Mackenzie Manelski

Marshall, in Suspended Time

Novel extract

Chapter 1

Sweden

Marshall Shaw sat on the second to last step from platform level. The stairs were horrendously dirty; he could feel the cold concrete through his jeans. He checked his phone. 

1:19 am on New Year’s Day.

There were only six minutes left until the final train of the evening. It was this train that he would jump in front of.

He didn’t want to inconvenience travelers by jumping in front of an earlier train. That would cause the rest of the evening’s trains to run late. They might even have to shut the track until tomorrow in order to move his body. He endeavored to make his final act as selfless as possible. He had been grappling constantly with the level of selfishness in this decision for the past several weeks. 

The second to last train of the evening sped by on the track to his right, sending a wave of thick, stale subway air straight into his face. He cleared his throat. He could nearly taste the grime. 

It was freezing cold, even this far below street level. Marshall pulled his cracked leather bomber jacket closer around him. The lining smelled like his father. Cinnamon, citrus, vodka. He tried not to think about it. 

Marshall checked his phone clock one more time. 1:20 am. He opened the stop-watch app. Watched the seconds tick until twenty past the minute. He shuffled some apps around and clicked play on When I’m Gone by Eminem. 

4 minutes and 40 seconds exactly. If he timed it correctly, his life would end with the final beat of his favorite song. 

Marshall had listened to Eminem on repeat while he took the train to Manhattan that morning. He was halfway through his sophomore year at the Jesuit high school on the Upper East Side. 

It was alright there. The Jesuits weren’t the reason he was sitting on this cold concrete slab. 

He rolled his ankles, shook out his feet. Twiddled with the silver chain around his neck. Aimlessly opened the text app on his phone. 

Where are you? From his mother, at half past eleven. He hadn’t bothered to answer. She hadn’t sent a follow up. 

There was no school that morning, as it was the holiday break, but he’d left a note on the kitchen counter informing any one of his family members that deigned to care that he was taking the train into the city anyways, to see some of his friends from school. 

He met up with Jacob and Sam in Central Park around 11 a.m. They wandered slowly down the snow-covered paths, petting dogs and discussing the scores from last night’s basketball game and what they’d gotten for Christmas. 

Sam had gone to Mexico for Christmas break. He showed Jacob and Marshall photos of an idyllic beach with rolling, blue waves. A whale was breaching in one of them. A spout of water shot into the air. It looked humid, even on the shitty iPhone camera. 

‘That’s amazing, man,’ Jacob said to Sam, in response to the photo. 

Marshall smiled and nodded along. 

He parted from Jacob and Sam around 8pm. The winter sun had set long before, and the Upper East Side was shrouded in December darkness. His mother texted him at 8:15. 

Still out? 

Yes, everything okay? he replied. 

She didn’t answer. 

He walked through the park for several more hours. He shuffled Eminem and other favorites on his iPhone. Lil Wayne, Blink 182, Tupac. He periodically rubbed the wires of his headphones between his gloved hands to ensure they kept working. To his surprise, his phone didn’t die the entire day. 

A last gift from the universe, perhaps. 

Marshall looked down at his phone again. Three minutes had passed since he had last checked the time. He stood up slowly, jumped up and down a few times to let warmth back into his legs and feet. 

Eminem was rapping about standing on a stage now, a crowd on their feet, a standing ovation for his performance. His daughter asked him how he’d gotten to Sweden.

How had Marshall gotten to 28^th Street Subway Station, in the early hours of New Year’s Day, 2013? 

Around 10:30 he stood up from a park bench. The park attendant was making his rounds for the evening, yelling at homeless people to leave, picking up empty trash with that mechanical claw contraption that convicts used to pick up Styrofoam cups on the side of the Hutchinson Parkway. 

Slowly, Marshall walked down Park Avenue. He started on 72^nd street and strolled all the way down to the 28^th Street Station. His feet were aching and numb by the time he arrived, just past midnight. 

As he passed the skyscrapers and the bustling restaurants and the golden, glowing windows of first floor apartments, he kept his eyes on the wet, gum-spackled pavement. His worst fear was seeing some glimpse of hope that would stop him from acting.

It had happened before. 

Now he walked down the platform of the subway track. His feet straddled the painted yellow line. Life on the left side, death on the right. 

The sound of a rat scuttling amongst a pile of debris down on the tracks reached him from where he stood on the platform. 

He stopped walking a few feet before the tunnel opening. It was here he would wait for the train to arrive. 

He sent up a silent prayer – to the god he didn’t believe in – that Sam or Jacob or Greta or Ella or his sister wouldn’t text him now. He only had a minute left, and a text from one of them would make him stay. A quick succession of five images crossed his mind. Sam passed out in the chair in front of his dad’s big TV, football highlights still running. Jacob asleep on the lower bunk, his younger brother above him. Greta, in her cocoon of pink silk sheets, a white noise machine running on the side table. Ella, orange cat curled up on the pillow next to her, a book open on the crumpled blanket. His sister – 

But that thought was too painful. He shoved it as far away as he could.

Another blast of air hit him as he stood there, waiting for the train. Just a few more seconds and it would all be over. He heard the groaning of the train on the metal rails down the tunnel. The beam of white from its front lights reached him, reflected on the grey tile wall. A round gleam of green came next, indicating that this train was a 6 train, northbound, towards Pelham and the Bronx. 

Eminem’s final line in his ears. Something about not feeling pain, smiling back. His words seemed so quiet over the roar of the subway car. 

The front lights of the train were blinding him now. Just a moment longer. He took a step towards the track, where the platform turned into the edge of a cliff, the tracks below a deep, dark pit. The subway was a snarling, malevolent beast as it approached at full speed. Terrifying, yet also his savior. The conductor didn’t seem to have even hit the brakes yet. Marshall took a deep breath. It shuddered in his cold lungs. He refused to allow himself to think of anything except moving forward. 

He had to time it correctly, there was no space for error. It was now or never. There was no other train running tonight on this track. He didn’t want to go home defeated, have to explain to his mother where he had been, have to hide this excursion from his friends, like he had done after the last situation. 

Marshall forced his right knee to bend. He took a small, short step forward. He shut his eyes, felt the tunnel wind on his face. 

Marshall took his final step. 

Both his feet left the platform. 

Tan Timberland boots hovered in midair for the splittest of split seconds. 

One of the earphones fell out of his ear, where it had been nestled for hours, and the wire bounced against his hip.

Marshall clamped his eyes shut. He thought he could hear, as if from far, far away, the sound of the train horn. But he may have been imagining it, he wasn’t sure. 

He waited for impact. He expected to feel an intense, vibrant pain as the train hit him, followed by a vast, black wall of nothing. Or perhaps, his boots would hit the track first, breaking his legs. 

But after the initial shock of stepping off the platform, and the bright white light, he felt nothing, no pain, no collision, no ankle breaking fall onto the tracks – 

Actually, he did feel something. Wind. But not from the same direction as it had been coming from in the tunnel. This was wind from below. Or above? Marshall couldn’t tell at all. 

Then he began to fall, as if from a great height. 

Chapter 2

Shark Bait

It was his Timbs that hit the water first. 

As his legs submerged, then his chest, followed by his head, a thought passed briefly through Marshall’s mind. He was sure, sometime in seventh grade, that he and Jacob had watched a Myth Busters series where the bald guy with the mustache talked about a human body making impact with water from a great height. They tested it with a dummy. Mustache man had said, survival? Zero chance. 

So surely, Marshall must be dead now. 

But no, he was alive. Alive and confused. At least he thought he was. He could feel the cold water saturating his clothing and hair. His legs felt like they’d been electrocuted. 

Marshall opened his eyes to a wall of grey water. They were immediately irritated by the salt– he could feel them reddening by the second. Lungs straining for air, he looked around frantically for any sign of daylight. Finding a pocket of slightly less grey water, he swam upwards at full speed. 

He broke the surface of the water gasping, the salt and cold thoroughly burning his throat and lungs as he gulped down air. Passing a hand over his eyes to wipe away the salt, his situation materialized before him.

He was bobbing in the middle of the ocean, like an apple in a barrel. Waves rose and fell around him, massive blocks of steel and iron coming his way relentlessly. His arms worked double time as he fought to keep his head above the water. 

He labored like this for what felt like hours, until something hit him from behind. Bewildered, Marshall turned to see a capsized wooden canoe of sorts. He could have sworn it wasn’t there a moment ago, during his field assessment. 

Marshall clambered onto the upturned raft, clawing his way onto its swollen center. As he did so, his left hand snagged against a broken piece of wood. He pulled it away, wincing. An inch long splinter protruded from the fleshy part of his palm.

Successfully perched on the raft, Marshall looked around once more. The waves were rocking him violently, and it took all his strength to hang on. His arms were shaking from the effort. As far as he could see in all directions, there was no sign of land. Not even a tiny, deserted island.

‘What the fuck,’ he said. It comforted him for a moment to hear his own voice.  

Possibilities were running a marathon through his mind. Did the train not kill him? How did he survive the fall into the ocean? Where the hell was he? How was he conscious?

For the first time, he looked directly up. Part of him was expecting to see some alien-esque portal in the sky, perhaps a circular bank vault door through which he had fallen. 

His inquisitive stare was met only by dark, gloomy clouds. Not even a seabird wheeled overhead.

The rocking of the boat, the expanse of grey water, and the taste of bitter salt in his mouth, were beginning to make Marshall nauseous. He pulled his legs up to his chest and rested his head on his knees. He focused on breathing deeply. 

A particularly large wave crested beneath his raft, and Marshall’s stomach lurched. He gripped the edge of the wood harder, shoving the splinter farther into his hand. He cried out in pain. Before he could register how ridiculous he sounded, he yelled out at the waves.

‘Would you just fucking stop!’ 

Instantly, the water calmed. The waves flattened out beneath his vessel to a gentle, quiet lapping. Marshall reeled backward in shock, nearly falling off the raft. He righted himself, staring down into the water, dumbstruck. 

‘Thanks,’ Marshall said gruffly. ‘Didn’t mean to yell.’

The ocean made no response.

Marshall took the moment of tranquility to examine his hand. The splinter had been jammed even farther in than he thought – only a small portion remained poking out of his skin. The area around it was bruised already, the flesh turned a hideous purple blue. He drew in a deep breath, and using his teeth, pried the splinter from his palm. 

It didn’t hurt as much as he thought it should have. Once removed, he tossed the offending piece of wood into the ocean. A trail of bright red blood, even more vivid against his monotonous, grey surroundings, trailed down his palm and onto his wrist. 

Salt water cleansed wounds, right? Marshall was pretty sure that it did. He and Jacob probably learned that off Myth Busters, too. 

He shrugged and stuck his hand into the water. The hole the splinter had left prickled for a moment, and then the pain dulled. Little clouds of his blood bloomed on the surface of the ocean and floated away, funny red flowers in a colorless field. 

Marshall held his hand under the water for a few minutes. When he felt comfortable that it had stopped bleeding, he put his hand in his sodden jacket pocket. His fingers brushed his iPhone. He realized with a start that he had completely forgotten about it. 

Doubting it worked now, after a five-minute swim in the ocean, he pulled it gingerly from his pocket. To his amazement, the phone screen still lit up when he tapped it with his finger. He looked at the screen’s top right corner, hoping to see even one bar of signal. 

Nothing. 

He should’ve known. 

A splashing in the water, a noise unlike the sound of the waves, caught his attention. Marshall raised his eyes just in time to see a grey dorsal fin approaching from the north, heading straight for his life raft. 

‘You’re kidding me,’ Marshall said. 

He had attracted a damn shark by bleeding in the ocean. He could’ve kicked himself for his stupidity.

Getting hit by a train was one thing. Turning into a shark’s late-night snack was something completely different. 

The shark’s wake reached him first. Would it try to throw him off the boat and stun him, like Orcas did to seals on icebergs? 

It better not. 

Marshall curled his hands into fists, preparing to punch the shark in the nose, if and when it surfaced. He tried to appear braver than he felt. He could feel his heart beating in his clenched fingers. 

The surface of the water broke. A slick, grey body was hurtling towards Marshall, full speed. He braced for impact, hoping for a collision of shark nose and sixteen-year-old boy fist. 

But as the shark came closer, Marshall saw the dorsal fin was sloped, not as triangular as he had thought at first glance. Surely, that head was too small to be attached to the gigantic body of the Great White that Marshall was imagining. The water parted for a moment, and Marshall could’ve sworn he saw the outline of a blowhole. 

‘Bonjour!’ the dolphin said as it surfaced. 

Marshall’s eyes bugged out of his head. The air in his lungs deserted him.

‘What?’ he croaked. 

‘I said bonjour, mon garçon! Make some kind of reply. Is this the way you speak to your teacher?’ The dolphin’s voice was high and a bit squeaky, but Marshall couldn’t deny there was a quality in it that he recognized. 

He scooted closer to the edge of the boat, to where the dolphin was turning circles in the water. 

‘Monsieur Dupont?’ Marshall asked. His voice was a barely audible whisper. His French teacher was a dolphin. Marshall was dead. He’d jumped in front of a train.

A horrible thought occurred to him now. Did he survive the train’s impact? Was he in a coma right now, being poked and prodded by medical professionals, under some anesthesia that was making him hallucinate this entire experience? Or was he very, very dead and – yep. He had to have been wrong all this time. There was something after death. None of that I-just-don’t-exist-anymore shit he had convinced himself of over the years. This had to be Heaven or Hell or… well, if one of his high school teachers had followed him here, it could actually be something worse. 

His sin had been suicide.

Punishment? Eternal French homework. Like some kind of twisted, academic purgatory.

‘Of course! Of course!’ the dolphin cried.

‘Are you dead?’

‘Why would I be dead?’

‘Because I’m dead!’ Marshall said, indignantly. ‘At least, I’m meant to be.’

‘Then you’re dead, but I’m certainly not.’ Monsieur Dolphin-Dupont was turning in lazy circles in the water. Marshall wanted to scream at him to stop but didn’t want another rebuke from his favorite teacher.

‘How is it we’re speaking now, then? If I’m alive and you’re dead. And how are you a dolphin?’ 

‘How are you a human?’

Marshall had no response to that – other than the quintessential and Jesuit-approved ‘because God made me one’ – so he just huffed. 

‘We’re speaking because you open your mouth and make noises, and I do the same in response. I can’t go into more detail. I teach French, not science.’ 

Marshall had no idea how to respond to that either, so he changed tactics. There were dozens, hundreds of pressing questions he wished to ask, the most important of which sprung out of his mouth.

‘But Monsieur Dupont. Where the hell am I?’

‘Marshall, my boy. You’re in Suspended Time, of course!’ the dolphin version of Monsieur Dupont said, letting out a series of squeaks. They almost resembled human laughter.