The Fall

Insomni-Zack! The first superhero he ever created. An eight-page color comic written, illustrated, lettered, and inked by Zachary Goodweather. About a teen who patrolled the streets of New York by night, foiling terrorists and polluters. And terrorist polluters. He never could get the blanket cape folds to come out right, but he was passable with faces, and okay with musculature.

This city needed an Insomni-Zack now. Sleep was a luxury. A luxury no one could afford-if everyone knew what he knew.

If everyone had seen what he had seen.

Zack was supposed to be sacked out in a goose-down sleeping bag inside a spare bedroom on the third floor. The room smelled like a closet, like an old cedar room in his grandparents’ house-one that no one opened anymore except for kids who liked to snoop. The small, oddly angled room had been used by Mr. Setrakian (or Professor Setrakian-Zack still wasn’t clear on that part, seeing how the old man ran the first-floor pawnshop) for storage. Tilting stacks of books, many old mirrors, a wardrobe of old clothes, and some locked trunks-really locked, not the fake kind of lock that can be picked with a paper clip and a ballpoint pen (Zack had already tried).

The exterminator, Fet-or V, as he had told Zack to call him-had hooked up an ancient, cartridge-fed, 8-bit Nintendo system to a pawned Sanyo television set with big knobs and dials on the front instead of buttons, all brought up from the showroom downstairs. They expected him to stay put and play The Legend of Zelda. But the bedroom door had no lock. His dad and Fet had mounted iron bars onto the wall over the window-mounted them on the inside, rather than the outside, bolted to the wall beams-a cage that Mr. Setrakian said was left over from the 1970s.

They weren’t trying to lock him in, Zack knew. They were trying to lock her out.

He searched for his dad’s professional page at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and got a “Page Not Found.” So they had already scrubbed him from the government Web site. News hits for “Dr. Ephraim Goodweather” claimed he was a discredited CDC official who fabricated a video purporting to show a human-turned-vampire being destroyed. It said that he had uploaded it (actually, Zack uploaded the video for him, one that his dad wouldn’t let him view) onto the Internet in an attempt to exploit the eclipse hysteria for his own purposes. Obviously, that last part was BS. What “purposes” did his dad have other than trying to save lives? One news site described Goodweather as “an admitted alcoholic involved in a contentious custody battle, who is now believed to be on the run with his kidnapped son.” That left Zack with a lump of ice in his chest. The same article went on to say that both Goodweather’s ex-wife and her boyfriend were currently missing and presumed dead.

Everything made Zack feel nauseous these days, but the dishonesty of this article was especially toxic to him. All wrong, every last word. Did they really not know the truth? Or… did they not care? Maybe they were trying to exploit his parents’ trouble for their own purposes?

And the talkback? The comments were even worse. He could not deal with the things they were saying about his dad, the righteous arrogance of all these anonymous posters. He had to deal right now with the awful truth about his mom-and the banality of the venom spewed in blogs and forums missed the point completely.

How do you mourn someone who isn’t really gone? How do you fear someone whose desire for you is eternal?

If the world knew the truth the way Zack knew the truth, then his dad’s reputation would be restored, and his voice heard-but still nothing else would change. His mom, his life, would never be the same.

So, mostly, Zack wanted it all to pass. He wanted something fantastic to happen to make everything right and normal again. As when he was a child-like five or something, he broke a mirror and just covered it with a sheet, then prayed with all his might for its restoration before his parents found out. Or the way he used to wish his parents would fall back in love again. That they would wake up one day and realize what a mistake they had made.

Now he secretly hoped that his dad could do something incredible. Despite everything, Zack still assumed that there was some happy ending awaiting them. Awaiting all of them. Maybe even something to bring Mom back to the way she was.

He felt tears coming, and this time he didn’t fight them. He was up on the roof; he was alone. He wanted so badly to see his mother again. The thought terrified him-and yet he yearned for her to come. To look into her eyes. To hear her voice. He wished for her to explain this to him the way she did every troubling thing. Everything is going to be just fine…