Rainsons

The way his eyes jump from building to building, looking for faces that aren’t there—were never there, it tears at my throat. He swears he can hear them. He swears he can hear them talking, sharing secrets hidden in the ground, lingering. Sometimes he opens and closes his mouth, like he’s thinking of something to say back. Mostly he just stands there, mangling his hair with savage fingers, and cries.

His hands are calloused and frost-bitten when he presses them to my ribs and tells me to forget it. I stand behind the screen door and wait as he listens to his horizons. I want to tell him to come inside and take his medicine like the doctors asked, to try and get some sleep, but I just pretend it doesn’t matter anymore. When the sun creeps behind the trees and the fog settles, he turns to me.

“It’s just a storm, Noah,” I remind him. “It’s just another storm passing through.”

He nods compliantly, but he doesn’t believe me. He lifts his head to the sky and clamps his eyes shut, dry lips pursed and anxious. The rain makes him nervous; he says it drowns out their voices, and when he doesn’t have their stories, he doesn’t have anything. There’s a blaze of lightning and I watch him count the numbers: one, two, three, four—and then a clash of thunder causes my bones to quake.

Between the howling of the wind, he holds up four fingers for me to see before dropping them to his side. His limbs contort and he pulls the thin cotton shirt over his head, his chest heaving like it always does on nights like this. He fumbles with his belt before pulling it from his waist and tossing it aside. Thick blue jeans fall to the dust and he steps forward, nakedly embracing the storm.

“Come on inside, you’re gonna catch pneumonia or something.”

He doesn’t move. He says this might be the one, the night when he can hear them over the howling of the wind and the rhythm of the rain. For the second time he looks at me and moves his mouth with the seconds—one, two. Just two miles until the tempest breaches our home, ripping us apart again and again and again.

The first time he heard them talking, I didn’t say anything about it. It was better to imagine he was playing make-believe like he used to do in school, or that he would get better on his own. That was the time when he spent a week on the front porch, tracing pictures into the dirt because he said this kind of understanding was beyond words. He didn’t sleep anymore and only drank black coffee in the evenings, too afraid he might miss something. Three months later, I took him to the doctors and they told me what was wrong, what they could do to help, but only if he wanted to help himself.

And he didn’t.

He said it was easier to be sick.

He doesn’t take the pills anymore, no matter what we do. He’s started hiding them in his drawers, burying them beneath the garden with his book full of secrets. Sometimes he’ll notice me watching him, but he doesn’t mind. He knows I won’t stop him, not anymore.

People tell me that it will get easier with time, that eventually the episodes will become routine, mundane, even bearable. But they don’t see the way his eyes sit sad and vacant when the stories disappear and they don’t hear the noises he makes in his sleep. Because if they did, they’d know this is more than just a phase or a silly delusion—this is his life, our life—together. There is nothing else anymore, just me and Noah and their voices.

A concurrent snap of thunder and lightning surrounds us and I can tell you word for word what’s going to happen next. He will sink to his knees, scratching at his skull, and allow a primordial screech to escape his lungs. The rain will soak his bare body until he starts to shake and quiver with an infinite melancholy. He will press his ear to the ground, searching for a murmur that never comes.

The rain beats at his bare back, blessed and broken, and those frantic eyes meet mine. For a moment, I question whether tonight could be the exception. Underneath the porch light, I raise my head to the clouds and pray for the first time since junior high. But when I unclasp my hands and cast my eyes to the tacit boy before me, I know there is nobody to hear our pleas.

Neither of us speaks as we walk towards each other, our footsteps crooked and poorly paced. There is no crying or touching, there are no soft condolences or pitying glances. Our breath hangs unevenly in the thickening silence and, at this very moment, I could run. He is offering a solitary opportunity of escape, practically begging me to leave. The look on his face tells me he’s okay with it and I nearly allow myself to move.

“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” I fumble with my swollen sandpaper tongue. He doesn’t say the words, but I can see them sprawled across his limbs.

‘I know.’

Gravity binds my soles, heavy with guilt and alarm, determinately to the ground. But in a swift motion he is beside me, allowing one hand to grip my shoulder and the other to coil around clammy fingers. There are no words when we walk back to the ramshackle building we call home, just the truth, inevitable and inconvenient, sinking in the night.

He sits on the countertop, his bones warped over himself. Half-empty eyes move past my silhouette and focus instead on the telephone wires, stripped from the walls, in a pile of muddled tendons. In the mornings when the city sounds are too much, I wonder how I can stand it. There must have been something I did wrong, something I did to deserve this wretched twist of fate, because I had no intention of living this way.

The rain thins and the clouds pass overhead, leaving us alone with the memory of their stories. He won’t look at me in the evenings when he’s thinking about the voices. He won’t meet my gaze, but I never take my eyes off him, terrified he might leave me in a moment and disappear like the sounds of the storm.

“The guy on the TV says the next one won’t be for a couple of weeks.”

There are things I would change if I could, things I’d try to forget.

“We should really get you a rain coat.”