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The Island lets him come back after all. It lets everyone go home, wherever that is for them, and John isn’t surprised to find himself alone there with Ben. They can talk now. There’s no question Ben won’t answer, and nothing he doesn’t want to know from John. It doesn’t matter that he already knows so much of John’s life. He wants John’s words, his voice, his smiles and his tears. When their truths have all been told, it’s easy to reach for each other. There’s no way to make up for everything they’ve lost and stolen, but it’s not impossible to forgive. To start again. John wakes up.
That dream again. He scoffs at himself, but can’t shake the sensation of Ben’s eyes on him. Like the touch of a heavy hand, sometimes brutal, sometimes seductive, but only open in John’s dreams. He tries to imagine Ben, or anyone, dreaming about him that way. On any other day, he’d laugh out loud. He doesn’t have the energy today. He’ll stay in bed until late afternoon, then run an errand. The hardware store down the street closes at five.
The room is dim, the air musty and stale. He’d open a window, but then there’d be the car exhaust and fresh asphalt from the street below, the smell of earth paved over and forgotten. There’d be the cold, too. Thinking about it makes him feel it, and he draws the covers up to his chin, remembering the hours he spent shivering in the desert after he turned the wheel. He stared at the stars then, trying to anchor himself to one. Trying to stay still enough to keep the pain in his leg quiet without his whole body freezing solid. The glaring streetlights here combine with the smog to make a brownish haze. He hasn’t seen a star in weeks. There’s nothing to hold on to.
He stretches his good leg and looks down at the vague shape of his toes. He wiggles them. This is the one thing that hasn’t been taken from him lately. When he closes his eyes, it’s all happening again. He can hear a jet engine failing, a woman screaming and sobbing, a man crying out in another language. When his toes move, it’s like he’s looking at someone else’s foot. He can see the black shoe next to him, the clean sole that’s never touched the ground. He watches his hand reach for it automatically, feels his knees bend, feels warm sand giving way under his feet. He looks up into the smoky blue sky, half-expecting to see some towering figure he can thank. He gets up slowly and carefully, tests each leg in turn. He doesn’t fall. He doesn’t suddenly wake up. It’s real. The man he’ll be addressing his suicide note to this evening shouts for his help. He gives it, with pure joy. He doesn’t know this miracle hasn’t come for free.
He remembers how dazed he was after the crash, staring at the sea or the trees or his fellow survivors, afraid to move or say too much, or even to sleep. The gift could be taken back at any time, like all the others he’d ever gotten. He waited, sparks under his skin, everything in him screaming to get up and go. He soaked up the rain the others fled from. Food ran short. He showed them his knives and improvised a lecture on boars, afraid they’d see who he’d been last week. Randy’s mocking voice was still fresh in his memory. They were too desperate, too scared to ask a lot of questions. They called him by his last name, let him fall into the role he’d always wanted, the soldier, the hunter, the man of action. He couldn’t have been more grateful. He went out to meet the light in the jungle.
It reached inside him and touched everything, all his fear and failure, all his courage and tenacity. It moved through his memories and saw the faces of everyone who’d ever neglected or mocked or used him, and the one who’d loved him. It found the hunger that had driven him there, with a head full of knowledge he never thought he’d get to use and a suitcase full of knives. It promised him everything he’d ever wanted, with nothing like words. He stood trembling and gasping with awe, letting himself be laid open. It occurred to him that he should be afraid. The others would be, but he didn’t feel it. He only felt the rare joy of being seen. The light left as quickly as it had come. He sank down to the earth, letting it fill his senses. In that moment, he was home. Nothing else mattered.
He could hear his own heartbeat pounding in his ears as he lay there, overwhelmed by how clear everything seemed, how strong and sure he felt. Even the miracle on the beach would be meaningless compared to the other things he’d get to feel and see here. He was born for this. He was special. All he had to do was listen and follow. And keep the others from leaving. He gave himself up without a second thought, and lay for a long time on the jungle floor, eyes full of green and blue.
As he made his kills, he remembered learning how to hunt. There was something eternal in all those cold mornings, those endless green fields. It was easy to forget the crowded, ugly city he’d come from a few hours ago, the rattling car that had carried him out of it. He was just a man walking with his father, weapon in hand, stalking prey. He might have done this thousands of years ago. He might have known what to call the little surge of power that moved up through the earth to burn in his blood. He didn’t hunt for a long time after Dad gave him up, but he never forgot. He dreamed about it all the time, his feet on living earth, his purpose clear. After he went out the window, the dream was different. He was falling forever, knowing he’d never touch the ground again, but something was always calling him. That power and purpose, that sense of destiny. Walkabout, the orderly had said. It all clicked together in his mind, but flew apart again when they told him he couldn’t do it.
He’d been dead for years before the crash, walking or rolling through the concrete world in a cold and stiffened body, all his blood pooling and turning to jelly. It started moving again in those first days, his heart pumping so strongly he could feel it in his toes. Everything felt so good, the weight of the knife in his hand, the tangy fruit in his mouth, the soft cotton clothes that brushed against his skin. It was all as hot and bright as lust, but so much bigger. There was something enormous here, something far beyond him, beyond all the little human souls gathered on the beach. He’d only felt the ghost of it in those cold fields, and seen its eye when the light found him. The rest was unimaginable. He could almost hear it sometimes, as a low and steady hum of deep power, or a beating heart full of wisdom, or the rush of winds strong enough to scatter them all to the sea. He reached for it, in dreams and visions, in exhaustion and ecstasy. Sometimes it eluded him, and sometimes it came to live inside him for a while, filling every cell to bursting. He could never get enough. Chasing it was exhilarating and terrifying at once. He was a man in love.
It felt good to be swept up in it and carried along, like wading out into the ocean and floating with the tide. Every so often, it pulled him under. Sometimes it wanted him to pull someone else down with him, or to destroy something they’d put all their hopes into, or to claw his way out of a mass grave all by himself. It could take his legs away from him any time it wanted, or stop speaking to him for no reason at all. He wouldn’t stop believing. He’d prove he was worth something, and it would feel for him. It would be his, as much as he belonged to it. It could never leave him.
He watched the others fight each other and themselves, thrashing around in traps of their own making. Sometimes he could help them out with a few words, a little wisdom he’d picked up here or there. They listened, but most of them kept their distance. That didn’t matter to him, or at least, he didn’t want it to. He watched as they paired off, thought of Helen. He wondered what it would be like to have her there. She would have gotten tired of hearing them all complain, that was for sure. Maybe she would have felt what he felt. She was the one who taught him faith, but he believed too much, in the wrong things. He went chasing after Dad again. He couldn’t blame her for leaving, knowing even as he proposed to her what the answer would be. She deserved better. He looked at the dates on her headstone and thought of how few years she’d had left when he knew her. He wondered if she would have blamed him for wasting her time. If it had been up to him, they might never have met. He was too wrapped up in himself to notice her, and too beaten down to try anything if he had. She pursued him, God knows why. He never had to wonder what she wanted or how she felt. He wonders if she would have stayed with him after the chair.
They told him there was a ninety-eight percent chance he’d never feel anything below the waist again. Sometimes he wondered bitterly why they couldn’t just say a hundred percent. It would have saved him a lot of hoping and waiting around for something that never came. They had to say something, he supposed. They told him there were other pleasures to be had, and plenty of women out there who’d be willing to explore that with him. He tried to imagine it, but could never get past the first conversation, no matter how much he ached to be touched. He couldn’t offer someone else the body he resented every day. He called the phone sex line instead, called the woman on the other end Helen, said he just wanted to talk. She seemed to enjoy the break, and he enjoyed how impressed she sounded when he made up stories about himself. It made him believe something more was possible.
Maybe she’d come on the walkabout with him. Maybe she’d understand why he lied, so often by omission. Maybe it wouldn’t matter to her. She might look at him for more than two seconds, might really see him. People didn’t want to get caught staring, so they barely looked at all. He could read their reactions sometimes, in those brief glances. Some were curious, probably wondering how it happened, but most only felt sorry for him. He could see them ticking off some internal list of all the things he couldn’t do. Soon he was nothing more than that list, not a real person at all. The woman on the phone skipped that part, but rejected him all the same. He left for Australia alone, and was coming back that way, too. Empty-hearted, until he fell out of the sky. He had the Island to fill him then. He didn’t need anything else, beyond a few trips out alone with his own hand. Until Ben had to go and stir all that up again.
He sighs and rolls over onto his side. Ben would have a plan for this. He’d fight. He’d bring them all back dead before he’d kill himself, destiny be damned. He’d warned John about that, but he’d reassured him, too. You’ll find your way, John, he said. You always do. He wonders what Ben would say to him now, what lies he might tell, what kind of consolation he could offer if he really wanted to. Nobody else understood. Nobody else really knew John. To the rest of them, they were both crazy. He and Ben were keeping everyone out of the world they thought was so important, the lives they thought were more real than the new ones they’d been given. None of them understood where they were and what they had.
He remembers the lockdown, the incredible weight of the blast door, the metal prong sinking into his thigh like a bullet in slow motion. Ben played him, he knows now, stalling with the button until the last minute. He remembers melting onto the floor when Ben came back, relieved and exhausted and oddly ecstatic for a second. There was a strange light in Ben’s eyes when he helped John up, and that little smile. John stared for a moment, trying to decipher that face, but couldn’t argue when Ben wanted to sit him down. Ben was so gentle with his leg, so apologetic when it hurt. As he lay in the pit with the bodies of the Dharma Initiative, his gut bleeding and burning from Ben’s bullet, he thought about that gentleness. He understood his life as a series of kindnesses followed by deep and excruciating wounds. Now that his parents were done with him, the Island had stepped in to give and take away. He wouldn’t get out of it this time. He reached for the gun, but Walt saved him. Or condemned him. It doesn’t really matter which anymore.
He remembers sneaking into Ben’s little yellow house to ask about the submarine, finding him in his narrow hospital bed, in perfectly matched pajamas. It wasn’t quite what he’d pictured for the leader of the Others. Too restrained, too suburban. Too chaste somehow. He felt a sudden certainty that if anybody was touching this man, they weren’t doing it enough. Not the right way, either. That’s how he got so cold. Too much thinking, not enough feeling. Sometimes it seemed like he only pretended to be human. It was hard to see anything soft about him, anything fragile. He was something the Island made out of hard-packed earth and powered with secrets and sarcasm. But then he’d raise his voice or his hands would shake, and John would remember that there had to be flesh and blood under there somewhere. He began to dream about digging through Ben’s dirt to find it. He could never wash that dirt away in the dreams. It got all over his hands and under his fingernails. He’d ask Ben if that meant he was one of them now, if he could know a secret or two. No answer would come. Just that tiny smile.
He revealed what he knew about John that night, as John was about to lift him from his bed, but revealed himself in the process. He wasn’t as good at hiding as he thought he was. John’s file didn’t put that recognition in his eyes, that silent acknowledgment of another lonely, grasping life. He saw the child in those eyes when Ben asked about the miracle, bright and curious, in love with the wonderland around him. He saw it again when Ben shot him, infantile and cruel, demanding a terrible punishment just for wandering into his playground. He could swear Ben enjoyed their argument in his kitchen, in the same way John enjoyed blowing up the submarine. Sometimes it was fun to tear things apart and look at the little pieces you were left with afterwards. Ben definitely enjoyed laying out his master plan to John in the basement later, like a movie villain. But it was deeper than that. More intimate. He knew where John’s sore spots were and pressed on them.
There wasn’t much mercy in it, and not much joy, either, but there was that recognition again. That understanding. John wondered how rough his start in life had been. Maybe he hadn’t been passed around from family to family, never good enough to keep, but maybe he hadn’t really been wanted, either. For a second, he found himself distracted by the way Ben’s loose shirt was falling open, exposing his neck and the top of his shoulder and back. He was pale there, and looked soft. Vulnerable. In the coming weeks, that would be easy to forget. They brought John to the man he feared, tied up and waiting for John’s revenge.
He wanted to be able to push the knife into Dad’s neck, but it wasn’t happening. Ben’s eyes were fierce and certain, his voice full of anger that John doubted was all on his behalf. Maybe it wasn’t Ben’s first trip down this particular road. Maybe Richard had handed him the knife, maybe somebody else, but nobody had to talk him into it. John could imagine Ben’s father then, another little man with cold eyes, bleeding out all over that pillar. Another sacrifice. Maybe he’d deserved it, maybe not, but if Ben could do that, he could do anything. John wasn’t sure he wanted to be set free that way, slipping the last tether that bound him to the outside world and the man he’d been in it. A man with a pathetic little life, but a clean one. He didn’t want to think about what else they might ask him to do.
Dad had hurt him and stolen from him without remorse, but just for a while, John hadn’t been invisible to him. He’d looked at John and seen something worth his time. Something he could use, but John didn’t have to know that right away. He could stand in the sun for a while, and believe its warmth was for him. If he had to bleed for that, he would, over and over again, but he couldn’t return the pain. Not with his own hands, anyway. He could feel the heat of Ben’s hand as he gave the knife back. He had a crazy urge to grab it and squeeze it, to say he understood and ask for a little more time. Ben only turned away. He went on, as he always did. Even when they killed his daughter. He remembers watching Ben catch up to them in the jungle after that. Moving quickly, standing up straight as ever, but with red and shining eyes that dared them all to say something. John did, then changed the subject as quickly as he could, knowing that if it had been his loss, he’d still be on the ground.
Sometimes he wanted to pry that crooked little mouth open with his fingers and make it tell him everything he wanted to know, independent of Ben’s iron will. In his dreams, that mouth was more obliging. It would whisper to him, too fast to be understood. Yelling at it to slow down didn’t help. Once it started, it couldn’t stop, but John would always wake up to the same thing. Lies and half-truths, silence and secrets behind every word. Jealousy in every look. It was almost a physical sensation, like sharp fingernails raked across his skin. He could never explain that he hadn’t set out to take anything from anyone. He’d only gone where his destiny led him, to the people who seemed to have all the answers. He had to accept the position he’d stumbled into, and Ben had to fight for what he thought would always be his. It was all coming from outside, pressing down on them without mercy.
He remembers making camp for the night after their first visit to the cabin. Falling asleep together, separated by a few feet and a dying fire. Ben’s color had come back, but those pale blue eyes were darker in that light, softer. There was no jealousy in them then, but something else John sensed from time to time, when they looked at each other a little too long, or when Ben was trying to be sneaky with his stares. Something almost like longing. John wondered for a second if this was a new manipulation. He’d go over there and be seduced, then out would come that baton or a gun, and that’d be the end of him. Ben swallowed and turned his head away toward the jungle. Maybe John hadn’t really seen anything, or maybe it had only been Ben’s longing to shoot John and leave him in the pit the next day. He must have wanted that for a long time.
John found himself in charge at the barracks, and tried for a while to be like Ben. He tried to freeze his face and hold every emotion in check, but Ben saw through him. Ben knew where to poke and prod to make it all spill over again. Once he’d retreated into silence and smug satisfaction, there wasn’t much John could do with him. It didn’t matter how many dishes John broke or doors he slammed, he just wasn’t going to win. He was going to waste another day bargaining and floundering for some way to lead, then spend another night on Ben’s bed, breathing him in.
On the surface, it was all soap and clean, crisp clothes, the smell of a civilized man in an orderly house. A man forever buttoned down under two shirts, no matter how hot it was. A man who could still manage an air of superiority when he was filthy and bloody and being led around like a dog on a leash. Nobody got close enough to notice what was buried under all that. An animal, sweating out rage and fear, grinding its desperate body against the bars of its cage. John knew that smell, knew it right down to his marrow. They were the same, untouched and unseen. The basement cell began to pull at him. He knew if he went down there, he’d get nothing but angry. He was better off dreaming.
He dug all the way through Ben’s dirt, down to the skin. He touched it with his hands and his mouth. He tasted the dirt and took it into himself. He made Ben cry out his secrets and found himself too overwhelmed to listen to the words at all, but it didn’t matter then. He’d finally gotten inside. He had the key to Ben, to the Island, to himself, to everything. There was no more tension between them, no games, only the open flow of knowledge and the give and take of pleasure. There was understanding, and finally, peace. And then he’d wake up.
He saw Ben kill a man on the floor of the Orchid. Ben was more naked in that moment than he could have been without clothes. He wasn’t holding back anymore, wasn’t denying anything. It was all spilling out of him at once, so much more than the rage that carried it. If Ben hadn’t picked up the knife, John wouldn’t have interfered. He would have kept watching, fascinated and repulsed. He remembers Ben’s face afterwards, bloody and sweaty. His whole body shook hard and his breath came short. Just looking at him felt almost obscene. John wasn’t meant to see this release. He supposed most people who saw it didn’t live to think about it later, or wouldn’t have wanted to. They probably didn’t want to reach in and pull it out of him in other ways.
In the end, Ben surrendered. He went off to his exile like a true believer. He left John with an apology and a handshake, left him to wonder what might have been, with a little more time and a few unguarded words. John had his five minutes of leadership, then his quest to bring them all back. He tried to forget what Richard and the man in the cavern had said he had to do, but every failure seemed to prove them right. He made his visits to the others smiling, remembering the good times. If they’d done him any wrong, he didn’t hold it against them, but there was nothing like that in their eyes. They reminded him that he was nothing in their world, that he’d left the only place that had any use for him. He tried to keep the light and the presence of the Island inside him, tried to hold on, but they faded a little every day. They were secrets he wasn’t supposed to take away with him. Not even to save his life.
He wonders what his note will do to Jack. It’s cruel and will hurt, but maybe it will wake him up. If anyone could bring them back, it’s him. He’d have something to fix, and there’s no way he could resist that. Maybe he’ll see the destiny he tries so hard not to believe in, and let himself be the man he needs to be. Maybe in the end, he’ll understand. Somebody has to understand.
He’s decided to do it with an extension cord instead of rope. He feels naked in his clothes today, afraid of being seen and stopped. People would notice a sad man buying a length of rope. They’d suspect something and ask questions. They’d feel for him as a fellow human being in a bad place, and try to help. He wouldn’t have to say much at all. They’d just know. They’d care. It wouldn’t have to be this way. He knows none of this is true, but it’s nice to pretend. He estimates the distance between the hole in the ceiling and the radiator and makes a mental note of it.
Maybe the Island will forgive him his failure. Maybe it’ll take him from this place and lay him down on the jungle floor. He’ll wake up with that light in his eyes, and that’ll be heaven enough for him. He thinks of the pillar and the sacrifices they tied to it, and wonders how many men in his position have sacrificed themselves by now. He wonders if they got to go back, or if they’re lying in cold, foreign ground, their bones still aching for home. Maybe they lost all their worthless parts in death and were made over again. He’d like that. He’d like to be somebody better and stronger, somebody who could lead. Somebody who wasn’t scared.
He looks at the clock. It’s after four. He’d better get going.
******
John leans heavily on Ben and lets himself be helped into the chair. Ben is being so gentle with him, so different from those he couldn’t convince. He speaks softly and touches tenderly, and John is reminded of that day in the hatch, when Ben had every reason to kill him or leave him there to suffer alone. Tonight, Ben could have left him to die by his own hand. Maybe his dream wasn’t all that silly, at least in the beginning. Maybe everything will be okay. The little thrill of hope he feels is worth all the pain. It’s been gone too long. He tells Ben everything he knows. Ben asks if he’s sure.
“Yeah, why, do you know her?” John says.
He hears the answer but doesn’t process it. He can’t breathe. Something is wrapped around his neck and it hurts. His hands find the curve of it, the smooth, rubbery coating. The cord. He tries to fight, but can’t get at Ben’s hands, can’t focus on anything but his frantic need for air. Ben is so much stronger than he looks. He can see the dark blue of Ben’s shirt for a second, then nothing but the glare of a streetlight through the window. There’s a strange crunching sound, and the front of John’s throat meets the back. The streetlight starts to go dark. It’s happening so fast.
He doesn’t understand.