All the Colors of the Dark

by Chris Whitaker

“Are there people searching for you?” he said, and the question somehow made that room darker, somehow stole a little more of the air that they breathed. “There’s no one left out there. No one at all.”

Patch knew that compassion was strength and at times weakness, and that it was what divided conscience. Sometimes he wanted her silent because he felt closer to her, and sometimes he longed for her to take him away with her stories.

“We can’t ever go back,” she said. “It’s not the same out there. Nothing is the same. The Rockies ain’t snowcapped. The Colorado River runs dry, and the Apache Trail ain’t in Phoenix. A church in Mesa Verde lost its god, so the people pray to each other like they ain’t devils. It’s different. Everything is different now.”

“Okay is the preserve of the uninspired, Patchwork. I’d rather live and die at the extremes than exist in the middle.”

And when she responded that too was quiet. “Decent. Weak. I sometimes wonder if the two go hand in hand.” “Being decent takes more strength.”

He coughed and tasted blood but did not tell her because there were more important things to say. “I was lost before.” “You’re still lost, Patch.” “Two people are less lost than one.”

But you know what I know?” He shook his head again. “Sometimes the only way to heal a wound is to tear a bigger one in the person that hurt you.”

“Though it’s dark, I’ll always find you. Though you’re stronger than me, I’ll always make sure that you’re safe. To me, you’ll always come first.” “You’re smiling.” “Because it’s true.” He did not remember falling. He did not remember her plan, or her cries, or her slapping at his face to try and wake him. He did not remember the gunshots outside the door.

“Will Patch be the same?” she said. He stood and stretched and collected his things. And he touched her cheek as he left. “None of us will be, kid.”

“We need light to survive,” the doctor said. “Not all of us,” Patch said.

Patch saw his mother’s face, and though makeup hid much he knew when she pressed into him that most of her had died.

His skin was not his. It itched him, the wounds he would not let heal because he worried they would leave no scars at all.

They would not understand. Only when the dark was total enough did he lie down. And reach out his hand for her to take.

She barely took breath, but when she did Saint noticed the way he walked, quieter somehow, his chin a little lower, his mind far from her and the nonsense she spoke. He no longer smiled.

He finally looked up at her. “When you see Nix, you should tell him that if he won’t look for the girl then I will.” Saint saw him then. He stood. “And I’ll burn everything in my path till I find her. I won’t hesitate. I won’t even look back at the ashes.”

“We look at others with fucking trivial problems, and we think how long they’d last with a taste of our childhoods.”

“The only good thing I ever did,” Patch said. “There’s still time.” “Just not for me.” “People have short memories when you do something good, and long when you fuck things up,” Sammy said. “So—” “So you either keep doing good…” “Or stop giving a fuck what people think.”

“Nothing on this earth more beautiful than sacrifice, kid. You’ll do well not to learn that yourself.”

“I hate it when you cry,” he said. “You take your hand away, and you paint me smiling then. In the dark we’re always smiling. We’re all the same. We’re all well and happy and shining.” “I don’t know how to paint.” “Art is feeling, nothing more. You know how to feel, Patch.”

She was constellations he could not map. She was beautiful and hateful, thunderclouds and summer rain.

And she talks about how we construct our ideals out of our own past mistakes. And I wonder what exactly a mistake is. A thing we should not have done, right? But if learning is built on trial and error there can be no mistakes, only rungs on a ladder to someplace better.”

Right then Patch wanted to tell her not to waste her time. She hadn’t stolen all that much. He never had anything to begin with.

“It means you did a good thing, and sometimes in life you need to be reminded of the good things you do. Because if you forget—”

She’s all heart. Makes it easier for her to get it broken,”

Tooms stood, tall, and moved to leave, but then stopped close to him. “You got out, Joseph. I worry you still haven’t realized that.”

“I fucked up, Dr. T,” Patch said, desperate. “Most people that come to church have.” “I don’t know how to make it better.” “It’s not your job to fix things, Joseph.”

“And at the end, when they’re reunited in death, you’ll be the first to stand and clap and whistle.” She took command of his every thought.

He imagined the kind of parties they threw and the kind of boys she dated. He did not hate them, just did not dare to try and understand them.

“People either drink like that to remember or to forget. I’d say both are true in Sammy’s case.”

“That people like us exist in a state of crisis. That it will be a miracle if we die of natural causes. We’ll turn to drink or drugs, and we won’t form close relationships because we’ll keep too much from others.” “We don’t need anyone else,” he said. “We do. You just don’t realize it yet. Unhealthy pursuits. We’ll exist at the extremes because the middle is where the healthy pass their time.”

He ground his competence out. Slow and hard.

He saw Misty in mixes, her skin titanium and singed umber and alizarin. Her Prussian eyes. Her hair would be lain darks softened with sienna before light layering. “I see you at school. And I miss you,” she said. He stared at her and saw cadmium steeled with Winsor Violet and Phthalo Blue. “You look at me like no one else,”

“You can’t save him,” Norma said. “I can.”

“When I…if I look at him now, like I looked at him then, I don’t see much the same, Saint. And I know he won’t…and for you I want everything. And I can’t be sorry for that.” “It’s not fair,” Saint said, sudden, abrupt. She did not want to cry and tried with all she had. “I notice pebbles and things he might like. But he doesn’t like them anymore.”

Right then he longed to be back in the darkness. Beside her.

I wanted you to be okay. I needed it.” “Why?” she said. He kept his blue eyes on hers, this time did not blush or shy away. “I see you, Saint. I see the way you care. I see the way you close your eyes for a couple of seconds before you laugh. I see you try and hide your tooth when you smile. But you don’t need to, because you’re…because it’s a perfect smile.”

“I worry I’ll never find her,” he said, and could almost not bear to speak such a truth. “You can keep looking,” she said. “But you might miss what’s right in front of you.” He would not look up. “Maybe what happened to you…you’re not like them, Patch. Everyone is…no one knows you. Not really.”

Patch wondered if hope was its own kind of punishment, sometimes worse than certainty, than the long and closed-off road toward healing.

“You don’t fuck with a honey badger,” Misty said, as Heather fought back tears and sloped away. “Pretty sure that makes you the honey,” Sammy whispered to Patch, who carried more than a little fear in his eye.

“Being a mother, there’s no practice for it. Just because you can do it, because you’re able, doesn’t mean you’re good at it. And if you’re not, it’s not just your life…”

“The pair of you have grown close. Of course, Misty will be heading off to Harvard in a few months.” “Yes, sir.” It was both spoken of and unsaid, looming on their track like a freight train headed toward them. Patch knew the damage would be severe but also knew it had been on their horizon since the moment she sat beside him on the fallen oak.

Nothing about them fit. Nothing about them worked. She loved him entirely and absolutely.

And then she heard it again, close behind her. She turned, her muscles tight as she choked back a scream.

God is a first call and a last resort, from christening to death bed. In between is where faith is tested. The mundanity. Anyone can drop to their knees when they’re facing crisis, but doing it when everything is steady…”

Ivy was pronounced dead at the scene. Patch took the news evenly. He did not cry at the funeral. She had died so long before.

“The law is bullshit.” He laughed. “Now you’re starting to sound like a cop.”

He read newspapers in bus seatbacks, saw color photos of troops too young being sent to a place they could not pick out on a world map, fought under a sun entirely foreign, against an enemy they would train hard not to understand. Deaths were victories. Patch knew those kids, like his father, history not so much doomed to repeat itself as just plain doomed.

He lives quiet, because the world lost its sound and taste and…It’s a hard thing to do.”

“When it comes to marriage, love is merely a visitor over a lifetime. Respect and kindness, they are the true foundations. If I’m honest, I think you should marry him.”

her words tunneling into his brain and forging their own place in him, to call on in case there were moments of doubt, moments of weakness that told him he might be good, beneath it all, what he had done and what he would do, he might just be good enough.