More Than This

by Patrick Ness

His mind isn’t clear. It races and throbs like the worst kind of fever, and he is unaware of even thinking. It’s more some kind of wild, dying instinct, a terror of what’s to come, a terror of what’s happened. A terror of his death.

He is still. He gives up his struggle. He lets oblivion overtake him. Oblivion is purgatorial and gray.

They’re not wet with seawater, not with the soaking, briny cold of the ocean he was just – (drowning in)

It feels, for a time, like drowning all over again, the yearning for breath, the struggle against something larger than himself that only wants to take him down with it, and there’s no fighting it, nothing that can be done to stop it, as it swallows him up and he disappears.

Hair buzzed down to almost nothing, his face alarmingly thin, his eyes looking like he’s never slept in a safe place in his life.

If this is just a dusty old memory that he’s trapped in, maybe it isn’t really even a place at all, maybe it’s just what happens when your final dying seconds turn into an eternity. The place of the worst season of your life, frozen forever, decaying without ever really dying.

Then he wonders where his body is. In whatever world this isn’t, out there where he died, where is he?

But, he thinks, it’s possible to die before you die.

He really is alone in whatever hell this is. Completely and utterly alone. It isn’t, he thinks, as he trudges back toward his house, the most unfamiliar feeling in the world.

It was late, two or three in the morning. They’d been in bed for hours, talking, then very much not talking, then talking some more.

Trains always went somewhere amazing when you were eight years old.

Worse, it had been accompanied by an equally hard lifelong yearning, a feeling that there had to be more, more than just all this weight. Because if there wasn’t, what was the point?

A book, he thinks at one point, rubbing his eyes, tired from so much focused reading. It’s a world all on its own, too.

A world made of words, Seth thinks, where you live for a while.

The weight from the dream feels like it’s in the room somewhere, and he’s distantly aware of it, but of himself, he feels – Nothing. He feels nothing.

He was here. He had made it this far. There was so very little distance left to go, and he was the one who had brought himself here. It was almost over. He was almost there. He had never, not once in his life, felt this powerful.

Everything about this world has felt small. Everything has felt like he was hiding in a tiny pocket of a place with walls that pressed in from every side, in the form of memories he couldn’t shake, a burnt-out wasteland that made a border, and now these two, showing up just in time to stop him from going any farther, bringing him back to this same stupid house at the very moment he tried to leave it for good, and who knows, maybe even bringing this van after them.

“People see stories everywhere,” Regine says. “That’s what my father used to say. We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn’t true.” She glances back at Seth. “We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we’d go crazy.”

“What I do know is that if you give a human being a chance to be stupid and violent, then they’re going to take it, every time. No matter where they are.”

If ever a door should creak loudly, it should be one on the front of a darkened, empty prison, but it glides open like something hydraulic and modern.

“It’s a trick of the light,” he whispers to himself. “A trick of the moon.” But he stands for a moment longer, the world holding its silent breath, the empty nothing of the doorway staring back at him.

He reaches out, but before he even comes into contact with it, it opens. He jumps back, but stops as he sees that it’s merely sliding smoothly into the wall, as if it’s simply responded to his presence by performing the most likely task he might ask of it.

Seth can feel all the memories there in his mind, spinning around him like he’s in the eye of a hurricane that’s pressing in, surging toward him, wanting something from him.

Seth grabs the frame of the bike, hoisting it up – And the world empties.

Her words echo across the miles of everything that’s ever happened to him, and any answer of his will take too long to reach his mouth to explain – He is far from them. So far, he’ll never reach them again – And then Regine takes his hand.

Whatever happened to you down there, whatever the world looks like now, that’s not how it always looks. That’s not how it’s always going to look. There’s more. There’s always more.

Haven’t you ever felt like there has to be more? Like there’s more out there somewhere, just beyond your grasp, if you could only get to it

You said we all want there to be more than this! Well, there’s always more than this. There’s always something you don’t know.

“We aren’t going to go down.” “I know you are trying to be brave for me, but we might. That is a risk when you are fighting with death. You do not always win.”

“I really came late to the guardian angel sale, didn’t I? To get the pair of you.”

That he’s dying. And that, at last, he desperately doesn’t want to.

“Are you serious? Real life is only ever just real life. Messy. What it means depends on how you look at it. The only thing you’ve got to do is find a way to live there.”

“Life does not have to go how you think it will,” Tomasz says. “Not even when you are very sure what is going to happen.”