bodies being pressed tightly together. My hand running up her back, the smooth porcelain feel of her skin. Her hands through my hair, both of
us breathing heavily. We fall back on the bed, on our sides. Our eyes are closed. I keep opening mine to see her. The room is dark aside from the
moonlight entering through the windows. She catches me watching her and we stop kissing. She puts her forehead to mine and stares at me.
She places her hand on the back of my neck and pulls me to her and all at once we're kissing again. Entangled. Meshed. Our arms tightly around
the other. My mind clear of every plague that normally visits and every thought of other planets, my mind free of the hunt and pursuit by the Mogadorians.
Sarah and I on the bed kissing each other, falling into each other. Nothing else in the world matters.
And then the door opens in the living room. We both jump up.
"Henri's home," I say.
We stand and quickly brush the wrinkles from our clothes, smiling, a secret shared between us that makes us giggle as we walk out of the
bedroom holding hands. Henri is setting a bag of groceries on the kitchen table.
"Hi, Henri," Sarah says.
He smiles at her. She lets go of my hand and walks over and hugs him and they start talking about her trip to Colorado. I walk outside to get the
rest of the groceries. I breathe in the cold air, try to shake my limbs free of the tension of what just happened, and the disappointment of Henri coming
home when he did. I'm still breathing heavily as I grab the rest of the groceries and carry them into the house. Sarah is telling Henri about some of the cats
that were at the shelter.
"And you didn't bring one of them back for us?"
"Now Henri, you know I would have happily brought you one if you had told me," Sarah says, her arms folded across her chest with her hip cocked
to the side.
He smiles at her. "I know you would've."
Henri puts the groceries away and Sarah and I head out into the frigid air to go for a walk before her mom arrives to take her home. Bernie Kosar
comes with us. He takes the lead and runs ahead. Sarah and I hold hands, walking through the yard, the temperature slightly above freezing. The snow
melting, the ground wet and muddy. Bernie Kosar disappears for a time into the woods and then comes running back out. His bottom half is filthy.
"What time is your mom coming?" I ask.
She looks at her watch. "Twenty minutes."
I nod. "I'm so happy you're back."
"Me too."
We go to the edge of the woods but it is too dark for us to enter. We instead walk along the perimeter of the yard, hand in hand, occasionally
stopping to kiss with the moon and stars as witnesses. Neither of us talks about what just happened, but it's obvious that it is on both of our minds. When
we make the first lap Sarah's mother pulls into the drive. She's ten minutes early. Sarah runs up and hugs her. I walk inside and grab Sarah's bag. After we
say good-bye, I walk to the road and watch their taillights recede in the distance. I stand outside for a while and then Bernie Kosar and I go back into the
house. Henri is halfway through making dinner. I give the dog a bath. When I'm finished dinner is ready.
We sit at the table and eat, not a word passing between us. I can't stop thinking of her. I stare blankly into my plate. I'm not hungry but I try to force
the food down anyhow. I manage a few bites, and then I push the plate out in front of me and I sit there in silence.
"So are you going to tell me?" Henri asks.
"Tell you what?"
"What's on your mind."
I shrug. "I don't know."
He nods, goes back to eating. I close my eyes. I can still smell Sarah on the collar of my shirt, can still feel her hand on my cheek. Her lips to mine,
the texture of her hair when I ran my hand through it. All I can think about is what she must be doing, and how I wish she were still here.
"Do you think it's possible for us to be loved?" I ask.
"What are you talking about?"
"By humans. Do you think we can be loved, like, truly be loved by them?"
"I think they can love us the way they love each other, especially if they don't know what we are, but I don't think it's possible to love a human the
way you would love a Loric," he says.
"Why?"
"Because deep down we're different from them. And we love differently. One of the gifts our planet gave us is to love completely. Without jealousy
or insecurity or fear. Without pettiness. Without anger. You may have strong feelings for Sarah, but they aren't what you would feel for a Loric girl."
"There aren't many Loric girls available for me."
"Even more reason to be careful with Sarah. At some point, if we last long enough, we will need to regenerate our race and repopulate our planet.
Obviously you're a long way from having to worry about that, but I wouldn't count on Sarah being your partner."
"What happens if we try to have children with humans?"
"It's happened many times before. Usually it results in an exceptional and gifted human. Some of the greatest figures in Earth's history were
actually the product of humans and the Loric, including Buddha, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac
Newton, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein. Many of the ancient Greek gods, who most people believe were mythological, were actually the children
of the humans and Loric, mainly because it was much more common then for us to be on this planet and we were helping them develop civilizations.
Aphrodite, Apollo, Hermes, and Zeus were all real, and had one Loric parent."
"So it is possible."
"It was possible. In our current situation it's reckless and impractical. In fact, though I don't know her number, or have any idea where she is, one of
the children who came to Earth with us was the daughter of your parents' best friends. They used to joke that it was fate that the two of you would end up
together. They may well have been right."
"So what do I do?"
"Enjoy your time with Sarah, but don't get too attached to her, and don't let her get too attached to you."
"Really?"
"Trust me, John. If you never believe another word I say, then believe that."
"I believe all the words you say even if I don't want to."
Henri winks at me. "Good," he says.
Afterwards I go into my room and call Sarah. I think about what Henri said to me before I do it, but I can't help myself. I am attached to her. I think
I'm in love with her. We talk for two hours. It is midnight when the call ends. Then I lie in bed smiling through the darkness.
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