Now in the arctic night
I can almost suppose you did not die,
But are somewhere walking between
The icons of ice, pensively
like a priest,
Wrapped in the cold holiness of snow,
of your own memory.
Gwendolyn MacEwen, Terror and Erebus
Joel slipped under on the plane and didn't emerge again until they were landing at the school. The passage of time shocked him, as it so often did. He had tried, really tried to fight his way out of the fog and couldn't do it.
It was impossible, sometimes, like trying to remember the answer to a hard question on a test. You knew, knew that you had learned the answer, that it was lurking somewhere in your brain, that it was desperately important, that everyone expected it, that there was no reason not to know -- and yet there was nothing to grasp at or hold onto. Being invisible was as easy as forgetting.
And in the bottom of that forgetting place, it was as if his brain didn't work in the usual way. He couldn't see anything but whiteness, couldn't feel his body, couldn't hear properly. Voices, sometimes; he heard voices as if he were half-asleep, and everything seemed wrapped in wool, or snow. Underneath the ice. He remembered the felt-board pictures from school of all the animals hibernating. Bears in dens, fish still awake under the ice, the frogs and turtles buried in mud. Elles dorment dans la boue, au-dessous de la glace. That thought in particular weirded him out as a kid -- being buried in mud, asleep, under the water and under the ice. But that was how it felt, now, when he went under to the bottom. The snow was so thick it held him immobile, in a stupor he couldn't break.
The kids at St. Rita's had all thought that he must walk through the walls and sneak around the city while he was invisible, but unfortunately, it wasn't true. Well, okay, once he had gone downtown and slipped into a movie theatre. And had a panic attack and never did it again, which made the whole thing a special shade of sad. But mostly, when he was at the bottom, he just sat in his room, staring at nothing, unable to move or think. The state could last for days, and Joel was usually violently ill when he finally emerged from those marathon invisibility sessions.
People got angry with him -- teachers, doctors and nurses, his own parents. Everyone knew how easily he crumbled, so they tried to hide it, but Joel could hear it in the things they said to him: I wish you wouldn't do that while I'm talking. You have to take better care of yourself. You're resisting therapy by withdrawing like that.
Father Gilles said Joel had more control than he let on, that he must be getting some benefit from disappearing all the time. Joel thought that the payoff, if there was one, had to be as intangible as he was. To not be seen or felt, or even heard, was only good if you didn't need anything, if you weren't scared or alone or bored. Bored, that was a big one, although it seemed so petty. But when you couldn't even read because your hands passed through the books, boredom hurt.
The trip to Westchester passed in the whiteness, sleep and waking reality merging together as he overheard the doctor and the professor talking together. Sometimes it seemed like they were addressing him, but he couldn't answer. He dreamed that he fell through the plane and was speeding toward the earth, but woke up before he could find out if he would die on impact or just pass through the ground itself. That sort of thing never happened in real life. Thank God that it doesn't, Father Gilles used to say. Why do you think that is?
Joel didn't know. And in the bottom, he didn't ask. Nothingness, he was nothing at all and there were no questions there.
But when at last he felt himself rising, he thanked God, as he always did. Reality took shape around him, like a sentence you read in a textbook and understand only after staring at it for a minute or two.
Dr. Grey led him off the plane. A young man in dark red sunglasses was waiting in the hangar, and Jean ran to kiss him. It was the sort of embrace that happens after an uneasy reconciliation -- Jean wore a slightly guilty look, as if happy to see him but worried that something would ruin the moment, and the young man hesitated for a moment before putting his arms around her.
The professor smiled. "Joel, this is Scott Summers. He teaches math here at the school, among other things. Scott, this is Joel McCree."
The young man reached out a hand, and Joel prayed he would stay solid long enough to shake it. He did, miraculously, although he thought he let go too quickly, which embarrassed him enough to make him flicker.
Summers had a stern look to him, although the glasses made his expression hard to read. He smiled when he glanced at Jean, though, and Joel re-evaluated him -- not a genuine hard-ass, just someone willing to take a tough stance occasionally. The principal at his old school had been like that; Joel remembered waking up from a blackout in his office, back before the mutation had manifested, and getting off with a warning about overexertion and a carrot muffin from the principal's own lunch.
Comparatively speaking, those had been pretty good days.
"You look beat," said Summers, leading Joel to the elevator with Xavier and Jean. "I'll let you have a proper rest as soon as we get you settled in your room."
The room was small, at least compared to his room at home. Which was now very far away, he realised. But it was private. "Usually we have kids room together, but the professor said you would probably find that too uncomfortable, with your...emotional issues."
Joel badly wanted to say, It's okay, I can handle rooming with other people, but he couldn't. And everyone knew it. They had tried it at St. Rita's, and the stress caused a weird episode of paranoia that verged on the psychotic, but Joel was convinced that if he just tried harder, he'd be able to avoid that. No one else agreed.
Summers explained the phone and the keys, a practiced spiel. "And, well, I hear that your other things will be shipped soon, so there's not much here. Anything you need, just ask."
"Thanks. I'm okay." Joel crossed the room to look at the view from the window, the pasture and horses. Something nice to look at for when he fell into it.
"Dinner's at seven tonight, but I'll get one of the students to call you, in case you fall asleep."
No escaping that, then.
Summers didn't leave, and Joel turned to look at him. He was in his twenties, athletic but slim, conservatively dressed in khakis and a navy blue polo shirt. Like some of the students who worked for Joel's father, at home, but less of that I'm so fucking successful vibe that made those kids so sketchy. "I'm not a politician, just dressed like one." One of Dad's friends, a cabinet minister, said that to constituents sometimes to get a laugh.
This guy wasn't like that, Joel thought -- he hadn't made any stupid jokes yet, or tried to be his best friend, or made some snide remark like "Don't you ever talk?" The climbers all did that, or they were obsequious and full of fake sympathy. He especially hated Amanda, who had been an annoying intern with his father and then invaded the house, with her bullshit overpaid job answering the phone and the door. She was oppressively normal, and she always looked at Joel as if he were a child molester rather than a mutant mental patient.
No, Summers didn't give off that sort of vibe, but he still seemed cautious, overly concerned. "Are you okay eating with other people? I guarantee no one will think you're weird here, if you're worried about that."
"I'm not. It isn't that."
"What is it?" Summers shut the door and sat down in the chair by the bed, as if ready for a long talk, and that was the last thing Joel needed. It was too much, just too much for right now. He needed to be alone just to recover from all this talking and meeting and shaking hands, and Summers wouldn't leave and there was no way to get rid of him, and if he didn't stop (not really staring but) looking, Joel was going to completely come apart.
The fog was threatening him, and he saw his own hands becoming indistinct like a TV picture in bad weather. He couldn't stop it. "I'm really okay, I swear, I just need some sleep. Please."
Then, like a power outage, a few seconds of nothing. When the world came back, he was on the floor, shaking, and Summers was bent over him.
"Joel? All right, I think we need to take you down to the infirmary. It's two floors down. We're going to take the elevator at the end of the hall, and Jean will meet us with a gurney. You just have to walk to the end of the hall with me. Can you do that?"
Pull yourself to-fucking-gether, you little shit. Joel managed to make it to the elevator, leaning on Scott. The nothingness was pressing on him, feathering the edges of his vision and making him feel like he was about to faint. Maybe he was, maybe that was what had happened. It couldn't be the blackouts again, could it? Or the seizures? God, not the seizures.
Dr. Grey was indeed waiting when the elevator doors opened. "What happened?"
"I don't know. He just lost consciousness suddenly."
And then, just as Dr. Grey was about to ask him something, the white closed in. He could feel the vast blank of it, all the distance there was to fall. Like waiting for a needle, or like the beginning of a bad headache. It attacked him like winter, a shrieking bitter wind. Everything disappeared, everything.
He awoke in a hospital bed, and thought for a moment that he was back in the Royal Ottawa, but then he saw Dr. Xavier nodding off over a book, his chair parked by the door.
Joel let out a long breath, then began to cough. That happened sometimes, when he came out of it. Dr. Xavier started at the sound, then smiled and wheeled close to the bed.
"Well! I'm very glad to see you again, Joel."
"I'm so--" Joel tried to catch his breath. "I'm so sorry, sir."
"Listen to me, young man, from now on you are not to apologise unless someone asks you to do so. You haven't done anything wrong; if and when you do, we will let you know."
Joel just nodded, to keep from apologising again. "What time is it?"
"Let's see...oh, goodness, it's eleven-thirty. At night. Today is Thursday. You had --" and he suddenly held up one hand, and Joel felt the blast of horror in his brain subside into calm. Calm like a -- like the greenness of the garden at home, all the leaves of the lilac trees shiny with rain. "You seem to have fainted while speaking with Scott, most likely from hunger and stress, and then lost control of your power. Which, I might add, is nothing to be ashamed of. It seems that your disappearances are reactions to stress, but we would like to test that hypothesis."
There were always tests. "I know."
Dr. Xavier smiled, his eyes crinkling. "We can discuss this further in the morning, but for now...I believe some roast chicken from dinner and bowl of soup would do nicely."
There were always tests, but usually they were a bit more professional-looking. After a brisk examination in the morning by Dr. Grey, who forced a couple of cans of chocolate Ensure on him, Joel found himself in a different lab, hooked up to a few machines that had a dangerously homemade look, all spliced wires and electrical tape. Drifts of papers covered the countertops, and in one corner, a turtle slept in a large aquarium.
Dr. McCoy was not much more comforting. He was enormous, with disproportionately large hands and feet, but Joel had seen mutants that looked even more outlandish, at St. Rita's, so that didn't disturb him. The bigger issue was that he came into the room talking and had probably come out of the womb the same way. Joel was never at ease with talkative people.
Well, never at ease with people, period, but the chatterboxes were still worse.
"Sorry about the wait! I was looking at Jean's results. The MRI wasn't entirely necessary, I thought, since we had the EEGs, but you know how she loves to play with the machine. EEGs just aren't as sexy. And you are our invisible man? What a shame for the ladies! Henry McCoy, resident science nerd. There are other science nerds here, of course, but I am their king. You can call me Hank, though -- humanities nerds aren't subject to my despotic reign, and your transcript suggests you belong to that camp. Do you mind that I peeked? I'm always interested in the state of the education system, especially in other countries. Your Latin and Greek marks brought a tear to my eye. But I digress, per usual. Shall we get going, Charles?"
Dr. Xavier turned to Joel and said, "I am going to release my control of your emotions now."
The green rain calm faded away. Joel tried to maintain it by himself, staring at the white walls rather than at the other faces in the room. Hank was perched on a stool by the biggest machine, taking notes with one eye on the machines' readouts. "My, look at that baseline stress! Some good news, before we get started -- it might interest you both to know that the Man Who Wasn't There here was diagnosed as epileptic some years ago, but Jean's tests and my own examination of his medical records would suggest that's not the case."
"I'm not epileptic?" Joel sat up. "But I had seizures. Or I used to."
"Prior to your manifestation? I don't doubt it. You survived quite a bout of meningitis as a child, and some seizures afterwards would be par for the course. Since then? Your EEGs and the MRI scan don't show any sign of epilepsy, Jean says. Your brain waves are certainly bizarre, but no spikes or anything. It could even be that these extreme absences of yours are seizures, as your mutation expresses them. I have no idea. We hope the tests will make that clear. And now...any time you like, Charles."
Dr. Xavier wheeled a bit closer. "Joel, can you try to enter your invisible state now? You don't need to go very far under, just a little bit."
Just a little bit. He could do that. He closed his eyes and heard the beeps of the machines become muffled. When he opened his eyes, he was nothing, empty space. Hank was scribbling wildly.
"And you can sense nothing, Charles?"
"Not a thing," the professor said. "Joel, can you still speak to us?"
"I think so." He hated the faint sound of his voice, hated to see the way no one knew which direction to look in.
Hank tapped his pen against the pad for a moment, then said, "Would you be so kind as to deepen the state, if you can? And please keep talking. I'm interested to see if the volume changes as the state deepens."
"What should I say?" Deeper and deeper. A long way to go until he reached the bottom, but still...
"Try reciting something for us. They do still teach students to memorise, don't they? Something longish?"
That was one request Joel could meet. In school, before he had to leave, before he started to disappear, he had been legendary for his memory. Not photographic; he could memorise long chunks of text with ease, but recalling diagrams was hard. Teachers always told him not to regurgitate material, but the kids offered to pay him if he would let them cheat off his paper -- the only time they ever paid attention to him, and they always went back to ignoring him after he refused.
After he was pulled out of school and put in the hospital, he used the long poems to keep his mind occupied when he couldn't move. He chose the longest one he knew.
"I was spawned from the glacier
A thousand miles due north
Beyond Cape Chidley..."
It was long, nine pages in the anthology where he'd found it, and the words crashed and rolled. As he spoke, reciting with his eyes closed, the woollen nothingness closed around him; perhaps this had been a bad choice.
Only the white sun, circling the white sky.
Only the wind screaming perpetually.
His voice gave out then. Not like going hoarse after yelling at a rock concert; there was just no feeling in his throat, no sound. His vision blurred -- the white walls and black countertops, yes, but not the handles on the cupboards or the sheen of the glassware. Xavier and Hank were out of focus.
But he could still think. He said the words to himself, even though no one could hear him.
And then the night --
The long night, naked, high over the roof of the world,
Where time seemed frozen in the cold of space...
"Anything?"
"He's awake, by these readings. And we know he's here; the cords haven't moved. Even if he'd phased through them the electrodes would have fallen."
"But it isn't like Kitty's phasing, you said?"
"No, you're right, I misspoke. This is -- did you hear that?"
Pause. "No."
"I thought I heard him."
And sharp, small lights in rows,
I lay a ghost of menace chill and still,
A shape pearl-pale and monstrous, off to leeward,
Blurring the dim horizon line.
A drift of white silence -- where had his mind been? The last bit, the dim horizon line. Ninth verse-paragraph: day dragged on day, / And then came fog, / By noon, blind-white...
Mutterings; he couldn't make out words. Then:
"Oho, wakey-wakey. He's back into alpha."
It was like the hospital, almost, hearing his parents chatting by the bed, talking about him because they were worried but not realising he could hear. I just wish he would go out and do things with other boys, you know? Too heavy, too dense to be able to speak.
No, he had to wake up. Had to get out of this. What time was it? How long had he been out? How long, Catiline, will you abuse our patience?
"Did you hear that?"
"I did. The first Catilinarian -- aha, that was a flicker."
And then, miraculously, the light of the room flooded over him and Hank was removing the electrodes, his hands gentle despite their size. "Welcome back, Mr. McCree. No need to shake like that. I'm not going to hurt you."
"It isn't that. You don't know. It's so horrible."
"Joel, I'm sorry." The professor reaching out toward his mind, like an optometrist's flashlight in the darkness. "But now that we know more, we can help you."
"No, you can't!" For once he didn't fade out as soon as he got angry. He reached for more, for a way to say what he wanted to, but the words didn't come, so he just repeated himself. "You can't, you can't at all."
The hands curling back, concerned adult looks, everything is going to be all right, Joel, and no it wouldn't. Never will it not. The world was swimming, not the way it did when he was fading out -- just swimming, swelling with heat and getting ready to burst all over him, like that tray of homemade jam that had broken and scalded him once. Jars shattered on the floor, one moment before the pain kicked in, that second of utter resignation.
He put his hands to his eyes and it felt wrong to come back from all that arctic whiteness and still be himself, himself and not someone else, but no one understood that. It was all some horrible mistake, he should have been dead years ago. Dead and not floating back to the surface like this --
"That is enough!" the professor snapped, mind and voice both loud.
Hank jumped. Probably the whole mansion heard it, but it was like yelling at a freight train. It didn't do anything. Joel was buckling under the pain, and anyone would. Anyone would but he gave in sooner. Wordless pain cut into his head like a toothache. It wasn't the mutation; it was the knowledge that everyone had to stop lying and saying things would improve -- it was all wasted effort, and they would have to cut him off, throw his body into the woods to rot. Dors dans la boue. If it were possible, if only it were, if only it could happen sudden as a shot. He saw the professor double over, and knew that he was hurting people again, but nothing could stop it.
"Hank, give it to him, please!"
And then, thank God, thank God, the needle.
"I don't believe in sedating patients," Charles said, "Ordinarily. Not for...not for that."
The boy was laid out on the infirmary bed, still in drugged sleep. He was an unencouraging chalky colour, gaunt and wan. Henry had him on an IV, since dehydration was increasingly a concern as well as malnutrition, and it was true that the mere presence of a tube in the arm made a person look sicker than he was.
But the unpleasant truth was that Joel should have been awake, talking, maybe eating something. How much of his life was the boy missing? It had been foolish to let him...no, to ask him to descend into that mindless state of invisibility. Joel would be even more reluctant to use his power deliberately in the future.
Hank rubbed the back of his neck, and Charles knew that it had been a long day for them both. "There was no good reason for him to suffer like that, and you know it. If he had been in pain from kidney stones, you wouldn't have thought twice about whether he should be medicated."
"This is different. I ordered it because he was hurting me, not because he was in pain. He's a loud broadcaster. Perhaps even some latent telepathic powers. But I should have been prepared for that. Of course he would panic upon reappearing. I didn't see it coming."
"Charles--" Hank shook his head. "I don't want to debate this again."
"I don't believe in drugging people when what they need is support."
"Get some rest, Charles, please."
Hank left, and after a few moments, Charles followed.
Scott was waiting by the elevator, trying not to look worried. "Professor! You're all right? How is he?"
"Asleep," said Hank. "At last."
"What did you find out? Jean was telling me about her results, but there wasn't much there that we didn't already know."
Hank brightened a bit. "Well, we're already running circles around Dr. Visineau and crew. It isn't a telepathic illusion of disappearance. Energy manipulation may be a plausible explanation, but the most intriguing theory, if I do say so myself since I came up with it, is that he's actually disappearing to another dimension, if you will. My reasoning--"
"In the morning, Hank." Charles had a headache.
How had the situation got so out of control? He had treated other students who were as sick as Joel -- Jean herself had probably been worse, although to some extent vegetative symptoms were easier to deal with than violent panic; there was less chance of the patient acting out suddenly. But he was able to feel Jean, to observe how her mind had twisted on itself and collapsed. There was something there to unravel, and he could get a grip on her.
The brief telepathic glimpses he was getting now of Joel were not enough. The files from Visineau weren't enough, due to the man's religious prejudices and inability to understand the pressures on a young mutant. If Joel would be able to last ten minutes in therapy without disappearing it would be a miracle, and even then, personality disorders were hard to work with. And that would not be enough.
His room was dark. Charles suddenly became aware not only of the headache, but of tight shoulders and a stomach full of dread. He thought of the things his mother used to say: it will all come out in the wash.
Quotes and Notes: The poem Joel recites is "The Iceberg", by Sir Charles G.D. Roberts (known to CanLit students as "Sir Charles God Damn Roberts"), a nineteenth-century Canadian poet.
"Elles dorment dans la boue, au-dessous de la glace." - Translated: "They [the frogs and turtles] sleep in the mud, underneath the ice." Joel was in Immersion, and like most students educated in French in their early years, occasionally remembers in French rather than in English.
Sharp-eyed CanRock fans will also notice "never will it not", a typically fractured piece of O'Hara grammar from the same album quoted in Chapter 1.