XXI
TEN YEARS AGO
LOCKLAND UNIVERSITY
During their freshman year, before Eli had ever set foot on campus, Angie had been drawn to Victor. In some ways they were opposites—Angie didn’t seem to take anything seriously, and Victor didn’t seem to take anything lightly—but in more ways they were alike; both young, dangerously smart, and lacking in patience when it came to the usual college crowd and their juvenile reaction to the sudden freedoms from parental restraint. Because of their shared sentiments, Victor and Angie both found themselves in constant need of an out, a reliable escape from situations they’d rather not be in, people they’d rather not be with.
And so, sitting in the comfort food kitchen in LIDS one day, they devised a fairly rudimentary code.
Save me.
The code was understood to be used sparingly, but always respected. Save first, ask questions later. When texted, along with an address, it meant that one desperately needed the other to bail them out, be it from a party or a study session or a bad date. Victor himself never had the luxury of a date with Angie, bad or otherwise, unless you counted the food they sometimes grabbed after bailing each other out—which Victor did. Nights spent in the same burger joint off campus, splitting shakes. He preferred chocolate but she always wanted some awful concoction, all swirled flavors and toppings, and in the end he didn’t really care because he’d never remember what it tasted like anyway, only how the cold of it made Angie’s lips redder, and the way their noses almost touched whenever they tried to drink at the same time, and how from that close up he could see the flecks of green in her eyes. He’d pick at his fries and tell her about the idiots in his study session. She would laugh, and spoon out the last of her shake, and recount how awkward her date had been. Victor would roll his eyes as she ran through the particular offenses, and think of how he would have done things differently, and of how thankful he was that someone—anyone—had pushed Angie Knight into wanting to be saved.
And by him.
Save me.
It had been a year and a half since Victor had thought to use that code. The last time had been before Eli—and certainly before Eli and Angie became a fused entity—but she still came to save him.
She pulled up in the frat’s parking lot in her hatchback, right to the spot where Victor was waiting after half climbing and half falling from the same window through which he’d thrown his parents’ book. And for a moment, one very small moment, after he climbed into the car and before he explained, it had been like freshman year again, just the two of them escaping a bad night, and he wanted so badly to let her drive to their old burger joint. They would slump into a booth, and he would tell her that parties hadn’t gotten any better, and she would laugh, and somehow it would make everything okay.
But then she asked where Eli was, and the moment passed. Victor closed his eyes, and asked her to drive him to the engineering labs.
“They’re closed,” she said even as she guided the car in that direction.
“You have a swipe card.”
“What’s this about?”
Victor surprised himself by telling her the truth. She knew about Eli’s thesis, but he told her about the most recent discovery, about the role of NDEs. He told her about his own desire to test the theory. He told her about his plan. The only thing he didn’t tell her was that Eli had already successfully done it. That he held on to for a moment. And to her credit, Angie listened. She drove, knuckles whitening on the wheel, lips pressed into a line, and let Victor talk. He finished as she was pulling into the parking lot of the engineering labs, and she didn’t say anything until she’d parked, and shut the engine off, and shifted in her seat to face him.
“Have you lost your mind?” she asked.
Victor managed a tight smile. “I don’t think so.”
“Let me get this straight,” she said. The short red hair framed her face, frizzing in the winter weather. “You think that if you die, and manage to come back, you’ll turn into what, one of the X-Men?”
Victor laughed. His throat was dry. “I was hoping for Magneto.” The attempt at levity failed, the look between shock and horror and annoyance still firmly scrawled across Angie’s face. “Look,” he said, sobering, “I know it sounds crazy—”
“Of course it does. Because it is crazy. I’m not going to help you off yourself.”
“I don’t want to die.”
“You just told me you did.”
“Well, I don’t want to stay dead.”
She rubbed her eyes, rested her forehead for a moment on the steering wheel, and let out a groan.
“I need you, Angie. If you don’t help me—”
“Don’t you dare spin it that way—”
“—I’ll just end up trying by myself again—”
“Again?”
“—and doing something stupid I won’t recover from.”
“We can get you help.”
“I’m not suicidal.”
“No, you’re delusional.”
Victor tipped his head back against the seat. His pocket buzzed. Eli. He ignored it, knowing it would be a matter of moments before Eli contacted Angie instead. He didn’t have much time. Certainly not enough to convince her to help him.
“Why can’t you just...” mumbled Angie into the steering wheel, “...I don’t know, OD? Something peaceful?”
“The pain’s important,” explained Victor, inwardly wincing. She wasn’t so upset at what he was doing, then. Only that he was involving her. “Pain and fear,” he added. “They’re both factors. Hell, Eli killed himself in an ice bath.”
“What?”
A grim, triumphant smile itched on his lips as he played the card. Victor had known that Eli wouldn’t have told Angie yet. He was counting on it. The betrayal showed in her eyes. She got out, slammed the door, and sunk back against it. Victor followed, rounding the car. He drew tracks in the snow as he went. Through the partially tinted glass he could see her phone on the driver’s seat. A red light flashed on its front. Victor turned his attention toward Angie.
“When did he do it?” she asked.
“Last night.”
She looked at the film of snow on the concrete between them.
“But I came by this morning, Vic. He looked fine.”
“Exactly. Because it worked. It will work.”
She groaned. “This is crazy. You’re crazy.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“Why would he...”
“He didn’t tell you anything?” prodded Victor, shivering in his thin jacket.
“He’s been weird lately,” she mumbled. Then her attention narrowed. “What you’re asking me to do... it’s crazy. It’s torture.”
“Angie...”
She looked up, eyes blazing. “I don’t even believe you. What if it goes wrong?”
“It won’t.”
“What if it does?”
His phone buzzed angrily in his pocket.
“It can’t,” he said as calmly as he could. “I took a pill.”
Her eyebrows knitted.
“Eli and I,” he began to explain, “we isolated some of the adrenal compounds that kick in during life-or-death situations. We fabricated them. Essentially the pill acts like a trigger. A jump start.”
It was all a lie, but he could see that its feigned existence impacted Angie. Science, even completely fictional science, held sway. Angie swore, and tucked her hands into her jacket pockets.
“Fuck, it’s cold,” she muttered, turning toward the building’s front doors. The engineering lab itself was a problem, Victor knew. Security cameras. If something did go wrong, there would be footage.
“Where’s Eli now?” she asked as she swiped her access card. “If you’re in this together, why are you here with me?”
“He’s busy relishing his new status as a god,” said Victor bitterly, following her through the key-coded entry, scanning the ceiling for the red light of recording equipment. “Look, all you have to do is use the electricity to turn me off. Then turn me back on. The pill will do the rest.”
“I study currents and the effects on devices, Victor, not people.”
“A body is a machine,” he said quietly. She led the way into one of the electrical engineering labs and flicked a switch. Half the lights turned on. Equipment was stacked along one wall, a variety of machines, some that looked medical, others technical. The room was full of tables, long and thin but large enough to rest a body on. He could feel Angie waver beside him.
“We’d have to plan it out,” she said. “Give me a couple weeks, and maybe I could modify some of the equipment in here for—”
“No,” said Victor, crossing to the machines. “It has to be tonight.”
She looked aghast, but before she could protest, he took the lie he’d started, and ran with it.
“That pill I told you about... I already took it. It’s like a switch, whether on or off depends on what state the body’s in.” He met her gaze, held it, and sent up a silent prayer that she didn’t know half as much about hypothetical adrenal compounds as she did about circuits. “If I don’t do this soon, Angie”—he winced for good measure—“the compound will kill me.”
She paled.
He held his breath.
His phone vibrated again.
“How long?” she asked at last.
He took a step toward her, letting one of his legs nearly buckle under some imaginary strain. He caught himself on the edge of a table with a grimace, and found her gaze as the buzzing in his pocket stopped.
“Minutes.”
* * *
“This is mad,” whispered Angie over and over as she helped bind Victor’s legs to the table. He worried that even now, with the machines around them humming to life and her busy winding the rubber strap around his ankles, she might back out, so he doubled up in fake pain, curled in on himself.
“Victor,” she said urgently. “Victor, are you okay?” There was pain and panic in her voice and he had to fight the urge to stop, to soothe her, and promise it would be okay.
Instead he nodded, and said through gritted teeth, “Hurry.”
She rushed to finish the knots, showed him the rubber-coated bars on the table where he could put his hands. Her halo of red hair had always looked electrified, but tonight it rose around her cheeks. Victor thought it made her look haunting. Beautiful. The first day they met, she’d looked like this. It had been hot for September; her face was flushed, and her hair had a life of its own. He’d looked up from his textbook and saw her, standing at the entrance to LIDS, clutching a folder to her front as her eyes wandered over the room in an appraising way—lost but unconcerned. And then they landed on Victor at his table with his book, and her face lit up. Not full-wattage light, but a steady glow as she crossed the room, and slid without preamble into the seat across from him. They didn’t even talk, that first day. Just passed the same hour in the same space. Angie had later referred to the two of them as concordant frequencies.
“Victor.” Her voice saying his name drew him back to the cold table in the lab.
“I want you to know,” she said as she began to fix sensors to his chest, “that I will never, ever forgive you for this.”
He shivered under her touch. “I know.”
His coat and shirt were cast off on a chair, the contents of his pockets set on top. Amid the keys and a wallet and a pre-med lab badge, sat his phone, the ringer turned off. It blinked angrily at him, flashing first blue and then red and then blue again, and so on, signaling it had both voice mail and texts waiting.
Victor smiled grimly. Too late, Eli. It’s my turn.
Angie was standing by a machine chewing the nails off one of her hands. The other rested on a set of dials. The machine itself was whirring and whining and blinking. A language Victor didn’t know, which scared him.
Her eyes caught on something, and she took hold of it, crossing back to him. It was a strip of rubber.
“You know what to do,” said Victor, surprised by the calm in his voice. Everything beneath his skin was trembling. “Start at the low setting, and go up.”
“Turn off, turn on,” she whispered, before holding the rubber above his mouth. “Bite down on this.”
Victor took a last deep breath, and forced his mouth to open. The strap was between his teeth, his fingers testing their grip on the small table bars. He could do this. Eli held himself under. Victor could, too.
Angie was back at the machine. Their eyes met, and for an instant everything else vanished—the lab and the humming machines and the existence of EO and Eli and the years since Victor and Angie had shared a milkshake—and he was just happy to have her looking at him. Seeing him.
And then she closed her eyes, and turned the dial a single click, and the only thing Victor could think of was the pain.
* * *
Victor fell back against the table in a cold sweat.
He couldn’t breathe.
He gasped, expecting a pause, a moment to recover. Expecting Angie to change her mind, to stop, to give up.
But Angie turned the dial up.
The need to be sick was overcome by the need to scream and he bit into the rubber strap until he thought his teeth would crack but a moan still escaped, and he thought Angie must have heard, and she’d turn the machine off now, but the dial went up again.
And again.
And again.
Victor thought he would black out but before he could, the dial turned up and the spasm of pain brought him back to his body and the table and the room and he couldn’t escape.
The pain kept him there.
The pain tied him down as it shot through every nerve in every limb.
He tried to spit out the strap but he couldn’t open his mouth. His jaw was locked.
The dial went up.
Every time Victor thought the dial couldn’t go any further, the pain couldn’t get any worse, and then it did and it did and it did, and Victor could hear himself screaming even though the strap was still between his teeth and he could feel every nerve in his body breaking and he wanted it to stop. He wanted it to stop.
He begged Angie but the words were cut short by the strap and the dial turning up again and the sound in the air like cracking ice and shredding paper and static.
The darkness blinked around him and he wanted it because it meant the pain would stop but he didn’t want to die and he was afraid that the darkness was death and so he pulled violently back from it.
He felt himself crying.
The dial went up.
His hands ached where they gripped the table bars, cramped in place.
The dial went up.
He wished for the first time in his life that he believed in God.
The dial went up.
He felt his heart skip a beat, felt it grind and then double.
The dial went up.
He heard a machine warn, then alarm.
The dial went up.
And everything stopped.