Nilly

j: in quaternion theory, a meta-imaginary number, orthogonal to both the real number line (1, 2, 3...) and the imaginary number line (i, 2i, 3i...)--symbol j, formalized by Sir William Rowan Hamilton in 1843 AD.

Usually, when a boy dies, his imaginary friend goes with him, to gambol in fields of light... or something. Or, at least, it imagines that it does.

But in Nilly's case, the boy's little sister Meg had met him ("See? He's hiding behind that shelf--come out, Nilly.") and Nilly thought he might become her imaginary friend.

Meg wanted to forget that game. She broke the toys the dead boy had given her. She threw a framed 8"x11" family portrait out the window into the muddy garden.

Her parents sent her to her room without supper. They yelled, "How could you do that?" locked her door, and slammed cupboards in the kitchen. This suited Meg far better than if they'd said awful things like, "I know you miss him, honey." Meg's bed was a glacier a thousand miles high, her carpet a thousand miles of impassible desert sand, and a red storm rose in the night. She hugged her stuffed animals and smelled lightning.

Nilly, however, kept trying to stand in her line of vision. Perhaps they could play. He was lonely.

She kept turning her face away, and he kept following.

If I cannot be your imaginary friend, he thought in a rush of anger, I'll be your imaginary enemy. But then she squeezed her eyes shut, and he felt a stab of terror and remorse. "Wait," he said, as aloud as he could. Too late. Meg opened her eyes, and sure enough, she'd mastered the trick, her cultural patrimony, the crown jewel of her civilization, that invigorating willful ignorance--the unseeing of spirits. She looked where he'd been, and only saw the books on the shelf.

Now Nilly was really stuck.

There had been others--Dally, Sandra, Foop, Mango Mango, and the Super Trash Robot Queen. They'd all gone with the boy. There was a land, too, Nillydallyland, and Nilly could slip into it: but it wasn't away. It was just interleaved with the dead boy's house. Its dense, sticky jungles were contiguous with the underside of the dining room table, its dark reaches of loud night nestled between the washer and the dryer, its snowblinding tundra beneath the blank ceramic tiles of the kitchen floor. After days of wandering through the jungle, you'd emerge onto the yellow carpet of the dining room. A deserted, empty land, with no adventures left to it.

The house across the street had a plastic castle in its yard. Turrets, and a slide. There must be a child there. Only a very desperate imaginary friend would try to claim a strange child who'd never seen it, but Nilly would have tried, if he could have crossed the lawn.

Grass and sky--it was mixed up in Nilly's mind with the bad camping trip. Grass under his feet, the oaks above him: he could last a minute or two before he heard the thunder of the white water, and felt the pressure in the boy's lungs.

He had been the one there at the end. Not Sandra, not Dally, not the Queen.

"Hey, you're killing me here," someone said.

Nilly started as if he'd fallen into cold rapids. There was a woman next to him on the living room sofa. In the first instant he'd thought it was the Mom--that she could suddenly see him. But it was another woman, in a bathrobe, with tousled black hair and incandescent blue eyes, wet and steaming, droplets beaded on impossibly smooth skin.

"Who are you?" Nilly asked.

"Nora Mathesson, about twenty years ago--his freshman year of college." She jerked her head towards the master bedroom, where the shower was running.

"The--the Dad?" Nilly said.

Nora grinned, all teeth. "He wasn't anyone's dad then. Listen, you can't keep doing this, skulking around trying to get their attention. You--"

"How are you here?" Nilly asked, perplexed.

"I'm offstage, so I can walk in on him with my roommate." She smirked. "And change history. But listen to me. They're not the only ones with imaginations. Are you listening, ah--what's your name?"

"Nilly," Nilly said.

"Oops, there's my cue," she said, and she was gone.

Nilly tried to imagine her back, but he couldn't. Nora Mathesson--a strange wet grownup in a bathrobe who could change history? He hadn't the slightest idea what she would say or do. If she could change history, why didn't she change the only important mistake that had happened in it?

The one he could imagine, of course--the one he knew better than anyone, better than he knew himself--was the boy.

But he was afraid of imagining the boy. He was afraid that it was wrong, to have the boy back here, and not gamboling in fields of light.

And he was afraid that he couldn't help but imagine the boy's terror. He was afraid that he would drown the boy again.

Perhaps the Dad could see Nora Mathesson? but he couldn't see Nilly. Nilly sat with him in the kitchen while he cried. The Dad's hands were coated with bread dough. Meg would be coming home soon on the yellow bus. The Dad sat and cried softly and looked at the refrigerator door.

Along with Meg's new bright pictures, affixed by magnets, there were three of the boy's. One was a dragon; one was a Hemulen; and one was a picture of a blue door in a brick wall. And on the third picture--Nilly had never noticed this before--the boy had written, "Nilly drew this."

Nilly's heart leapt at the boy's lie. He walked across the blank ceramic tiles to the fridge and put his hand on the drawing.

The boy had imagined him drawing. The boy had imagined him imagining.

Nilly reached in and opened that blue door in that brick wall. And went through it.