I Fell in Love with Hope(19)

“Since we’re all inevitably doomed to die, I will be Hamlet, and you will be Yorick, and this shall be our grave.” She looks around at the empty hall like a house yet to be a home and smirks back at me with ambition in the curve. “I’m not sure what you are. All I know is you’re a beautiful set of bones and some curiosity tied together by gray, and I want to bring you to life. I think that would make me happy.” The more my jaw loosens on its hinges, the more everything in me relaxes in awe of her.

“I want to see you,” she whispers. Hikari slips a piece of paper no larger than the size of my palm from a fold in the bandage of her elbow. She smooths down the crease at the center and hands me a drawing of a figure holding a box of books with stars circling them like dancers.

“You think I’m beautiful?” I breathe.

“All readers are,” Hikari says. “Goodnight, stranger.”

And when I look back up, she’s gone.





hee




The Hit List, in it of itself, is a heist. Heists have three stages.

Planning.

Execution.

Escape.

When we first agreed to become thieves, Sony was all about the second stage. Her excitement outdid her. That night on the roof, she pointed across the city, to the sweets shop, the bookstore, and the street vendors. She was never about the tangibility of stealing but about the act itself. She wanted the rush, the nerves, the racing.

Neo preferred the planning, the hypotheticals, the logistics. He walked (this was pre-wheelchair era) to his room, rummaged through his cardboard box, and found an old notebook with a metal spiral spine, one he used to rip pages out of when he was dissatisfied. He held it up over his head on the roof, then dropped it onto the concrete beneath the night sky.

He took everything into account. He was the one who coined the term, Hit List. Because we weren’t just stealing, we were killing. Our targets laid on the first pages in smudged black ink:

Time. Time must always be the first.

Disease. Not pathogens, not titles derived from Latin, the essence of illness. The name of suffering.

Death. Death must always be the last.

There are more. We have endless names to take, to steal from.

The next page was the declaration. Dramatic, I know, but challenging such things requires it.





To all who stole from us, we defy you. You tempt the world and lay waste to it, but try and lay waste to us. Our minds are stronger than our bodies, and our bodies are not yours to call weak. We will kill you in every way we know. That way, when we must go, the playing field is even.

Time will end. Disease will fester. Death will die.





C wrote that. Neo took the pen and wrote it, but C crafted it himself, like a song. All except the final line. That one belongs to Neo. C was never about Planning or Execution. He was about being present for it all, not in the grips of elsewhere. He wrote what we all think but usually didn’t know how to say.

The following pages were the results of our execution. What we wanted and what we robbed. Things, yes, but also feelings, desires, chances-anything our three enemies run away with.

However, we were never doing this just for a thrill. That’s why, in the end, we will escape with all we took.

Our Escape is a collection of yet-to-be-filled pages. They lay at the latter end of the Hit List, waiting for the day we summon the courage to leave—a place where we will be unbound to our lives, happy and together and unafraid.

We call it Heaven.

By the time we were done writing, our seat bones ached. Dawn hit the skyline and illuminated the notebook now given a soul. Sony held her ankles, rocking back and forth, throwing out every idea in her head. C laid down, listening to me read aloud Neo’s words.

It’s a part of our lives.

The hospital has plenty of boredom to go around. Wake up, eat, take medications, undergo treatments, the ministrations that don’t belong to us. They belong to Time, Disease, and Death.

But the Hit List moments?

They’re ours.

___

Neo is in a state between conscious and unconscious. C and I sit at his bedside, waiting for him to re-enter the world of the waking. It’s been over twenty four hours since we saw him, and no one is more worried about Neo than C.

He tries to distract himself, flipping through a magazine he isn’t even reading. Seeing Neo this way after surgery is hard enough. The fact that Neo has a bruise trailing his neck and shoulder makes C’s jaw grind. He starts the magazine over once he’s reached the end, a nervous tic, like tapping your shoe.

“C,” I call.

“Yeah?”

“What does it mean to be beautiful?”

“Beautiful, how?” he asks. “Like a flower? Like girls?”

“Like Yorick’s skull in Hamlet.”

“Like who’s what in what?”

“I think that’s what I was in her metaphor. Or was it bones?”

“Whose metaphor?”

“I guess they’re the same thing.” Bones and skulls. It’s all hollowness.

“Are you talking about Hikari?” It dawns on me we’re not having the same conversation.

“She called me beautiful.”

C’s eyes flick from my feet to my head.

“You are beautiful,” he says.