Sarah pedaled her pink bicycle back and forth across the sidewalk in front of the house. Even though I had loosened her training wheels for the second time this week, she still balanced smoothly, giving a quick wave each time she rode passed. It was perfect bicycling weather: a cool, light southerly breeze complimented spring's setting sun with only a few clouds parading across the sky. The smell of heated asphalt and shaved grass transported me to the spring days I had spent exploring the streets and parks of Brooklyn with my father. I resisted the urge to fetch my bicycle from the garage and take Sarah on such a journey. She was still too young and the streets of New Jersey were not as accommodating as the streets of Brooklyn. I smiled at the thought and had to admit that the streets of Brooklyn weren't very accommodating either.
I watched as ants carrying newly cut bits of leaves marched around my feet, two stairs beneath where I sat, disappearing down the concrete staircase towards the flower garden. Sarah squeezed the black rubber horn and a duck cry greeted Mrs. Tinderly as she drove by slowly and carefully in her yellow family truck. It was almost time to go inside and start dinner. I watched Sarah ride by a few more times before getting up, wiping the backs of my shorts, and heading down the stairs. Sarah began pedaling faster, racing the last sunrays that peeked out from behind the neighbor's townhouse.
I walked down to the garage and entered the code to open it. "Sarah, it's time to put your bicycle away," I said.
Like most seven-year olds, she had learned to ignore certain requests and pedaled even faster. As she turned the bicycle around sharply at the end of the sidewalk, only the inside wobbling training wheel kept the bicycle upright. The determination on her face was comical. Her two braids, clipped with pink bow berets, whipped her neck in time with the fervent pumping of her legs. She sped past me as I stood waiting at the top of the driveway, and headed at chain-rattling speed for the end of the sidewalk.
I began running before I even saw the bicycle fall; she had gone into the turn too fast for the training wheel and as it tipped over her arms and legs became entangled with the pink and white bicycle frame. When I got there, the front wheel was still turning and without waiting to see my reaction, she cried. I separated Sarah from the bicycle and examined her. I wanted to yell, explain how had she stopped and gone into the garage or went slower or turned at a more conventional rate or never left my arms, she wouldn't have fallen. But I didn't. Except for a small scrape down her left leg, she was fine.
I faked a smile, knocked on her helmet, and asked her, "Did you hurt the sidewalk?" She was still sniffling and turned her face away from me to hide a smile. I carried her back to the house, dragging her bicycle by the handlebars.
After dinner, I went to the backyard feeling fifty pounds heavier. Stuffing filled my ears and nose and my sluggish body thought carefully before obeying each requested movement. I leaned the blue beach recliner back to the full-reclined position, and eased into the chair. Sarah followed me outside, still full of energy as only a child can have after eating a full meal.
"Turn off the porch lights, Sarah," I said. "Let's look at some stars."
She turned off the lights and flopped down next to me, her hand searching for and scratching the Mickey Mouse band-aid on her bare knee. She rested her head against my shoulder and stared into the sky with me. Off in the distance to the east, the lights of Manhattan created a starless area on the horizon, like a large bank of moonlit clouds. There was no moon this night, however, and the late evening clouds had mostly cleared.
I searched the sky for Ursa Major, squinting out the seven stars that formed the related asterism. I leaned over until I was at Sarah's eye level and pointed up to the sky. "There's Ursa Major," I said, "the Great Bear." Sarah nodded. She had seen this demonstration before. I drew the lines between the stars with my finger, showing her the head, three legs, and body of the bear.
"In ancient times," I began as Sarah snuggled closer, already anticipating the story, "even before bicycles, heroes and gods traveled the heavens and earth. One of the heroes was Callisto, a beautiful princess and the daughter of a mighty king who ruled the land of Arcadia.
"Callisto was more than just beautiful," I said. "She was also a skilled huntress, traveling over the weathered mountains and through the ancient forests of Arcadia in search of the most fearsome of beasts."
Sarah closed her eyes, squinting them together tightly. I felt more than heard a rumbling bass vibrating through the window of a neighbor's bedroom. I slowed the cadence of the story, falling into its rhythm.
"During a winter hunting trip, Callisto left her hunting party behind to stalk a queenly deer. She hid in a stand of trees and silently pulled back her knocked bow. Callisto slowed her breathing and felt the arrow's feathers rub across her cheek. Before she could release the arrow, a white clad woman walked up to the deer, laying her hand upon its back, she whispered into the deer's ear. The deer looked into the trees where Callisto was hiding, and turned and fled in the opposite direction.
"Callisto stood up, still holding the taut bow, and asked the white-clad woman what she thought she was doing. The woman replied, 'I know you are a great huntress, Callisto, for I am Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. But that deer you stalked was a friend of mine, and I could not let you take her.' Callisto lowered her bow and curtsied before Artemis.
"They talked for hours about hunting and Callisto's travels, and when night covered the day, Artemis asked Callisto to join her. Callisto was overjoyed at the offer, but before she could accept, Artemis said, 'There is one condition to my offer. If you travel with me, you must stay away from all men. They are dangerous creatures and corrupt the most innocent of women.'"
Sarah clapped enthusiastically. "Artemis sounds like a smart lady," she said. "You know, you can never be too careful around boys and their cooties."
I nodded in solemn agreement and continued, "Callisto accepted Artemis's condition and traveled with her. Artemis introduced Callisto to other lands and mystical creatures, which they hunted together. Callisto, who was very honorable and liked Artemis very much, followed her wishes and stayed away from men.
"Now Zeus, if you remember, was the king of the gods," I said. "He was powerful and had a great appetite for women."
"He ate them?" Sarah asked.
"Well, the really tasty ones, sometimes," I said with a smile, "but that's not what I was talking about. During his travels, Zeus encountered Callisto while she hunted a ferocious boar. Zeus was fascinated by Callisto's beauty and grace, and approached her. Callisto turned Zeus away, telling him that she served Artemis and could not talk to any man.
"Zeus was not only a powerful god, he was also a sneaky one," I said. "He left Callisto and returned a few months later. This time, before Zeus spoke to Callisto, he disguised himself as a woman."
"That's some disguise," Sarah said.
"Yes. Zeus was a very powerful god," I said. "And Callisto became good friends with the disguised Zeus. After some time, Zeus revealed his real identity to Callisto. While Callisto was surprised, by this time, she had become such good friends with Zeus that she couldn't give up the friendship. Zeus and Callisto stayed together and became lovers.
"A few months later," I said, "while Callisto and Artemis were hunting."
"What did they hunt?" Sarah asked.
"Bears," I said. "Callisto and Artemis were hunting great bears that could gobble little girls up in two bites." Sarah squealed and laughed. She leaned over and pretended to bite my arm and I obliged her by howling in pain. Sarah was delighted by this and continued to eat me up. After she leaned back in the chair, I continued.
"During the hunt, Callisto and Artemis killed a great bear. There was a lot of gore and blood on their hands and clothing, and Callisto and Artemis went to a nearby stream to wash up. While undressing, Artemis noticed that Callisto was pregnant."
"She had a big belly," Sarah said, knowingly.
"Exactly that. But Artemis knew that to become pregnant, Callisto must have been lovers with a man."
"Or a god!" Sarah said and smiled.
"Yes, or a god," I said. "Callisto admitted to Artemis that she was Zeus's lover. After hearing this, Artemis became very angry with Callisto and sent her away. Six months later, Callisto gave birth a beautiful son. She named him Arcas and the two of them lived together happily.
"But the story doesn't end there," I said. "Many years later, Artemis, who still held a grudge against Callisto, told Zeus's wife about their relationship. In a rage, Zeus's wife found Callisto and--because she, like her husband, had great power--transformed Callisto into a great bear. For years, Callisto wandered through the woods as a bear."
"Oh," Sarah said.
"Arcas," I said, "like his mother, grew up and became a skilled hunter. During one of his hunting trips, he encountered his mother in the form of a bear. But because bears do not talk, Callisto could not tell her son that the bear he hunted was his mother.
"Arcas, being a practiced hunter, pursued her through the forest. He eventually tracked her down and, using his hunting spear, stabbed her in the chest," I said. Sarah gasped.
"Artemis watched the hunt from the heavens and took pity on Callisto and decided to intervene. She sent a fierce whirlwind down to the earth and before Callisto died, she brought her to the heavens." I pointed back up to Ursa Major. "That's her," I said, "the Great Bear that watches over her son and the world."
We were both quiet after I finished. Sarah closed her left eye and traced the lines of the Great Bear with her tiny finger. A slight wind picked up and I felt Sarah shiver. The evening smells of mating bugs and baking earth mingled with the cooking smells of late dinners. The trees rattled from the wind, but the crickets were mercifully silent. The stars glittered and the sheen of the Milky Way peeked over the horizon.
"I was thinking about Zaida again," Sarah said. "I think about him a lot." Sarah stopped tracing the stars and looked up at me. "Which are his stars?"
I turned to her in surprise. Sarah had not known my father--he had died when I was very young. I had spoken about him to Sarah in the hopes of keeping his memory alive. "I am not sure, sweetie," I said as I stroked her unraveled hair.
Sarah sat quietly for a while longer as she chewed her bottom lip, looking back up at the sky. "You told me Zaida watches down over us, just like Callisto," Sarah said. "So which are his stars?"
I put my arm around Sarah's shoulders as she waited patiently for me to answer. My eyes were already damp; the thoughts of children were amazing. "Perhaps Zaida shares the same stars as Callisto. In that case, he's up there right now," I said, pointing at Ursa Major, "watching down over us."
Sarah considered this for a moment and nodded her head. "I'm hungry," she said. "May I have a yogurt?"
"He was this close to talking back to me." I demonstrate just how close for my Dinner Companion. My thumb, mere millimeters away from my forefinger, is rock steady. I admire it for a few moments. My Dinner Companion, obviously breathless, waits for me to continue the story. I let the anticipation build for a bit then continue, "In the office, even. Who did he think he was? I saw it in his beady eyes and red face. He was holding his breath, with his mouth blown out, like that black trumpet player with the deformed cheeks, and his nostrils flailed. Flailed! He was this close to speaking." I again show him the rock steady distance. He's obviously impressed. Who wouldn't be? High-stakes office politics oozes from me. I nod as he agrees more inanely than I expected. He goes on for a while as I admire my watch.
I gaze over the ocean where the sun sets behind the western mountains. The pink sky turns the beach golden and stains blonde highlights on the water. The surf is high--the weatherman said something about unexpected northwesterly winds. The evening surfers still go at it, a few paddling toward the beach, but most congregating near the foamy surf, almost to the razor sharp horizon.
My Dinner Companion has been silent for some time. He's clearly waiting for me to respond to whatever he said. The waiter's arrival saves me from having to pretend. I lead: "Prime ribs. The emperor's cut, rare, of course. The bartender, John M-something, makes a secret sauce for meat that the chef recommended when I was here back in, oh, '99 or perhaps 2000. I've been sold on it ever since. Last time, John joked that he'd name it after me, since I'm one of the few who can appreciate its richness. I've introduced a cousin of John Wheeler, the actor, to the sauce. He loved it as well and still to this day talks about it. Have him whip some up and serve it with the prime ribs. Don't bother with the horseradish--it just kills the taste. I'll take orders of the garlic mashed potatoes and that creamy spinach. Another cocktail is in order, and, come to think of it, I'll start with a dozen Kumo oysters. This is the right time of year for them, isn't it? And make sure they're fresh-flown in within the last two days, or just forget it. You can probably start the chocolate soufflé after you bring the prime ribs--that should be perfect." My Dinner Companion is in awe. I sometimes feel guilty ordering first--it must be the same feeling ice skaters get when they have to follow a perfect-score performance. My Dinner Companion starts to order; as he reads from the menu, the waiter and I share a grim look.
After my fourth cocktail arrives, I decide its time to start talking shop. "My company is quite demanding of my time, but I really can't blame them: I've had a lot of luck with the customers lately. I've been floating some ideas that they've been gobbling up--like fish on meaty hooks. I spoke with Brian, the CEO of a 'small' company yesterday (I'm sure you've heard of it, it's called Arnstar, and just made the Fortune 500) about our products. I was relaying the engineer's newest specs--come to think of it, they might as well have been my specs for all the ideas they took from me--in a private meeting, and all he kept asking was 'when, when, when?' I told him, 'you know how software development goes: once the programmers sink their teeth into new features, the best you can hope for is an alpha-alpha!-test within the year.' Brian couldn't get enough of it!" MDC stares blankly at me. He assures me he knows what an alpha test is, but I have my doubts. "I had scheduled two meetings that morning after Brian. I literally had to threaten physical violence to leave the meeting. Once I start spouting ideas, my audience never can get enough of me."
The appetizers arrive and I dig right in. Not surprisingly, the Kumo oysters were in season. They're presented in a black-wooden oriental bowl filled with crushed ice and seaweed. The oysters, arranged in an alternating horizontal and vertical arrangement, are slimy and glistening. I squeeze just the right amount of lemon and dribble the ideal amount of thick, red cocktail sauce onto each shucked shell. I eat the first one, and, as expected, it is delectable.
"Regrettably, I'm going to have to catch a flight tomorrow morning to return to L.A. I can't be away from the home-office for too long. I'd say the place would fall apart with out me, but that would be a terrible understatement." Like clockwork, the subject of airlines and flights comes up. I start with the normal chat about security and tourists. He goes on about removing his shoes and I laugh. The drinks are stronger than usual. A couple next to us keeps turning around to look at me. I give them a smile and suck the last oyster dry.
"Can you believe I didn't get an upgrade on the flight here? After fighting through the elite lines to get to an open airline e-ticket machine--I swear, it's as if these passengers have never used a computer before, the time it takes them to print their tickets and check their bags; it's embarrassing--I punched in my credit card and seat 24F came up on the screen. I was sure it was a mistake. This is a 777 and there aren't 24 rows in first-class! I mean, really, I'm a platinum member. I'm not cattle, like the ones who fly to Hawaii to be slathered in slime and roasted to a pink doneness," I stop, mid-sentence and grin, admiring my own cleverness. While I admit it's a conceit of mine to think this way, I do have a way with words. I lose my train of thought as a woman walks by. She's wearing a tight, sleeveless dress with a sharp diamond cutout back. After studying her closely, I'm rewarded with a shadowed view of rear cleavage, which I point out to my Dinner Companion. He quickly agrees. I toast her cleavage and, reluctantly, her companion, a rather goofy tourist in mismatched Hawaiian shorts and shirt, the tags of which are still poking from the faux silk.
The waiter clears our appetizers and delivers another cocktail. I disappointingly note that MDC is not keeping up and he makes noises about early meetings. I'm not sure how to respond, so I don't. "Where was I before that walked by? Oh, yes. We were talking about cows. As I was saying, seat 24F came up. I quickly checked the electronic seating chart--mistakes do happen--and not only is my seat not in first-class, it's past the wing, halfway through the first-passenger section. And, to add insult to injury, it's a middle seat! I immediately call an attendant to double check. We chat for a bit, and she has the gall to print up my ticket, swing and throw--and I mean literally twirl multiple times to build up speed, like an Olympic Hammer thrower, before releasing--my bag on the conveyor belt, and walk away, as if I had said something wrong. But it gets worse." MDC is now completely captivated. He's sipping at his drink, sucking ice up with his straw in a most distracting way. The crushed ice barely fits into the bottom of the straw, but once he maneuvers it in, the ice shoots at high speeds up the straw. I wait to see if it will get stuck in his throat, loosening-up my arms for some Heimlich; but it's regrettably not needed.
During my pause, MDC starts in again. The sun has completely set and the water is dark. The surf can still be seen by the moonlight, but the surfers are near invisible. Teams of them wash off at the showers at the edge of the beach. A fair number of them are women, mostly on the fat side. It seems MDC has traveled quite often in coach. I'm starting to think I chose the wrong companion for dinner tonight. While he might understand my commentary, I'm not sure he can truly appreciate it. I smile encouragingly and I excuse myself. It's early in the night to break the seal, but I need to get away for a bit. MDC seems the type to go on and on.
I return just as the wait staff, as if on cue, swoop down to serve our dinners. While our waiter personally places my dinner plates, a busboy delivers MDC's. As he lowers MDC's vegetable plate, a buttery string bean leaps off the plate onto MDC's lap. It is obvious that the waiter put the busboy up to it, probably still disgusted at MDC's proletarian ordering. I chuckle as I cut into the prime rib and slather it in the secret sauce. It's even better than I remembered.
A Hawaiian band starts performing at the beach level of the hotel. The tourists form a semi-circle around the performers, kept back by male hula dancers wielding flaming torches. The music is unmistakably island and not terribly unpleasant. A particularly striking hula dancer wearing a sequin red dress erotically moves her hips to the strumming players. She takes small, careful, toe-first steps as she waves her wrists and fingers slowly, moving more to the beat of the shushing waves than the ukulele and guitar chords. Some people at the restaurant, including the ogling couple, join in the tourist's applause at the end of each song.
I return to my steak and interrupt MDC as he attempts to explain the proper procedure for eating crab legs, which, according to him, involves a lot of incorrect smashing, a little more correct cracking, and probably the worst attempt at sucking meat from a shell in the history of meat-sucking. "My flight got much worse." My resonant voice carries well over the music and MDC puts down his mutilated crab leg--his efforts resulting only in tiny shreds of meat and greasy fingers--and listens intently. "I got on the plane during the courtesy board, and things were looking good as the stewardess announced she was closing the plane door, cellular phones off, etcetera. My aisle neighbor, an older man that did not smell too offensive and leaned respectfully away from me, and more importantly, away from our shared armrest, was already belted in. More promising was that my window neighbor was missing. As you know, two coach seats are almost better than a first-class seat. I began to slightly regret how harshly I had spoken to the ticket girl. That regret was very--and I mean very--short lived. Following the stewardess from the rear of the plane as she came through the aisle for a final pre-flight check," I pause--dramatically--and upend my cocktail. "Just as she walked up the aisle, a Hawaiian woman with a baby strapped to her chest appeared. I admit I panicked. I'm usually calm on airplanes, but after frantically calculating where she was heading--which was obviously not the first-class cabin--only one seat remained: the one next to me."
MDC regards me with genuine sympathy. I saw the meat with my five-inch knife and remove a large swath from the bone. I lather the meat in the orange cocktail sauce and hover the fork inches from my mouth, watching (but not seeming to watch) MDC stare longingly at the perfectly cut and dipped prime rib. I chew and swallow, blotting the juices running down from my lips. "Me and the older man get up and let her in the row. She proceeds to spread out all her baby crap not only under her seat, but also over our shared armrest and partly under my seat. My already too small middle seat! And just when things could not possibly get worse, the baby starts to wail. And when I say wail, I mean the sky-is-falling, get-the-fire-department-because-my-baby-is-trapped-under-the-blue-fragments wail."
MDC is not the only one engrossed by my tale. By now, the male part of the couple at the next table is listening raptly. He seems the professional sort, wearing pants, which tourists, who seem to forget all notions of fashion while on vacation, never seem to do in Hawaii. His date's neck is awfully fine, both thin and shapely, and well displayed with her hair up in a messy but intriguing bun. As I look, she turns around and I tip my empty glass to her health and the health of her well-cushioned spine. She quickly glances away and shares a look with her date. He turns back to me and based on his look, I'm sure he wants me to continue with the story.
"While the mother moves her stuff around, she casually--in quite difficult to understand English--mentions that she's traveling with her fiancé, who is seated in the rear of the airplane. She goes on to suggest that should her baby disturb me, she'd be happy to have him switch seats with me. She tells me he's seated in 38B, 'B' mind you. I do some quick calculations and determine that not only is that seat farther away from the cabin door, it's also a middle seat in the middle of the plane--with the exception of seats near the toilet, there are no worse seats. Besides, the way she asked, it sounded more like she was doing me a favor instead of visa-versa. I thank her and bury my nose in a magazine, trying to ignore the feel of the baby's clammy hands on my turned-in elbow."
The crab legs seem to be winning in MDC's dinner struggle. He already gave up on the strange plastic claw-like instrument that came with the metal pliers and tiny fork. Now he painstakingly removes shell bits from the tiny strands of meat. The waiter stops by to inquire how our meal is going. MDC ignores him, but I assure him that we're doing fine--great, even. I hold up my empty glass and he takes the hint.
"This was a night flight and after reviewing my meeting notes, I try to catch some Zs. The baby shuts up long enough for me to almost fall asleep, only to be woken up by a tap on my shoulder. The woman wants to get up. I reluctantly wake up my neighbor and let her out. She does this three more times, before returning with her fiancé. It's obvious that the she keeps leaving her seat to visit her fiancé and not to take care of the baby. This time, the fiancé asks me if I'd like to switch seats. With all my stuff properly placed in the seat and overhead, and a clear path to the exit when the godforsaken plane lands, I have no intention of moving. I tell him, 'not really.'
"You have to understand, I've had a bad experience switching seats on a previous flight. I was flying from L.A. to N.Y., first-class, of course, and an older couple was separated, the wife--who wore way too much make-up, as if anything could hide her deep wrinkles or sagging jowls--sat next to me, and her husband was in the rear. The woman asked me if her husband could switch with me. I had a prime window seat in the first row, and, being the nice, but inexperienced traveler, I agreed. I end up in the rear of the first-class cabin. When the stewardess gets around to taking my order, she had completely run out of this excellent smelling chicken and rice dish. I had to settle for an Asian vegetarian meal! The couple in the front was laughing it up; both had chicken dishes and easy access to the stewardess for refills."
MDC is rightfully outraged by the story. Even the eavesdropping man, who sighs quite deeply and loudly at the end, is appropriately disgusted at how I was taken advantage of. The waiter clears our dinner plates, takes MDC's dessert order and heads to the kitchen. Stars replace the surfers at the horizon and Cassiopeia rises from the dark waters. The Hawaiian musicians and dancers are currently on a break, and the crowds have thinned a bit. The sharp smell of the ocean hangs heavily in the air, filling my lungs with a salty mist, which makes breathing deeply difficult, but more rewarding.
"Halfway through the flight, the person sitting next to the fiancé agrees to switch seats with the mother. When I get up to let him in, I notice that the fiancé was sitting not, as I thought, in a middle seat, but in an aisle seat. Seat 38D to be exact. Had the mother spoke properly, I would have switched. As it was, I barely slept the rest of the flight, having to get up at the end again for the mother to switch back. By the time she returned, the baby stank. Luckily, the landing and taxiing were rather quick, and I escaped that nightmare."
The waiter returns with our desserts. He presents my chocolate soufflé first, still in the baking cup, with drizzled raspberry and vanilla sauces decorating the plate. I put my fork into the cup and scoop out a small piece. Steaming dark chocolate leaks out of the center of the cake. I blow carefully on the drenched cake and place the forkful in my mouth. The warm cake is tender but not sweet. The chocolate sauce is incredibly rich, just a hair away from being too much so. I close my eyes as the cake and sauce blend and dissolve.
As I take a second bite, I see the neighboring couple preparing to leave. The woman is grasping her date's arm hard around his bicep and she's talking quietly to him. He keeps looking over at the table and I raise my glass to his health. The chocolate is still stewing in my mouth and I decide not to take a drink. He turns and leaves the restaurant with his date in tow. The Hawaiian music strikes up just as he passes the door.
At the beginning of fall, Peter discovered a broken windowpane in the basement of his house. A few jagged glass edges remained in the frame, but no other glass pieces were found. The yellow-framed window, nailed and painted shut, provided a view of the balding grass garden running along the side of his redbrick house. A chain-link fence, stitched with alternating green and white plastic strips, obscured the view beyond the garden. Peter's father covered the broken windowpane with a few layers of ripped garbage bags, but never returned to finish the job.
When the calendar decreed the beginning of winter, a cold draft seeped through the broken windowpane causing the plastic covering to suck in and out in concert with the wind. There were a few moments of tension between the thunderous burst as the plastic blew in, inflating the whistling garbage bag, and the softer hiss when the wind released the plastic. The sucking sound and motion reminded Peter of the artificial lung machine that had supplied oxygen to his dying grandmother. Before seeing the machine, he had never thought about his own breathing. Now, when he lay in bed, he was conscious of each breath. He sometimes lay awake all night controlling his breath, afraid that if he fell asleep his breathing would stop.
It was during one of those restless nights that Peter first heard the scratching in his wall. His bedroom pitched darkness that night, the type of dark that conjured gray-blackish spitballs. His heart thumped in time with the scratches and titters that emanated from behind the wall. The wall, covered in swirling wood paneling framed by black plumb lines, hid the origin of the noise.
For six weeks, the sounds arrived from inside his wall. The sounds were neither consistent nor predictable, but every few nights Peter heard the scratching. At the first sound, his insides froze up and his thoughts slithered wetly through his icy organs. A small part of his mind considered his fear ridiculous--scratching never hurt anyone. Those thoughts crystallized alongside his internal organs. He never got back to sleep on those nights. Instead, he stayed up until sunlight swirled in the brewing darkness. Peter never told his parents about the sounds because under the bright antiseptic of morning, he believed such sounds would never again scare him.
After a scratching, sleepless night, Peter arose to a deceptively sunny day. Two layers of broken clouds drifted high above the one-way street that his room overlooked. A blue family sedan sat double-parked at the corner, its blinking yellow lights tallying the passing of time. The marshmallow gray puffs of vapor escaping the car's muffler gave Peter a good gauge for the cold temperature outside.
The clothing he pulled from his drawers had the comforting smell of damp wood and moldy soap, smells which somehow permeated all of the clothing his mother washed. He dressed quickly and washed his face before heading down for breakfast, stumbling down the stairs two at a time, except for the last three, which he vaulted down, using his arms as a pivot between the wall and the banister, and setting down with a resounding thud on the carpeted landing.
"Stop dropping your Cocoa-Puffs all over the floor," his mother said. Frederick sat at the kitchen table with a spoon poised in front of his mouth. He wore a cornflower blue Adidas t-shirt, the same shirt he had worn continuously for the past month--his mother, fearing he would catch his death if he ran around shirtless, had given up arguing.
Frederick placed a dry spoonful of cereal in his mouth and dropped a sugary ball of chocolate with his left hand, which he hid under the table. He watched his mother carefully as he rolled the ball off his foot to quiet the sound. His mother didn't even look up. "What did I just say?" she asked him. He put the full spoonful back into his bowl and pretended to munch away.
Peter slid into the kitchen with his left socked foot and arm in front of his right like a surfer. He barely kept his balance as his sock caught and ripped on the golden metal bracket that divided the dining room's hardwood floor from the kitchen's tile. He poured himself a glass of OJ from the fridge and drank the glass bathed in the fridge's neon light. He put the glass and the carton back on the fridge's shelf.
"Glass goes in the sink," his mother said, her reading glasses perched dangerously on the upturned tip of her thin, pointed nose. The glasses magnified the large pores under her rouged cheek, appearing as a zoomed topographical map that scrolled as she moved her head to read the columns of the newspaper. She wore a pillowed robe decorated with fading blue flowers over her nightgown that shouted Sunday morning.
"Right," Peter said, removing the glass and putting it in the sink.
"Orange juice isn't breakfast," his mother said.
"Yup," Peter responded. He walked toward the kitchen door, appearing very interested in a fruit basket print that hung on the wall. His mother folded the top of her newspaper and peered at Peter. "Sit down and I'll make you some breakfast," she said without readying to rise.
"Not hungry," Peter said. A chocolate ball hit his foot. He looked to Frederick and Frederick grinned at him. He slowly crushed the ball with his big toe, leaving a brown crumbly mark on his ripped, white sock.
His mother looked at Peter expectantly.
"I said I'm not hungry," Peter said. His mother continued to stare at him.
"I'll get a bagel," Peter said. Satisfied, his mother nodded and snapped the newspaper up and continued reading.
Peter walked to the counter and ruffled the brown bag that held the day-old bagels. He made a munching sound and left the kitchen with his arm held rigid at his side. Frederick, still pretending to shovel his cereal, watched Peter's performance but did not say a word.
Peter scurried down to the basement. It was here that he and his friends assembled. Scattered throughout the room were chairs in different states of repair, including three generations of rolling computer chairs and an incomplete set of white wired patio chairs. One of the patio chairs would collapse when sat on. Peter and his friends had learned that if the broken chair was set properly its damage was impossible to discern. With a deafening clatter, many had felt the wrath of the patio chair.
Besides the scattered chairs, the room had a large bare middle, which left plenty of room for impromptu wrestling matches (made all the more lethal because of the hard floor), and rolling chair wars. Steady cold air leaked in through the garbage bag covering the window. In the far corner of the room, Peter's computer waited. Peter sat down in his computer chair and rolled himself under the desk. With a much-practiced move, he used his thumb and pinky, and the middle finger of his right hand to boot his computer.
The computer went through its starting pains, groaning, clicking, and occasionally burping until symbols flashed on the screen. Peter reached out and selected a hulking green troll. The troll expanded into a painted scene of four fantastically dressed persons standing with weapons drawn against the troll. The troll dwarfed the party, each of which held a different weapon: a silver sword, a knotted staff with a fiery ball balanced on its top, a pair of daggers with the blades crossed together, and a taut bow taller than the person pulling it. The word 'Loading' followed by a growing collection of ellipses appeared on the bottom of the screen. The scene dissolved slowly into a new reality, a world of trolls, dragons, and heroic warriors. Peter couldn't wait to step in.
At fifteen feet tall, Grelko the Giant loomed. Peter admired Grelko's girth, which dominated his computer screen. Grelko was ancient. Peter had played him for one hundred twenty days and thirteen hours in a world where age translated into power. The longer your character survived, the more powerful it grew, and Grelko was huge, even for a giant.
Peter called up his list of friends to see who was online. Even though it was early, a surprising number of his clan were in the system. He scrolled quickly through their names looking for one in particular. With relief, he found Freilik's name.
The clan greeted Grelko with bows and cheers. Grelko approached Freilik. Freilik was less than a quarter of Grelko's height and wore a loose fitting green robe that partially covered her rounded belly and chubby legs. Peter still smiled when he saw the character Samantha chose to play. Samantha was tall and thin and Peter considered her the second best looking girl at school, right after Svetlana, whose fully developed chest and frog eyes put her on top of every boy's list in Peter's class.
"Have you been on long?" Grelko mouthed to Freilik. Green sparks cascaded off his massive axe, the sparks drifting to the ground before disappearing through the pixilated earth. Pleated clouds slid across the darkening sky.
"It's been quiet all morning," Freilik mouthed. "We're just waiting for them to attack. I have to log in an hour or my mother will kill me. But I'd really hate to miss this." She wielded a short sword, which glowed dully in the fading light.
Grelko peered over Freilik to a distant gathered army. "It doesn't look like you'll miss much," Grelko mouthed and shrugged, a strange sight as his breastplate, which consisted of two chainmail shirts coupled together with straps, shifted up and fell down on his shoulders with a jingling thump. "This looks like a pretty easy fight. And, you know, Grelko the Giant doesn't lose many battles." Grelko's smile showed three gray teeth in an otherwise empty, cavernous mouth. Freilik groaned.
"Of course," Grelko mouthed quickly, "it would be better if you stayed. I'm better with you at my side. You know, we haven't lost one battle since we've teamed up. That's saying something."
"Yeah," Freilik mouthed with a smile. "But, then again, Grelko didn't lose one fight before me either."
"You know me," Grelko mouthed. Samantha had joined Peter in the game last year at his urging. She had played three characters before settling on Freilik, a surprisingly spry elf that complemented Grelko well. Samantha and Peter had been in the same classes since junior high school. She had always been friendly with him, especially after they shared a desk in seventh-grade Spanish. They spent more time doodling and passing notes than listening to the teacher that semester. Peter had realized at the end of the year how much he had grown to like Samantha. He never worked up the courage to ask her out.
Freilik snickered and walked around the perimeter of the encampment with Grelko trailing. She peeked in the supply tent and continued her walk. As she passed by the hastily constructed inner gate, she stopped. "Spy!" Freilik mouthed. In a blurred motion, she drew and with an underhand motion flung a small dagger. The dagger hung in midair before a bluish creature appeared. Grelko raised his axe and took two giant's step toward the creature. In executioner style, he brought the axe down on the creature. The creature raised a blackened spear to block the axe, but the spear cracked and Grelko embedded his axe in the creature's shoulder. The creature crumbled.
Freilik and Grelko stepped back as a large crowd rushed over to see what was happening. The leaders of the clan barked orders and the clan spread out, searching the surrounding area. Freilik and Grelko remained near the bloody creature. Freilik searched the corpse, tossing Grelko a jingling small pouch.
"That was interesting," Freilik mouthed. "I wonder why they sent him."
"I'm not sure, but his friends probably aren't too far behind," Grelko mouthed. Before Samantha had joined, Peter would have seen that spy before he got within a hundred yards of Grelko. He had grown soft with her around. Surprising himself, he did not mind this.
The attack began while the clan was spread out searching for additional spies. It was a bold attack, something that none of the defenders expected. For all of its audacity, it took the clan only twenty minutes to fight off the offensive. As always, Grelko was at the front of the attack with Freilik only a step behind him. They wiped out half the attacking army. After Grelko and the clan decimate their ranks, the attacking army sounded the horn for a retreat. The clan chased the retreating attackers while Grelko and Freilik returned to camp.
"You sure you don't want to stay for the looting," Grelko mouthed. "I'm sure the bounties they carried will be worth something. I know you don't usually pass up opportunities to collect the goodies."
"I wish I could," Freilik mouthed. "My mother has been yelling at my for the last twenty minutes to finish up. We're supposed to go to my grandmother's or something. I swear she does nothing but complain--my mother, that is, not my grandmother. She's pretty cool, in that older-person who knows things, type of way."
Grelko laughed. "I know exactly what you're talking about. So what are your plans for tomorrow?"
"Not sure," Freilik mouthed. "I may log in tomorrow morning for a bit if you want to meet up."
"Oh," Grelko mouthed and paused. "Sure."
"Okay then," Freilik mouthed. "Kill you later!" With a poof, Freilik logged out leaving Grelko standing there.
Peter logged out shortly after Freilik left, leaving the looting to the rest of his clan. As he powered down his computer, he heard a scratching on the floor behind him. He used his feet to spin his black computer chair around. Sitting in the middle of the tiled floor, a white mouse rubbed its hind legs together.
Fear encased Peter. His vision clouded until only the mouse was visible, and it appeared huge, its pink eyes the size of hubcaps, and its teeth gleaming metallically. Peter could only think about his vulnerable feet; he wished more than anything that he was wearing sneakers instead of just socks. He jumped up on the chair, keeping a good distance between the floor and his feet. The mouse sniffed the air and sauntered away from Peter. Peter used this opportunity to leap off the chair, using his palms to avoid running face first into the wall, and ran to the stairs, hugging the far wall and not looking back.
He found his mother and brother in the living room, watching Sunday cartoons. "There's a mouse downstairs!" Peter shouted. His mother and Frederick looked up. Peter felt his legs shaking.
"A what?" his mother asked.
"A rat!" Peter said. "It's in the basement."
His mother looked at Peter and shrugged, lifting herself off the couch and walked down to the basement. Frederick increased the volume on the television.
"Frederick," his mother yelled from the basement after only a few minutes. "Bring me down the mop and bucket."
Frederick got up reluctantly, still watching the television screen. He walked slowly toward the kitchen until a commercial came on. He ran to the closet, retrieved the bucket and mop, and ran down the stairs to the basement.
Peter heard lots of banging and yelling coming from the basement. He pictured his mother chasing the mouse with her kitchen broom. After a short time, his mother and Frederick returned.
"We caught the mouse," his mother said. "Caught him right under the kitchen bucket."
"Yeah," Frederick said. "Mommy snuck up to the mouse, real quiet like, and dropped the bucket right on his head. I bet he didn't even know what hit him. You should have heard him running around squealing!"
His mother nodded her head in agreement.
"We just need you to dispose of the mouse. You can use this mop," his mother said and handed Peter the kitchen mop. "Just turn the bucket over, using the mop so it doesn't escape, and empty the bucket outside in the garbage."
Peter took the mop from his mother. Frederick smiled and turned away. His mother gave Peter a little shove toward the basement stairs.
"Why didn't you just pick it up?" Peter said.
"We caught it under the bucket," his mother said. "We did all the hard work. Now all we need you to do is scoop it up. We're not asking much."
"Why don't we call an exterminator?" Peter asked. "We should have done that before. Do you know the number of germs rats have? I'll get the yellow pages." He stood up and walked toward the kitchen. His mother grabbed him by the arm.
"No need. We caught the mouse. Just go get it. Unless you're scared of a mouse?" his mother said.
"Pete is scared of a mouse," Frederick sang. "Pete is scared of a mouse. Pete is scared of a mouse."
It was bad enough that his mother questioned his courage. Peter couldn't bear to listen to his younger brother tease him. He walked down the first few stairs and looked up at his mother and brother. They both stood at the top of the staircase watching him. His mother made a shooing motion with her hands and Frederick waved. Peter continued down the stairs.
The staircase was narrow and turned abruptly before the last step. His friends joked that a fat person would never fit down the staircase. For the first time, Peter wished he were much fatter. He exited the narrow staircase into a hallway that led to the main room in the basement.
In the middle of the basement floor, Peter saw the upside-down kitchen pail. He took a step into the room, holding the mop, strings dangling, in front of him. The kitchen pail was dull white with black horizontal smudges. The white plastic grip of the wire handle was stuck under the lip of the pail, which lifted the pail off the ground.
Peter approached the pail and pushed it with the mop. The pail slid backwards. The pail then jerked forward as the plastic grip slipped over the lip of the pail. Peter dropped the mop and jumped back in dread, his arms raised as he had been instructed during the two weeks of martial arts classes he attended before dropping out. He took small, quick steps backwards until he felt the reassuring hardness of the wall. Peter knew that his mother had been wrong. This was not a job for him.
Peter stood at the far end of the basement facing the peeling yellow wall. He was hunched over with an arm half-raised to protect his turned away face. He heard his mother and brother coming down the stairs, talking quietly. His brother looked out from beneath the arched doorway with a cupped hand covering his nose and chin, and only the edges of his upturned lips visible. His mother, standing next to his brother, said something, but Peter didn't hear her. Peter watched with one eye covered by his crooked elbow as she walked over to the pail and lifted it. Only the unbroken pattern of streaked tile was under the pail.
"We didn't catch the mouse," his mother said, her voice finally registering in Peter's ears. "We didn't even see it. There was nothing here except the empty pail. What are you doing in the corner, Peter? Peter?"
Peter whimpered. His mother came over, putting her arms around his quivering shoulders, and stroked his hair.
"Pete, get a grip, Frederick said. "It was a joke." Frederick had stopped laughing.
Peter looked at his brother and pushed his mother aside as he exploded from the basement.
"It was just an empty pail," his mother yelled after him. "It was supposed to be funny."
Peter's vision was obscured by cloudy blood vessels as he ran out of the house and slammed the front door. The porch windows shuddered and a plant balancing on the windowsill fell over, spilling dirt on to the floor. Red petals peeked from under the dirt. Peter choked on a laugh and kicked the dirt until it covered the flower. Taking the stairs three at a time, he leaped to the ground. He ran with his head down, his moist eyes stinging in the cold air.
He ran into the avenue. A green station wagon screeched to a halt as Peter crossed in front of it. He didn't look up. He kept running. Peter knew that this was his life, his real life. Peter couldn't live like this anymore. He thought of Samantha. He thought of how friendly he was with her in the game. How well they talked in class. He then thought of the pail and her hiding underneath it. What was he afraid of? It was ridiculous. In the clear, cold light of day, he decided to go to her, to go to her in real life.
Rows of two-story houses lined the residential street. Stairways led up to the front doors next to driveways that sloped downward to garages. Every few houses, a large tree protruded from an opening in the concrete sidewalk. The tree roots pushed the surrounding sidewalk upward, forming a useful ramp for adventurous bicyclists and skateboarders.
After a few blocks, Peter noticed that three boys were following him. Peter reached into his pocket and felt for his keys and wallet. The boys were getting closer, glancing at each other and gesturing. Peter turned the corner on to Samantha's street. He felt the three boys turn the corner moments later. One of the boys crossed the street and walked parallel to Peter. Peter walked faster. It was early afternoon and the streets were empty.
Peter felt relief when he was half a block from Samantha's house. The boy across the street ran diagonally toward him. The two following also ran toward him. The one that crossed the street arrived first. He held out his arm, which was covered in a well-padded ski jacket, and struck Peter in the neck. Peter yelped and fell to the ground. When Peter looked up, the other three boys stood over him.
One of the boys grabbed Peter from behind. He felt something cold and smooth touching his neck.
"It's a razor blade," the boy said. "Don't move or I cut."
Another boy reached over his friend's arm and ripped off Peter's necklace. The necklace had been a gift from his uncle. As the boys searched through Peter's pocket, he heard Samantha's voice. She was screaming from her porch, running toward them. She was wielding a portable phone with a large plastic antenna. "Get out of here," she yelled. "I called the cops. Leave him alone!"
The boys ran, scattering in four directions. Peter stared at Samantha. She still held the portable phone in front of her, swinging it like a sword. "Are you okay, Peter?" she asked.
"Fine," Peter said. He stood up and walked away from her. His steps were hesitant and he didn't look back when he turned the corner. Had he looked, he would have seen Samantha standing there, crying. He walked for a few blocks and sat down leaning against a blue mailbox.
His mother found him three hours later. She took him home.
***
Grelko the Giant surveyed the castle. The warriors standing on the walls looked surprised. Grelko always traveled with his clan. His reputation and stature made him a target for anyone in the system looking to build a reputation. But there was Grelko, alone except for his axe.
Grelko charged the castle wall. The spell casters and bowmen waited for him to get in range and then opened fire. Magical fire and streaming arrows engulfed Grelko. In a surprisingly short time, the giant's bloody body was prone outside the city's wall. The defenders waited fifteen minutes before approaching the body; they were sure it was a trap. But when they arrived at the body, they found Grelko dead. His axe had broken during the magical onslaught and the giant held the broken shaft in his dead hand. Bards were summoned to document this occasion.
Everyone spoke of Grelko's charge for months, and the message boards were ripe with rumors. But no plausible explanation was ever given, least of all by a new incarnation of Grelko. The defending city enshrined the broken axe in its temple. A few days later, it disappeared. The city guards swore that they had seen glimpses of a green clad elf during the night.
Your wait from this point is thirty-eight minutes.
The Fire-Breathing Termite lurks 150 feet overhead with screaming passengers scurrying across the mound. The August sun lashes Thomas’s neck, and he rubs it, looking around. The crowd stands too close to him and radiates its own heat.
“This heat is incredible,” Thomas says.
Kem mutters, “There’s no such thing as heat. It’s only electricity pulsating through one’s brain.” Even in the heat, she wears a blue, unzipped sweatshirt with a hood and pull strings. Her sweatshirt sleeves cover her wrists and most of her fingers, and under her sweatshirt, she wears a black shirt printed with “Pumpkin Picker: Basket.” She stands perfectly still, not seeming to breathe.
“What did you say?” Thomas says.
“Nothing,” Kem says. “Just searching for meaning in all this heat.”
“Any luck?”
“Yeah. I discovered heat doesn’t have meaning unless you’re stuck in it.”
Thomas barks a laugh and rubs his neck again. “I bet that’s something they didn’t teach you in your air-conditioned meditation class.”
Thomas learned he would ride the Termite a week ago. He was eating brunch with Kem and discussing vegetarianism. Kem was trying to decide if she cared enough about animal rights to stop eating animals. Thomas bit into his half-pound cheeseburger and gestured wildly before responding.
“It’s a world where you have to eat or be eaten,” he said and swung the burger past her face. “This may look innocent and defenseless, but if it had not been viciously killed and grinded, it might eat you and everyone you love, or, at the very least, some of the grass around your house. I know how much you love that grass.”
“I don’t have a house. And my dorm is surrounded by concrete, not grass.”
“That doesn’t change anything.” Thomas took another bite of his burger and meat juices dripped down his chin.
Kem leaned over, wiped the mess off his face, and put a finger on his lips before he could continue. “We’re going to Defying Adventures next weekend,” she said. “And you’re going to ride the Termite again. It’s all planned. Now, what were you saying about eat or be eaten?” Kem smiled as Thomas turned a Kermit shade of green.
Your wait from this point is thirty-one minutes.
A Fire-breathing Termite car, with six people sitting in pairs, slinks toward the peak. A few hands rise in preparation for the drop. One of the passengers wears a fluorescent orange shirt that clashes brilliantly with the red rubber termite that wiggles in the wind over the track. As the car reaches the peak, it hangs motionless before gravity tugs.
Thomas shifts the plastic bag holding Faust from his sweaty right hand to his left. Faust is still alive and swimming. For not the first time, Thomas wishes he had won the goldfish for Kem. He had studied the game booth for ten minutes before putting his money down. Each try cost five dollars and most players won on their second attempt. He tried four times before giving up. He hated to disappoint Kem, but even after changing fishing lines, he couldn’t catch the plastic fish’s mouth. Kem won the fish on her first try and handed it to Thomas. He took it, happy to be of some assistance, and named him Faust.
The Termite car shoots up through another hole near the summit of the mound. It twists and slows down as it rises twenty feet over the peek, providing the riders a moment of weightlessness. Kem claps and laughs as the car plunges in a twisting, fluorescent orange blur into a Termite hole. Thomas averts his eyes.
“So, how long is this line?” Kem says.
Thomas shushes Kem. “I’m concentrating on keeping my lunch down. I’m still doing pretty good with the frankfurters, but the slushy is problematic. I knew blueberry was a mistake when I bought it.”
Kem measures the distance between them and takes a tiny step back. “The line, freak. How long?”
Thomas points at the sign overhead, which flashes advertisements along its border and counts the waiting time digitally at its center. Kem glares at the sign and shoves her middle finger at it. The sign increases the wait time by five minutes. Kem groans and Thomas erupts in laughter.
Thomas met Kem freshman year partly because of his roommate John. John started university dating his high school sweetheart, a cheerleader a year younger than him. John and his girlfriend spent all their time in the dorm room before her senior activities and his newfound freedom doomed their love. They didn’t bother tying anything on the doorknob when busy. Thomas learned to listen warily at the door before opening it. John’s girlfriend took an almost obscene pleasure in Thomas’s interruption of their lovemaking. While Thomas enjoyed seeing her slender, six-foot frame sweating in rapture, the enjoyment embarrassed him terribly.
Instead of chancing an interruption, Thomas spent his time wandering the dormitory halls. Freshman orientation had finished, but classes had not begun. Thomas went from dorm to dorm admiring the murals painted along the walls by generations of students with either too much time or too much talent. Some were paintings of favorite cartoon characters or sports teams. Others were elaborate panoramic scenes painted in a realistic or surreal style. Most were half finished as if the artists lost interest or moved halfway through their work.
Kem sat outside her room with her legs stretched across the hall. She had large, slightly sloped eyes that dominated her oval face. Her arms and shoulders were droopy and her body looked like it was about to fall over. Kem refused to carry a bag and instead wore pants with many large pockets always full of stuff: books, candies, letters, pencil sharpeners, anything that was lying about. She emptied her pockets every evening, but by the next afternoon, they were full again.
A book was splayed across her knees and her head was bent over it. Thomas was surprised to see someone reading a book; he couldn’t imagine reading without an assignment. He stepped over Kem’s outstretched legs.
“I’m not going to grow unless you step back,” she said, looking up.
Thomas continued to stare at Kem. He wanted to say something, but his mind blanked. His body kept moving forward as his eyes locked on her. When he risked either snapping his neck or losing sight of her, he stopped.
“I was taught as a little girl that if someone steps over you, you stop growing,” Kem said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m barely five feet tall. I’m not going to risk losing even an inch. So, if you wouldn’t mind.” She pointed to her legs. Thomas stepped back over and she pulled her legs in to let Thomas pass.
“Mind if I join you?” Thomas said.
“You have a thing for short girls?”
“Great men stand on the shoulders of giants. Even a little man appears tall when standing there.”
“A little woman, too, eh?”
Your wait from this point is twenty-four minutes.
A black car roars through a hole on the side of the Termite mound. The car twists upside down and turns sharply. A second car explodes from the hole and passes underneath the first. The passengers from the two cars extend their arms. From this distance, the hands look like centipede legs propelling the cars away from each other. After completing the loops, both cars blast into the mound through different holes.
The line slithers and loops forward. Thomas feels frustration building inside him. The frustration is still as far away as an approaching train that appears motionless even as it draws near. Thomas watches Kem chew on her sweatshirt’s pull strings. He takes in her flavor—she smells like cherries, the real cherries before soaked in sugar and spray-painted for presentation on a sundae—and his frustration fades.
“Did you watch the South Park episode where Cartman buys an amusement park?” Thomas says.
“Didn’t he buy the park so he could have it all to himself?” She lowers her voice, pinches her nose, and says, “No more lines!”
“Ah! I knew it. Even lit. majors, with your holier-than-thou taste and sophistication, are vulnerable to modern culture.”
Kem scrunches up her nose and sticks out her tongue. “A little real culture wouldn’t hurt you, math boy.”
“I’m starting to agree with Cartman,” Thomas says. “Maybe it is worth a million dollars to avoid these stupid lines.”
“If this is a ploy to escape riding the Termite, it won’t work, you know. We need to get you over what happened last time.”
Thomas smiles weakly. “I’m looking forward to riding the Termite. I’m a bit curious what the ride looks like with my eyes open. It’ll be a new experience.”
Kem majored in English Literature. She was that rare freshman who knew what she wanted and never wavered in her studies. She read continuously, usually with a pen in her mouth. Thomas tried to read her books. He wasn’t much of a reader, but he forced himself to every night. Kem carried a book of Sylvia Plath’s poetry in a large pocket, the pages drawn with five-pointed stars, hearts, and heavy underlines.
Thomas walked her back to her dorm one night and recited Plath’s “You’re” to her. The night was cool with only pinches of moonlight marking the path. Thomas stopped next to a park bench and recited the poem. At the end, he placed one hand on each of her shoulders and said, “Right, like a well-done sum. / A clean slate, with your own face on.”
They had known each other only a month and Kem had already told Thomas that she was not over her high school boyfriend. After Thomas finished, she smiled and raised her hand. Her fingers were stained with ink. A pen in one of her pants’ pockets had exploded and blackened her hand. She brought her fingers close to his face but pulled away before touching him. “I don’t want to get ink all over your face,” she said and turned quickly. Kem’s knees buckled and Thomas put his arm around her shoulders for support. She tensed up, and then relaxed, leaning her head against him. He pulled her closer, and with a slanted gate, they walked home.
Your wait from this point is eighteen minutes.
This section of the line has no shade. The heat from the sun smacks Thomas’s unprotected skin in waves. The line moves forward. As it turns a corner, two lanes appear separated by a dull orange rope. Thomas follows the people in front and steps into the right lane. Kem peers down the empty left lane.
“Do you think that other lane is a return lane?” Kem says.
Both lanes make a sharp right turn ahead and nobody comes back along the left lane. “Not sure.”
Thomas considers the left lane. People have a tendency to choose the longer line. This is mostly an American phenomenon. In Europe, people fight each other for the shortest path to the front. Americans feel that the longer the line, the safer the choice. There is a group mentality to waiting. If the line is long enough, there must be something good at the end. This holds even if all lines lead to the same place.
Before Thomas dated Kem, he would never have given the left lane a second thought. Kem was an alpha female: her clothing was a season ahead of the fashion. She found garage bands and listened to their music before they hit it big. People who were around her unconsciously dressed like her; not one of her friends carried a bag anymore.
Kem loved to stay up late and discuss everything. She said she was her most expressive in the late evening hours when the streets emptied and the world quieted. She was lying in his bed one evening, resting her head on his chest, while he stroked her wiry, short hair, lengthened with blonde, braided extensions. A week had passed since she last corrected him for introducing her as his girlfriend. On the ceiling, Thomas had taped glow-in-the-dark stars forming the major winter constellations of the northern hemisphere. Like most of their conversations, the longer they spoke, the more philosophical it turned.
“You have to avoid the herd mentality,” she said. “Many times I do the exact opposite of what people expect. I like to watch their reactions. It’s about manipulating the herd: they’re my own cult. Most times, they don’t even think about what they’re doing. In a group, people aren’t terribly smart.”
“They aren’t that smart individually, either.”
“You know that’s not true, Tom.” Kem smiled. Even when she disagreed with him, she did it in such an endearing way that Thomas couldn’t help but love her. “People are brilliant when they’re given the opportunity to express themselves individually. But when you get them in groups, they’ll follow the easiest path, even if it isn’t the best or most interesting path. Someone has to rebel against the group and change the status quo.”
“We should go down the left lane,” Thomas says. Before he finishes, a man in jean shorts and his girlfriend jump the rope divider and head down the empty left lane. The floodgates open and a crowd follows. The left lane fills up quickly as Kem and Thomas watch.
“Eh,” Thomas says. “I was in no hurry.”
“Do I smell some sour grapes around here?”
“That sounds yummy,” he says and kisses the top of her head.
Your wait from this point is nine minutes.
After the turn, the line begins to weave through metal switchback stairs. This is the point of no cutting. Once you enter the metal structure, it is next to impossible for someone to catch up without cutting through an angry line of people. The only exit after this point is at the end of the ride. Thomas catches his last glimpse of a Termite car slowing down by completing a series of lazy loops around the bottom of the mound. This is where the riders take stock, checking that all their parts are where they are supposed to be. It is also where last time Thomas knew he would not be able to keep his food down.
The cars vibrate the metal stairs. While the stairs provide shade, the metal heats quickly, and near the top of the stairs, the heat becomes unbearable. Thomas places his hand on the bag and Faust rams its head against his hand. The water feels like silicone under Thomas’s fingers.
“I’ve heard rumors that goldfish are very stupid,” Thomas says. “The story goes that when they swim completely around their tank, they forget where they’ve just been. They think they’ve found a brand new area.”
“I don’t believe that theory. Faust is smart. I can tell.”
“Maybe. Perhaps he knows that there’s nothing better on the other side of the bag. The only thing out here is this hot line and a sickening fall.”
“You think they’ll let us take Faust on the ride?”
Thomas holds up the fish and turns the bag until Faust faces him. Faust’s lips purse, opening and closing before swimming away. “For his sake, I hope not.”
Thomas brought Kem to Defying Adventures to ride the Termite last summer. He wanted to impress her with his nonchalant attitude toward danger and excitement. It didn’t work as he hoped. Thomas gorged himself on amusement park frankfurters. He grew up eating frankfurters. His mother boiled them for dinner, barbequed them at family gatherings, baked them in casseroles for special meals with his father’s clients, and even fried them with eggs for breakfast.
When he went to college, Thomas vowed never to eat another frankfurter. Within a month, he craved them and broke his vow. He tried to limit his intake, convinced that the lips and ass meat could not possibly be good for his health. Kem had other thoughts and learned to use frankfurters to her advantage. When Thomas refused to attend artsy or tender movies, Kem would tantalize him with descriptions of the movie frankfurters. The movie theater they frequented served the gourmet variety: thin with a meaty, heavy flavor and grilled until the outside skin crunched. He sat through her tear jerking or indecipherable artsy films with a frankfurter, small popcorn, and Sprite. The meat flavor went exceptionally well with the salt of the popcorn and the lemon of the soft drink.
Before getting in line for the Termite last summer, Thomas ate three frankfurters. The cool weather and light rain kept the crowds away, and Thomas and Kem rushed from ride to ride with almost no wait. Thomas did his best to keep his composure, but after riding the Termite, he spattered half-digested frankfurter chunks all over Kem.
Your wait from this point is one minute.
The Fire-Breathing Termite cars stop in front of three gates. The attendants load the cars in quick succession. Before the previous car disappears, the next car is already loaded and ready to follow. When it is their turn, Thomas flicks the antenna attached at the front of the Termite car before sliding into his seat. Kem takes the seat next to him and two looped bars descend over their heads and shoulders fastening them to the plastic chairs. The attendant tugs on each person’s bar before hitting a big red button.
The Termite car springs forward, picking up speed as it explodes through a round hole. Thomas’s eyes adjust gradually to the darkness. Smoke fills the interior of the colossal chamber and lasers flash the darkness. The track glows sickly green and the car ahead of them disappears. A many-legged bug splatters against the side of the car with an amplified splat. The couple seated behind them shrieks. Two, thin, furry legs reach over the top of the car, brushing Thomas’s shoulder. A steep hill looms. As the car tilts to climb the hill, the bug detaches itself and falls away. Thomas’s stomach rumbles in time with the ratcheting of the ascent.
“If you’re going to blow, give me fair warning this time,” Kem says. Thomas doesn’t answer.
“I’m not joking. All I ask for is a fighting chance.”
Thomas looks down at the bag in his left hand. “Shit. I forgot to drop off the fish.
“Just hold on tight. If you can make, Faust will make it.”
“Poor Faust,” Thomas says.
Thomas places the bag in his lap and holds on to the bar with his right hand. The car continues to climb, jerking a bit as it slips from one of the ratchets. Kem raises both her arms and starts screaming. “Just warming up,” she says and puts her arms down.
The Termite car passes through a pitch-black tunnel. A brilliantly lit gash appears at the end of the tunnel. The gash expands and a windy gust washes over Thomas. He struggles to keep his eyes open to watch the ascent. It reminds Thomas of trying to look up while standing under a waterfall. The car passes through the open gash into daylight at the top of the Termite mound. The car begins to dip as it passes the top. Sweat pours from Thomas’s palms and warm fear bubbles in his hollow stomach.
“Oh yeah,” Kem screams and raises her arms. “Here it comes. Waiter, check please!”
The car plummets and picks up speed. Thomas’s head feels huge with the pressure and his ears pop painfully. The juices in his stomach gyrate. A heavy weight drops on his chest and he tastes blood in his throat. The car buzzes and shakes as it falls toward a black, round hole. Bright orange flames greet the car as it pierces the hole. The intense heat from the fire washes over Thomas as the car passes through the flames.
The car jerks to a stop at the bottom of the hill. The acrid smell of sulfur fills Thomas’s nostrils and he squeezes his eyes shut. The car speeds up as it climbs again, this time twisting inside the dark mound. The car continues to rotate, loop, rise, and drop. Sunlight burns Thomas’s eyelids only to be replaced by darkness stained orange. He concentrates on his whirling stomach and swallows the gastric juices that keep sneaking up his throat.
When he is sure he can take no more, the car rights itself and loops lazily around the outside of the mound, slowing down with each loop. Thomas takes a deep breath. There is a strange, ringing silence and he realizes that Kem has stopped screaming.
“That was awesome,” Kem says. Her arms are still above her head, her wrists flailing.
Thomas feels wetness on his pants. He looks down to find a watery stain covering his crotch and inner thighs. He holds the shriveled remains of a plastic bag in his left hand. He pictures Faust flying from the bag during one of the upside-down loops and writhing through the air before smashing into the dark ground inside the Termite mound.
Kem stares at him. “Is that water from the fish or is there something you’re not telling me?”
“Poor Faust,” Thomas says.
Kem places her arms around his neck. “I never liked that fish, anyway. He didn’t fit in any of my pockets.”
Word version
So, this kid Charlie Menkis, I don’t think I told you about him, he’s a medium-sized kid, who sat next to me in third grade and pretended to shoot spitballs with an oversized straw. He got into this fight with Roger Frye, this guy with the nose—a big kid, medium tall with lots of pimples. Before I get any further, you should know this happened back in Brooklyn, so, yeah, this’ll be a good one.
Charlie thought he was one smart cookie. He always had that attitude, like when you spoke with him, you’d think he was looking down his crooked nose at you. He was a cool guy once you got to know him, but the first time I saw him, and you know I’m a nice guy, not judgmental or anything like that, the first time I saw him, I wanted to punch him in the nose. I wasn’t surprised that his nose was like that, all bent like. Some other guy must have had the same thought and popped him one. I wouldn’t blame that guy, but he probably should have given Charlie a chance. You never know who the good ones are until you give them a chance. Charlie was a loyal guy, the type who would walk an extra block because you had an inkling, or layout some cash because you came up a few cents short for the weeks’ comics.
He lived on Gravesend Road, right off Avenue U. Charlie liked living there because he believed they named it Gravesend after a famous gangster was viciously killed on the street. Me, I think they picked Gravesend because the street ran to the very bottom tip of Brooklyn, and most of the people who lived there ended up dying there. Gravesend, like the rest of the neighborhood, was dirty, run-down, dangerous, crowded, and absolutely wonderful. It was a place, and when people ask me where I come from, I don’t hesitate to tell them. I wear Brooklyn as I wear a fancy coat. It’s more than just where I grew up: it’s who I am.
Roger’s house was a three blocks from Charlie in a brownstone on Avenue W. Charlie and I ate dinner at his house a few times. Roger didn’t have any brothers or sisters and his parents were overly friendly, almost in that creepy way. Most other parents, my parents included, think friends are something you have to put up with, but only for so long. They’re nice to us for a bit, but once we overstay our welcome or eat one too many times at their dinner table, they begin to drop hints like don’t you have your own home, what, your food is not good enough, get the hell out of here, stuff like that. But Roger’s parents, they couldn’t wait to have us over. Roger’s father was a husky guy. He shaved his head completely and had these ingrown eyeballs, the type that you were sure would disappear completely, eye socket and everything, if he shut his eyes. His mother was a tall lady with a very long face, which she unfortunately passed on to Roger.
Roger yelled at his parents. I’m not saying I don’t yell at my mother, because I do, plenty. I find I have to do it more and more as she grows older. It’s as if she can’t hear me anymore. I hear that old people go senile but I didn’t think it would happen to her so soon. Roger yelled at his parents not because they were nagging or telling him to do something unnatural like wake up early or something. No, he yelled at them because they didn’t get stuff the way he wanted. His parents just took it. They sat there all quiet like and didn’t say a word. His mother even tried apologizing but then he yelled at her for interrupting. It was the strangest thing, like visiting a different planet where kids and parents flip flopped.
The last time we saw the inside of Roger’s house, he asked if we wanted to play ninjas. Charlie always pushed to play board games but that grew boring because he knew the game’s rules too well, and the rules seemed to change based on his situation. In the end, we’d throw up our hands and just give up and go toss the ball around or watch TV or something, just anything to shut Charlie up. I can hear only so much about rules and regulations and other crap like that. We got enough of that junk at school.
I didn’t know much about ninjas. When I went over to Charlie’s house, I’d see them on the badly dubbed Sunday movies on channel 11. I knew that ninjas were sneaky, wore black masks, and killed people with sharp weapons, which, after Charlie and I thought about it, was kind of cool. Because of that, and because we never played ninjas before, we agreed. Before you go and start pointing fingers and laughing, remember, there wasn’t much to do in our neighborhood. We were young then, too young to walk the streets alone or go to the diner or late movies. We ended up inventing make-believe games and playing them behind closed doors, where—after learning this the hard way—none of our older brothers or sisters could see us.
Roger opened his dresser and showed us his weapon collection: throwing stars, two sais—the three-pointed unsharpened daggers used by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—grappling hook and rope, and various swords and daggers. Roger wouldn’t let us touch any of his weapons. He took each out, swung it around or sometimes threw it against the wall or the wooden posts of his bunk bed, which was riddled with holes. Roger flung a black dagger at one of the post, and it dug in, the handle still rattling after it struck.
He then picked up a crossbow lying next to the dresser. He cranked back its string and placed in a bolt. The crossbow was long and black, its curved bow jutting out in front. Roger swung the loaded crossbow around, and we backed off. Roger laughed at this. If you’ve never looked down the prod of a loaded crossbow, trust me, you’re not missing much. Crossbows are large and heavy, but when they’re loaded, you can feel the string’s tension in the air. I’m not sure what Roger was trying to do, he might have been aiming at his bedpost, or maybe at the wooden target on the closet door behind us, but he fired. The bolt flew past me and struck Charlie’s thigh with a loud thunk.
Charlie screamed. It was the craziest thing I’d ever seen. Roger stood there, his eyes crazy like, winding the crossbow as if he planned to load another bolt. Roger’s mother knocked on the door, and poked her head in to ask if everything was all right. When she saw Charlie, she came in. She bent down to look at the wound, the jeans around the bolt starting to turn red. His mother kept asking Roger what had he done, but Roger stood there, holding the crossbow, and denied doing anything.
Roger’s parents dropped me off before taking Charlie to the hospital. Roger stayed home. When the doctors removed the bandage three weeks later, the bolt left a large, red, circular welt on his leg, Charlie’s first battle wound. The skin around the welt turned all shades of black and blue. Shortly after that night, Charlie and I agreed that Roger was and always had been screwy.
Charlie wasn’t done, however. That boy can hold a grudge, and I would too if someone shot me. Charlie is one of those guys who when they find something funny about somebody, something they can latch on to, like, you know, someone wears jogging pants all the time or has a large head, he keeps the joke going. Someone like me would maybe say it once or twice and we’d get our laugh, but then we’d think of different things to say, or we’d hold off a bit, let the guy recover before we jumped them again. I’m not saying Charlie was worse than other kids were. It’s just that Charlie really dug in on you. He found the weakness and then stuck his knife into you and started twisting it, all slow and painful. It wasn’t good enough to wound, Charlie was all about the torture. I understand and respect torture, and Charlie raised it to a new level. He was a real artist, if you know what I mean. After Roger shot Charlie, Charlie had a new target for his skills.
Charlie started in on Roger’s nose. Roger’s nose was one of those rare characteristics that we just didn’t talk about at school. It was so freakishly large that we almost forgot about it. Its width was normal and its proportions from the tip to the top would have been normal if Roger’s head was larger, but it wasn’t. The nose didn’t fit his face. It was huge, starting almost above his eyebrows and ending with a hook downward that covered the top part of his upper lip. When we were young, we of course took our jabs at it, but that died off quickly because it became too easy. To make fun of Roger’s nose was like making fun of the sun because it shined too bright. His nose was who Roger was and we accepted it. Sure, we’d say things like, the guy with the nose when we were describing him, but it was more like a characteristic, just as we’d call Peter the Chinese guy just so you’d know who we were talking about.
Anytime Roger came up, Charlie would make a fist and place the thumb side over his own nose. It wasn’t an accurate betrayal, because, to be honest, Roger’s nose was larger than Charlie’s skinny fist, but we laughed. After a few days, everyone started doing it, and Roger eventually saw it.
Charlie wasn’t done with just the Roger nose. He started drawing a caricature of Roger, and I’ll admit it, it was damn funny. Charlie started with a small semicircle, almost like a nose, and you’d think, sure he’s going to draw a pretty big sized nose for Roger, and the semicircle was big, but not huge. Then he’d draw a humongous second semicircle connected to the first one, and the nose would look tiny. The first time I saw it, I didn’t get it. But then he’d look at you, and Charlie’s face was thin, very thin, but he could make these strange, exaggerated faces, like pulling his lips really wide apart or separating his eyebrows and then crossing his eyes. He was always pulling stuff like that. So after he drew the two semicircles, he would look at you and his face would be blank, no looks or gestures or anything, and that would surprise you because you’d be expecting something. With his face expressionless, he’d bring up his fist, still holding the pen, to his nose to give the sign of the Roger nose. And then he’d start laughing. Once he started laughing, it sometimes took him a bit to stop his shaking enough to start drawing, but when he did, boy was he right to laugh. He put a dot in the small semicircle for the eye, a half-circle for the mouth, and a few sticks for the body coming out of the smaller semicircle. The huge circle was Roger’s nose! Damn, it’s funny even thinking about it now. But as I told you before, Roger couldn’t leave funny enough alone. He performed that drawing for just about everyone in the class, sometimes multiple times, and began putting it on all the wooden desks.
Roger isn’t much of a get in your face type of guy. He broods. He’ll start talking about someone for a while, and he might give that person nasty looks, but he’d be unlikely to approach him and start an argument. Part of the reason might be because he usually lost those arguments. He was not quick on his feet and his insults always end up rather flat. He wasn’t stupid, just a slow thinker. Charlie, on the other hand, had a flair for insults. Roger probably did the smart thing by not approaching Charlie in the schoolyard about the drawing and the Roger nose. Hell, even I, and I’m quick on my feet, try not to get into words with Charlie where others can see us. It just always ends badly. So Roger bided his time and didn’t approach Charlie directly.
Roger started giving Charlie funny looks at school. We all saw it. He started talking behind Charlie’s back. At first, he told people what a jerk Charlie was, and attempted to badmouth him to anyone who would listen. After a few weeks, he went further. He said he was going to kick Charlie’s ass.
Our school gym has a disgusting heavy polyurethane smell that overpowers you when you walk in. I’m sure it causes cancer or something, but once you’re there for a bit, it fades into the background, like the buzzing on walkie-talkies. The odor can destroy your sense of smell for hours, ruining lunch if you are unlucky enough to have gym in the morning. Even opening the gym’s back doors didn’t help. If anything, when those doors are open—and they only opened the doors on days where they feared that we’d drop dead from the heat—the air outside the gym starts smelling badly but the gym air doesn’t change.
The gym doors were wide-open on a terribly hot spring day, where all I could think about was the heat. That day, I spent many hours staring at the two hands of the clock, willing it to move. But no matter how long I looked, the clock never moved. On a day like that one, things looked wavy, and everyone moved slowly because their bodies repaid every bit of effort with expended with buckets of sweat. Kids acted out in class eager for the teacher to send them to the principal’s office since his office, like every administrator’s offices in the school, had air conditioning. The teachers caught on quick, though. Only the most resourceful students could find an act that created enough anger in the teacher to send you to the office, but not enough to risk a long detention. Students overcrowded the nurse’s office and she ended up treating them in the hallways, painfully close but still outside her air-conditioned office.
We were hoping the gym teacher would forget to come to class because the thought of playing anything on such a hot day was next to unbearable. Charlie and I were standing around arguing about whether Mr. Gerling, our gorilla of a gym teacher, was capable of speaking in full sentences or only grunts. Roger joined us and didn’t say a word. He took a deep breath, throwing out his chest, and jerked toward Charlie, his fists raised. He pulled back before he got close. I don’t think Charlie expected it, and he took a step back and fell over, ending up flat on his butt in the gym.
Roger grinned when he looked down at Charlie. The rest of the class gathered around and there were some yells to fight. Charlie remained seated for a while and we didn’t know what he was going to do. Instead of standing up, he slowly lifted his fist toward his face, his thumb inward, and formed the Roger nose. Someone chuckled and there were more cries for a fight, but to tell you the truth, I was disappointed. I expected more from Charlie. But he was far from done. Charlie removed his fist from his nose and lowered his arm until both hands were behind him. He used the palms of his hands to push himself up. He wiped off the back of his shorts carefully, and put his hands on his hips.
Charlie spoke quietly, and the circle of students closed in tighter. I think at that moment, Roger was having second thoughts. It looked more as if Roger wanted to get out of there before Charlie started, but it was too late for that. There was no way that the circle would let him get away. That’s when Charlie said it.
“Roger, it wasn’t your flinching that knocked me over. What you don’t realize—and I’m not sure if it’s your greasy hair or puss-filled acne that sucks the essential oils from your brain—what you don’t realize is that when you jerked forward, your nose was at least five feet from your face. Even when you pulled back, it was too late.”
The gym was dead silent. Even the cars driving on the avenue outside the school made no noise. We waited to see what Roger would do. If I had the time to take odds, I would have made a killing. The principal always said that our school was a nonviolent place, a place where, now get this, I’ll quote them because it always cracks me up, “a place where you check your violence at the school door.” Me, I never believed them. I had two broken nose and was in three fights before I turned ten, and I’m not a violent guy. But when they come at you, you have to put up or bad things will happen. It wouldn’t have been too surprising if Roger got into it with Charlie then.
He started to say something, his face turned splotchy red, and his mouth and jaw moved, but no words came out. Charlie stood in front of him and he made a fist and placed the pinky side of his fist on his cheek creating a reverse Roger nose to show us where Roger’s nose hit him. The entire class broke into laughter. Roger stood there and said nothing, his face turning red until the red covered the splotchy white parts. The fight might have happened then if Mr. Gerling hadn’t walked in. He barked something, and the class groaned and began running laps around the gym fighting the heavy air.
When something happens in school, news travels fast. One time Taylor Baylor, yeah, I can’t make that up, that’s his name, it’s kind of messed up but he’s the smartest and fastest kid in our grade. When we play punch-football—and, no, it’s not what you’re thinking, it’s football played with a blue Spalding—his team always wins. Taylor runs straight out and they just chuck him the ball usually like ten or twenty feet in front. No matter how far they throw it, he catches it. We usually made Taylor play quarterback because the quarterback can’t run unless the defender rushes, and we’d kick the ass of any defender who rushed Taylor. Anyway, Taylor puked in the cafeteria. The puke was purple, and there was a lot of it, more than we figured any one person could hold in his stomach. Before the custodian could cover it up with sawdust and sweep it away, almost the entire school came rushing down to see it: the purple lake of puke. We had a substitute teacher that day, so when we heard about it, which was like less than a minute after it happened, we all ran to check it out. I don’t know what the sub was thinking, but for all her screaming, there wasn’t a student left in her classroom.
By the period after gym, the younger kids started coming up to me to ask what happened. One of them even wanted to tell me about it. He was a little guy, and the little guys always try to get on us bigger guy’s good side. He tells me that Charlie kicked the kid with the nose’s ass so bad that his nose spurted tons of blood all over the gym floor. No kidding, that’s what the kid told me. When I tried to tell him that’s not what happened, he wouldn’t listen. He told me he heard from an older friend and he had gone up to the gym and saw the puddle of blood. It’s no use arguing with those little guys. Their brains are all mushy.
I didn’t see much of Roger that week after the incident in the gym. I can’t really blame him. Roger wasn’t that popular before, and the humiliation in the gym really wasn’t what he needed. Many rumors flew around about Roger’s disappearance, but Charlie didn’t do or say much about it.
Charlie and I sometimes walk home together, and I remember the day of the fight well. The weather was blistering cold, a day where any exposed skin turns bright red and your breath looks like exhaust smoke from a car. I’ve lived almost sixteen years next December, and on really cold, clear days like this one, the sky looks three-dimensional. Do you know those skies? It’s like looking into a holographic picture where you see depth even though the picture is on a flat piece of paper. Three dimensions are easy to see when there are clouds floating every which way, but that day there weren’t. It was just blueness, and the blueness was three-dimensional.
We had just turned onto Avenue T, just two blocks from Charlie’s house. We talked about the kind of stuff that ten-year olds talk about, like movies and junk. I can tell you we weren’t talking about sports because Charlie didn’t know the first thing about sports. He was strange that way. I knew a little about it, having played in little league and everything. But Charlie, I don’t think he ever played on a team. He’s the kid we always picked last in anything we played in the schoolyard. It wasn’t because we didn’t like the guy—I mean, some of us didn’t like him, but most of us thought he was cool. It was just that he was real skinny. Charlie turned out to be one of the tallest kids in class, but back then, he was ordinary-sized and skinny with wrists so small I could wrap my thumb and pinky around them.
Roger was waiting on the corner when we turned. He must have misjudged when we’d make the turn because he looked real cold, as if he’d been waiting for a while. His splotchy face glowed red, and snot, the really gooey kind—which I always found strange, because snot, unlike water, is all gooey when cold and hard when warm—dripped down around his lips. Roger wore a blue ratty sweater and his bare skin poked out of the huge holes left by the wide knitting. It wasn’t a good look, and the cold must have bothered him because his hands were the same shade of red as his face and chest, and he kept rubbing his hands together. He looked bigger than I remembered, not huge, just puffed up like a marshmallow man.
“You think you’re a funny guy,” Roger said. He took a step toward us, well, really toward Charlie but I was still standing next to Charlie, and Roger jerked forward with his fists. This time, Charlie didn’t move. I moved a bit, but Charlie stood his ground and looked at Roger with his head tilted to the side as if he were studying a strange animal in the zoo.
A group of third graders played across the street from the corner. I didn’t notice them when we first turned, but when Roger spoke, they stopped playing whatever their game was, and watched us. Now, I know you’ve been out of school for a long time, so you probably won’t understand this, but this was a difficult decision for me. Charlie’s my bud, and I’m a good guy who always looks out for his buddy. If I wanted to, I could have pummeled Roger into hamburger meat, but I had to consider the rules, you know. In school, those rules are different, but once you get past the playground, you have to be careful. It wouldn’t take long for everyone to know what happened here at the corner of Avenue T and East 23rd street, and I was giving my next move a lot of thought.
“What, no jokes this time?” Roger said. Roger was moving from foot to foot either in anticipation or because the cold was getting to him.
Charlie still considered Roger and remained silent. He wore a very large, puffy coat, and his thin neck and head poked out of its zippered neck, like a straw in a glass of milk. I half expected him to bring up the Roger nose, and I was tempted to beat him to it, but I still wasn’t sure if I could step in. I could have fought instead of Charlie and no one would have looked down on me. The only problem with that was that the other kids might question Charlie’s manhood, and I wanted to avoid that. A guy’s manhood was all he really had in school. And anyway, Charlie didn’t appear scared or anything, it just looked like he was chewing over something.
As I was saying, there are rules in a street fight. You can’t just jump in anytime you want. I mean, you can if the circumstances are right. Let me put it this way, if Roger brought a friend and the friend jumped in, there’d be no problem. I’d be there for Charlie. But he didn’t, and Roger ignored me, he was concentrated and talking only to Charlie. If we both jumped Roger, then that would be wrong, unless we were trying to mug Roger—but that’s a whole different situation, and, besides, we weren’t after Roger’s money.
“You don’t want to make fun of my nose now, huh, Charlie? What, you’re not such a big man without Mr. Gerling saving you?” Roger said. He fell back into a karate stance, his front leg bent and his back leg at a wide angle with his foot facing forward. He placed both of his hands on the sides of his waist and I was real close to just socking him one. There was no way he’d be able to stop me if I jumped on him. I’d pummel him down and it would be fair, in a way. But I looked over to Charlie, who was still standing there and I could have sworn he gave a small shake of his head.
“You sure, Charlie,” I said. This time I definitely saw the shake of his head. I remember shrugging my shoulders and taking a step back. He baked his cake, and it was time for him to eat it.
Roger gave out a loud yell, took a strange, almost diagonal step toward Charlie, moving his back foot toward his front foot, and then forward at the same angle. Charlie rubbed his chin like he was in deep thought and watched Roger get closer. Roger looked close enough to strike at Charlie and Charlie finally raised his hands to his face and formed fists. He still hadn’t said a word.
Roger again brought his back foot forward and stepped diagonally forward and his left arm struck moving and twisting at the last moment. His fist fell into Charlie’s padded jacket and Charlie stepped backward. The punch didn’t penetrate the huge padding of Charlie’s jacket, but he still looked confused—outside of wrestling, I don’t think Charlie had ever been in a fight before and it showed. He moved around Roger, and forced Roger to get out of the ridiculous stance he was in to keep Charlie in front of him.
Charlie’s hands were near his head and he tucked his elbows tightly under his neck. I wasn’t sure if he could even see past his arms. Roger moved in again and tried to punch him, but his punch fell into Charlie’s arms. Roger backed off again.
“This is going to be fun,” Roger said.
Charlie remained silent and kept his arms up around his face. He focused his eyes, brown beady eyes that he used so effectively to make hilarious faces, on Roger’s every move. Roger stepped back and jumped toward Charlie, his front leg extended trying to perform a jump sidekick. One of my favorite games in the arcade is the game called Karate Champ. It’s in the pizza store and I can play it for hours. There are two joysticks and the fighters perform their special moves by moving the joysticks in different directions. Like, if you wanted to do a forward flip you would push the first joystick up and the second joystick down. Likewise, if you wanted to do a kneeling punch, you would push the first joystick down and the second joystick up. You could do a flying sidekick, which is what I think Roger was doing, but all in real life, not in the arcade, by pressing the first joystick up and the second joystick to the right.
Roger jumped toward Charlie and he extended his foot. Charlie scrambled backward and when Roger landed, Roger’s foot had landed on Charlie’s front foot. Roger was still yelling when he landed and he stepped back. Charlie lifted his foot up to his hand and he rubbed it.
“That hurt,” Charlie said completely deadpan. Without even noticing, the kids had crossed the street and were watching the fight from close in. They started laughing, their high-pitched laughter echoing off the line of attached houses that lined the sidewalk. Roger looked at them, rubbed his hands together, turned, and walked away.
As he walked away, Charlie said, “Did you see that? He hit me with the flying toe stomp. That was amazing.”
Cutting-Floor (here’s where I put all the stuff that didn’t make this draft):
We didn’t get any weapons, so I stepped behind Roger’s bunk bed and let him know how stupid this game was. Charlie, however, started getting into it. He threw some fake kicks and punches in Roger’s direction.
We planned to sketch out the next issue for our comic. Our first one sold pretty well, although I was hoping for a few more dollars. I don’t think Charlie cared much about the money, but he loved hearing what people had to say about it. We were talking about the story for the next comic. I remember I was pushing for a giant robot villain, but Charlie had his heart set on flying lizard men. Charlie almost always won those conversations. I’m not sure how he did it, but as we turned, I was taking credit for thinking up the flying lizard men and already describing to Charlie what they would look like.
Besides drawing comics, I don’t think he did much but study. I knew in a fight, Charlie would lose badly. I doubted he even knew hot to throw a punch. It just didn’t seem his style. I think he’s trying to make something of himself, and he’s probably scared to death of being sent to the principal’s office and risking his permanent record.
I didn’t see the fight, but Charlie was walking home with Eddie, and Eddie told me all about it. I trust Eddie. He’s strange but good at telling stories.
Charlie and Eddie were walking home together after school. We’re in New York, I should tell you, Brooklyn if
That night we ordered food from this place called Brennan & Carr, an old-style roast beef joint. Before joining Roger for dinner, I never ate from there. My parents didn’t believe in taking us out to dinner. Back then on most nights, we had to suffer with my mother’s terrible cooking. Now I get to go to Brennan & Carr often. My mother doesn’t cook as much anymore, probably because of that impending senility. Brennan & Carr has this great roast beef sandwich, but at the time, because I didn’t know better, I ordered a cheeseburger. The cheeseburger is not bad, but it’s not as good as the roast beef. For the roast beef, they dip the bun in this big vat of gravy, and then dip the roast beef in the same vat with a slice of cheese slapped on it.
Roger’s parents called ahead and went to pick up the food. Roger ordered two roast-beef sandwiches, fries, and mozzarella sticks. The food came in brown paper bags, with the sandwiches, fries, and sticks wrapped in the restaurant-grade tinfoil, which is like regular tinfoil only thinner and with these indentations—it’s real fancy like. Roger’s mother brought the food to the table and his father took out the drinks and silverware. As his mother served, there was a problem: Roger’s second roast-beef sandwich was missing. You should have heard him screaming. It was like his parents had stabbed him or something. I thought his father was going to run away from the table and cry or something, he was that upset. My father would have backhanded me if I had said the things that Roger said. He didn’t curse, probably because we were still too young to know the good ones, but he called his mother a whore and his father a balding has-been. I sat there astonished. I would have taken notes and tried it on my own parents, but I knew better. Besides the back-handing, I’d probably spent the rest of the month locked in my room with my computer broken into tiny bits. I guess it had something to do with being an only child. Charlie and I both come from bigger families, I have a brother and a sister and Charlie has two sisters, and our parents wouldn’t put up with what Roger dished out.
The rumor around school was that Roger had started taking karate lessons, which made sense with his love of ninjas. Now, I liked the Saturday afternoon ninja movies as much as the next kid, but Roger’s fascination went beyond that. One Halloween, I think it was back in third grade or somewhere around that time, Roger dressed up as a ninja in a black costume with lots of sashes and hidden pockets.
Over the last few years, many karate schools began opening in our neighborhood—after the first one popped up, they came in swarms. I think it had something to do with those Saturday afternoon martial arts flick. That’s some good shit, and I know I would have signed up in my parents could have paid for it. But that’s cool. From what I saw with the kids who went there, they did a lot of kicking, but all those fancy kicks weren’t much good in the schoolyard. With so many karate schools, it’s more than possible that Roger attended one. He didn’t talk about, but you had the feeling that something changed in him. He used to walk around all hunched over, like if he didn’t keep moving forward he’d fall over. Around the time that people started talking about him and karate school, his posture improved and his chest puffed out. That’s around the time that he started glaring at Charlie.
Now Charlie I knew went to a karate dojo. There was a Russian kid in our class, Mihail, who Charlie hung around. Mihail was the first kid to take karate and I think he got his black belt when he was nine. Mihail convinced Charlie to go to the karate class. Charlie’s parents encouraged him to do things.
When the principal finished searching Roger, he found thirty different weapons, and from what I heard from Oscar, who was in the principal’s office when Roger’s mother came in for the discussion, Roger would have gotten suspended for sure if his mother didn’t start crying. From what I heard, they gave him counseling during his study hall for the rest of the year. Much good that did.
There’s an attack stance in which you stand with one leg in front of the other and one fist in front of your face and the other one a bit lower. I’ve seen this stance in many movies and those specials where they show karate competitions. Charlie is a serious guy and a bit of a wimp when he’s not hiding behind his clever words. He’s also terribly afraid of dogs. I’m not talking about the scary dogs. I’m talking about all dogs, even the tiny ones with barks that sound more like little girls whining. We were walking to his house a year ago and passed a fenced garden. A small dog jumped out from behind a wall in the garden and charged at us. Charlie fell back into his karate stance and gave a loud, “Kiya!” It’s a cry that they teach you at karate school. I bent down and let the dog lick my fingers through the gray fence. I could see Charlie’s heart beating through his thin t-shirt. I told you he was skinny, and I’ve seen him with his shirt off when we went swimming, and you could make out each rib in his cheat and just about see his heart beat underneath his skin. It’s freaky to look at his almost pinkish blue skin and see bones sticking out and organs doing their thing. I never saw someone jump so high or yell so loud when such a small dog charged forward. But that’s Charlie for you.
Now I always thought Charlie was the smart one. But for some reason, he really took to this ninja game.
The thing is, I don’t think Charlie realized how skinny he was. He didn’t think much and cared even less about what he looked like. Just to give you an example, so you can have a better idea of what I’m talking about, Charlie wore these plastic braces. Eddie is a good friend Eddie is short and his nose always looks like it should be running, there’s always flaking red skin and other yucky stuff around it—now that I really think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen him blow it or any snot dripping from it. Maybe it’s a skin disease or some other thing.
Eddie, Charlie, and I were once talking, and Eddie made this real funny comment. Eddie was like, ‘Charlie, you eat cream cheese for lunch?’ We were standing around and talking in the afternoon between classes. Charlie said ‘nah, he had pizza,’ which was a good choice because there were some real good pizza joints around the school. I’m talking high quality. They say it’s the water that makes the pizza good, you know Brooklyn water. I don’t believe they put water in pizza, so I think they’re full of shit, but I’m just telling you what they say. Anyway, then Eddie says, and this was funny, I almost peed my pants funny, Eddie says, ‘Then what’s that gunk between your braces?’ You see, Charlie’s braces always had this white goo around them. I never thought of it before Eddie said something, but it did look like cream cheese stuck there. Eddie said things like that. He was quick, that Eddie. But Charlie didn’t care much about how he looked so it flew right passed him. I was dying, though. That Eddie’s a funny one.
Once, during gym, Roger jerked at him and Charlie fell over as he tried to get into his fighting position. Charlie stood up, brushing himself off, he started in on Roger. He began with the Roger nose, which everyone had seen already and we all felt was a weak comeback. But that was just his warm-up act. Looking back, we should have jumped in and stopped him, but there was something fascinating about watching Charlie work. His insults were a real art, if you know what I mean.
Roger went into his closet and came out dressed completely in black, even going as far as to wear those funny black slippers with the big toe cut out, like mittens for your feet. Roger’s mouth was covered, but we could see its outline as he spoke.
Right away, I saw how stupid the situation was. I’ve been in lots of fights, but I’ve learned not to face someone with a weapon, even just an innocent broomstick is asking for trouble. Give me fists and I’m there. But weapons are a different story. The last thing I wanted to do was get my head knocked off, and Roger’s weapons looked dangerous.
Even for a little guy, the thing was he wasn’t scared of nothing. He would charge into a fight or stand up to some guy he had no business standing up to. That’s Charlie for you. And he didn’t think of what he was doing until after he did it. After he had words with an eighth grader, Charlie told me how there would be no way in a million years he would have stood up to the guy if he had a chance to think about it. But that’s the thing: Charlie never thought about anything until after he’d done it.
So, not surprisingly, Charlie threw a few more kicks and charged Roger. When he got in close, he grabbed at the sai that Roger twirled around like he was conducting a band, and ripped it out of Roger’s hand. Now armed, Charlie poked the sai in Roger’s direction, pushing him back against the dresser. Roger, yelling at Charlie to stop, lowered his mask. He looked pissed, worse than even when his mom asked him to pass the string beans. Charlie laughed and backed off. He tried to spin the sai in his hand, dropped it, and caught it in both hands before it the floor. Roger went on and on about how that wasn’t how you’re supposed to play ninja—how ninjas were sneaky and you didn’t see them until they attacked. Charlie nodded but didn’t give up the sai.
I left the Killton Academy for the Insane at the small hours of the night. As a good girl, I pretended to swallow a few pills and put the pillow over my head and when they shut the lights out I shut my lights out, or so they thought, and I spit the pills like watermelon seeds on the pillow for the night nurses to find. They weren’t very smart. I befriended them and they thought I was their friend, or maybe they thought they were my friend, but it didn’t matter much. None of it did. I didn’t do well behind walls and gates and locked doors, and there were too many needles and applesauce snacks for me to sleep, and for the last eight years, I couldn’t sleep a wink.
They thought I slept well, they thought I adjusted. I attended the doctor conferences and the group sessions and I cried my eyeballs out along with the rest of the gooseberries until they thought I was one of them, they thought I embraced their paradigms and medicines and therapies and their warm fuzzy slippers. It’s what I wanted them to think. It was a lull. I’m a normal girl in a normal cage listening to normal counseling waiting for them to punch my ticket to leave. I tore up the ticket in the small hours of the night, with my three roommates snoring away and the nurse’s station dark, probably because they were doing the naughty thing in the back room with the night physician or the night attendant or perhaps it was the night alley cat that always seemed to find its way through the caged windows and locked doors. And these people thought I was the sick one.
The door creaked as I left and I kept down a giggle by squeezing my nose and chattering my teeth. The gooseberries were all asleep and the nurses were doing their wild thing and that left me and the locked door alone for a bit. The door never had a chance and I left Killton Academy for the Insane in the small hours of the night. I followed the road for miles, wagging my finger to let it know that I would have none of its slithering and curving, that it should continue straight on and leave me about, thank you very much. It didn’t take long to find the railroad tracks, two faithful iron bars that needed no scolding to travel straight into the night.
I waited in the bushes and pinched each arm when my eyelids threatened to lower the curtains and give away my position. The night critters and the swinging trees babbled and I listened carefully because you never know when a critter or tree will say something weighty. I was in a reverie when the ground shook and a tiny dot of light wiggled in my direction, the breeze not yet up and the toot-toot still silent. I waited for the large locomotive to pass before I grabbed the train and yanked it toward me, hugging the car close to my chest as it stampeded its way through Killton up north and then the back country. I slid through the nooks and into a dark car, releasing the train to go about its business while I went about my business in the corner.
The train car was cold and stacked with automobiles, a dizzying experience as I imagined the trains moving the cars moving the people moving the trains and round and round until I grew dizzy and grabbed the wall. The air was cool and cardboard armored the cars. I poked at the vulnerable spots with my long finger, leaving marks and fingerprints.
I let myself into a luxury car where I saddled up on the plastic-covered leather upholstery and made myself a good bed, where I slept for the first time in years. I knew the cure for insomnia, and it wasn’t small blue pills or darkened rooms smelling of ammonia. It was the sound of the train moving over track and the rattle of locked doors and chains as we tooted away from the Killton Academy for the Insane and into the wild wilderness of the north.
I knew it was morning when a strip of light crept along the wall. I gathered my things and poked out the door. I watched for many miles, searching my bearings, and after two abandoned stations, I realized I was close. I jumped as the train slowed and bent like a stick in the hands of a five-year-old child, the ground slanting and rolling me down, a film of dust forming on my clothes and skin, a welcome relief after a night in the conditioned air of the train box. I sat with my hands in front of my angled legs and watched my toes alight with the red glow of the train as it sped by. When all was left was its curvy backside, it appeared stationary for the longest time before I saw it shrink and toot and shrink until it all but disappeared. I remembered my manners just in time and jumped up before it vanished to wave my goodbye, a thank you for the fine journey.
I wondered what the gooseberries at the Killton Academy for the Insane would think of me at the edge of the tracks. I looked around for the first time since the small hours of the night, and filled the gooseberries’ heads with the overcast sky overflowing with the puffiest of clouds stacked one on top of another like squished marshmallows bought for the campfire, but flattened at the bottom of the sack, beneath the pots and pans and dried dinners and extra clothes. Most would think me a sight, with my sack of goodies and the train tooting its farewell. Some would think me mad, but there are worse things than to be thought mad by a gooseberry.
I followed the track until it came upon a station with wooden benches long since abandoned, and the letters on its white-painted signpost gone the way of the station manager and pop stand. An overgrown road led away from the tracks toward my destination, Dainty, North Dakota. I didn’t know if she would remember me. I hadn’t been back since before my parents moved away, this was before they shipped me to the Kilton Academy for the Insane, before the world went all topsy-turvy and left me the sole survivor hiding on the island of sanity. The town even back then was dying and my parents believed the death throes stole my sanity. I explained patiently that towns, even dying towns, don’t steal sanity, that sanity was a gift that you had to take care of, like a pet, and if you let your guard down even for a moment, it might run away and you would spend the rest of your days searching for it, holding its leash and posting signs on telephone poles and calling the neighbors to see if they had seen it run past. I didn’t bother to explain that I held my own sanity well in hand, its leash taut as it sniffed the nearby bushes for truths. My parents wouldn’t have understood because they themselves held empty leashes, tautly walking along like the invisible dog trick. Dainty would have, though. She was a fine town and to be frank, only Dainty understood me.
At the bend in the road, I stopped and studied a large green sign with Dainty’s name and population, 135 people, and a bumper sticker emblazoned in glitzy silver reading “Fastest Growing City in North Dakota.” I left Dainty in 1998, and even then, Dainty was becoming a ghost town, and by saying that I mean an old person town, since you can’t have ghosts unless you have dead people, and the surest way to have dead people is to stick a bunch of old people in a dying town.
I fought through the bushes and trees that staked the road and climbed to the top of the hill separating the abandoned railroad station from the rest of Dainty. From here, the town looked miniature. I clapped and jumped as I recognized the roofs of the houses and shops. I dug the sand from my eyes and squinted this way and that and everywhere I looked, people wandered the streets, which seemed strange for a ghost town. Large silver lights and black sheets and folding chairs and walkie-talkies were everywhere. people going this way and that, and none looked the Dainty type, the harsh curious features, the instant smile as if there was nothing to show but hospitality, that is, until they got behind your back, and then you’d better watch carefully or there’d be knives sticking out in all different ways, and you might find yourself the newest resident of the Killton Academy for the Insane, I’m just saying.
But these people seemed different. I came upon a bored-looking lady swinging a talking device by its wire. She didn’t see me approach and I tapped her on the right shoulder and stepped to the left, silencing my giggle with a squeeze and a chatter. The lady wore a triangular bun and oversized pink glasses, smaller than a clown’s but larger than a person’s, the kind that makes you want to touch them to see if they’re real or plastic or just for show. She caught up with me as I stopped circling and reached for her glasses. When she saw me she laughed, which reminded me of the gooseberries who laughed at whatever I did, as if they saw deeper humor in us that the rest missed.
“Bouchard, I’m glad you made it,” she said, speaking faster than any Dainty person had a right to speak. I didn’t recognize the name, but I slipped Bouchard around my shoulders, shrugged a bit to test its weight, and stretched my neck like a cat, needing but a scratch behind my ears to find the ultimate pleasure. Snug as a rug in a coffee mug, the name was. “Dean’s been looking everywhere for you. I’m Sandy, by the way, not that you would know me, of course. Dean was worried when you disappeared.” She studied me, looking a bit struck, before she nodded and spoke into her talking device. “I found Bouchard, I’m coming to you, she’s dressed and ready.”
Static answered the talking device, and then a man’s voice. “It’s about damn time. Where the hell has she been?”
Sandy didn’t stop to answer and grabbed my dirty hand and pulled me down the hill toward the lights and the people. I always knew Dainty would provide for me. As I said, Dainty always understood me. Sandy walked fast and I skipped to keep up. We winded our way through surprised crowds who dodged from our path as if delighted that Dainty’s prodigal child had returned. I waved and spun around to look at them, making faces with my four fingers, thumb, and tongue before Sandy tugged me along. We passed old and new houses, all looked newly painted, but I could see beyond the paint that they hadn’t been used for some time. Good old Dainty, only a paint job away from oblivion.
As we moved closer to the center of town, we passed bunches of people huddled over cameras and more lights and wires that crisscrossed every part of the sidewalk and street. Sandy stopped pulling but I kept walking until I ran into a man wearing all black with a tight-cropped gray and white goatee that I wanted to grab and pull and climb in until I lost myself in the curls.
“Dean, I have no idea where she came from,” Sandy said to the man in black, at last letting go of my hand, and touching the triangular bun at the back of her head. I stretched my neck until I could study that most geometrical of hairstyles, wondering how she managed the sharp angles and points and whether maybe this time she’d let me cop a feel at her pink glasses.
“Bouchard, it’s nice you decided to join us,” Dean said.
“Glad to be here,” I said with a southern accent. With a name like Bouchard, you had to be something or you were nothing, and southern sounded like something. Dean looked at me strangely and I mirrored his expression, drilling into his skull with my eyes until I could see gray matter leak out around my eyeballs. He looked away and cleared his voice and I could have sworn touched himself in that intimate place between his legs. I obliged and copied his movement and damn did it feel good. With all that good sleep on the train, I forgot how that felt, the last time being my final night at the Killton Academy for the Insane as I pushed the time past and waited for it to run out and the lights to go on and the television to warm up and the heated cereal to pop, crack, and sizzle in the plastic bowls.
Dean cleared his voice again, and I stifled my own cough, wiping the dust and dirt of the road off the front of my slacks.
“We’ve been waiting for over an hour,” Dean said as if he had not been doing the naughty thing but a moment ago. “But that doesn’t matter much as long as you’re ready,” and here he paused and looked me up and down and I smiled most brilliantly, using my perfect white teeth as an interrogation spotlight. Perhaps I did look like riff-raff after so many years. That’s one of the things about the Killton Academy for the Insane, they don’t supply mirrors, and after a little while you forget that you even looked like someone or something. Dean peeled his eyes away from my sparkling teeth and continued, “but I guess you look ready to me.
“Set up for the first take,” Dean shouted. “Bouchard has decided to grace us with her presence. I want to roll in five. Bouchard, take your position so we can get the first scene in the can.”
I patted my bag and fell in behind Dean, close in so he couldn’t quickly get away. He smelled of lilies and oldness, like ripe Ivory soap and sawdust. He smelled of Dainty. He turned and grabbed me by the shoulders and walked me to the middle of a crowd surrounded by bright lights with cameras.
The crowd consisted of eighteen girls in groups of twos and threes. They were milling outside a large brick building. The building looked very familiar, but wrong somehow, as if I was looking at it from the wrong angle. The girls all wore pink pajamas and oversized bathrobes with green and blue emblems, like the one I wore, like the one they gave me at the Killton Academy for the Insane.
Dean yelled, “Action!”
I ask for water the third time. My voice sounds quiet and slightly anxious even to my ears, and I accept the waitress will ignore me. She manages a nod, but it doesn’t take a detective to deduce her meaning. The café’s manager has been making noises in my direction, pointing and talking to the waitress. She tried to push me to leave five times already, making motions to bring the check, asking if I wanted anything else, probing with her eyes whether I planned to take her table all day and repay her lost tips. Her eyes are too close together and look like they are squeezing her bony nose. I ignore her motions and requests and silent remarks. I know I’m not the most appetizing of sights sitting by the front entrance—I take up most of the booth’s bench and parts of me leak out past the edge of the table—but I was here first, and, besides, I haven’t found my story yet.
The Sunday paper’s eight sections are sprawled across the table next to my closed notebook. I turn the newspaper pages rhythmically, not reading the words. Why read the newspaper, stuff that happened the previous day, when I can live what will happen tomorrow? If anyone watched me—and while people tend to stare, few actually look—they would discover that I turn the page every forty-five seconds. With practice, anyone can learn to tell time by the ticks of their subliminal clock, a very useful skill for those who know how to use it.
I’m a news junky, and it’s here that I find the latest news, when people are at their most vulnerable, when they think they’re eating a safe meal at a safe place. I switch through the conversations around me, turning my head like the knob on a radio, tuning into each table like a radio station, focusing in for a few moments before moving on. From a good table, I can tune into eight conversations without much effort, and, if the acoustics are just right and the background noise minimal, I can listen to four additional conversations. They put me against the wall today, and I’m stuck with four tables within range. There’s not much going on: reminiscing of a high school football game from the seventies, travel plans of what sounds like a to-be-divorced woman and her teenage son, quiet elderly couple that ran out of talk years ago.
And then I find it. Across from me is a table occupied by an middle-aged man and woman. It takes me only seconds of sorting through their emotions to realize that this is my story. A casual listener might not notice the glorious mystery leaking from the conversation. The man wears a satiny blue spring jacket and large sunglasses. His hands are folded in front of him over a burgundy sweater, and his legs dangle outside the cushioned bench. He has gray hair and a pink face. His head keeps moving but you can’t tell which way he’s looking because of his glasses. He speaks out of the side of his mouth, giving his words an unformed feel.
“Brad’s been working on mother,” the man says. “She’s going to change her will again, I know it.”
I let my eyes lose focus and turn my head to the left so that my right ear is closer to their table. After years of practice, I learned that the right ear is better for eavesdropping than the left.
“She threatens to change her will every week,” the woman responds. “Your inheritance is safe. Eleanor just uses it as a weapon. It’s not going to work, we won’t fall for it.”
The man grunts and takes a large bite from his egg salad sandwich.
“What did she say this time?” the woman asks.
“Mother didn’t say anything specific, but she kept saying how happy she was that Brad visited. She said they talked about his future.”
“Brad doesn’t have a future.”
“Unless mother changes her will,” the man says, his mouth full of crumbling eggs.
I shake the final drops of coffee from my mug. If I owned a restaurant, I would see my type coming a mile away and refuse service. Those signs don’t lie, restaurateurs can refuse service to whomever they want, like casinos who refuse card counters, or clothing stores who refuse ladies who buy outfits for a weekend affair only to return them on Monday. But they don’t, and I rotate through the coffee houses and diners. I sit with my family-sized breakfast and bottomless coffee mug at seven in the morning each Sunday, and I’m there for the day. I have a wonderful bladder, and I can hold my coffee all day if need be. I’ve found a few diners who don’t mind me taking up so much of their space and eating into their profits. But those high-minded establishments are far and few between, and it is only in those places where I’ll chance getting up to drain the morning’s coffee. In the other establishments, if I do get up, I’ll return to my seat and find my table occupied by a family of four trying to decide what type of syrup-delivery systems they should order, square or round.
Except for a pile of bushy dyed hair, I can’t see what the woman looks like. “How is she doing? Any closer to, you know, passing?” the woman asks.
“Not that I noticed. Mother forbid the doctors from talking to us, and with Brad starting in again, it can’t happen too soon.”
By now, even a casual listener would see why this conversation is interesting. I jot down in my notebook the framework of the detective story: a family fights over the last will and testament of the matriarch. She probably has a fortune stored away. Grubby old women usually do, the grubbier the bigger the fortune, or so the suspects always believe. If she dies unnaturally, there is a whole family of suspects. From the sounds of it, any of them might do it. But would they? I get too far ahead of myself. I try to slow my breathing but find it difficult. I wasn’t always this big. Largeness, like most great things in life, happens slowly, almost too slowly to notice the change. I never minded the girth, but there are a few things that I find difficult to get used to: one is that inertia increases with one’s size. Stopping becomes a big challenge, and once I grow excited, calming myself feels like trying to stop a moving train with nothing but shallow breaths.
“I wish she’d just die already,” the woman says. “This is killing me. Her sitting on top of her oversized bank books in her oversized house looking down her nose at us.”
“Oh, she doesn’t look down on me so much. She never thought you were good enough for me. I sometimes wonder if she was right about that.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” the woman asks, her voice rising in register until the other tables turn and look.
The man lowers his voice and leans toward the woman, “I’ve asked one small favor of you in this, and you still refuse to do it.”
“I spy on your brother and sister. Isn’t that enough?”
“This won’t be over until it’s over,” the man says ominously.
I’m a mystery buff. Ever since I was a child, when I read my first mystery book, The Mystery of the Watermelon Thief, I have spent my life trying to recapture that initial feeling, the feeling of living in a mystery, not knowing everything. Mystery books provide little mystery for me now. When the author provides the clues, the suspects seem to whisper in my ear their guilt. It’s little challenge, and besides, it’s not real. Not real like this is real.
The waitress refreshes the man and woman’s coffee, and I continue to jot down notes in my notebook. I never became a detective because of physical limitations. I was a big child and I knew early on that I would have to find mysteries in a different way. The waitress stops by my table with the coffee pot. I keep my head down, continue to scribble, and point at empty mug of coffee. I feel her shake her head and hear her breathe out an annoyed sigh. I know I’m not the most appetizing-looking customer, and I know she prefers if I sit, slap on the feedbag, and leave as quick as possible. A fat customer, like a fat chef, should never dawdle with his food.
“Of course, she might die of natural causes soon enough,” the man says unconvincingly. “Hopefully before she changes her will again.”
“We just need to stay on top of things until then. Brad won’t be able to keep up his acting. You know he can’t stand the old hag. Now, eat up and let’s get going. Her birthday is this week and we need to buy something special, something to make her not think of Brad anymore.”
The newspapers will have a field day with this story. So many suspects, I begin to speculate about the facts and clues and characters. Time to get started. I squeeze out of the booth and walk over to the man and woman’s table.
“Mr. Thomas,” I say when I’m in front of their table. “Is that you Mr. Thomas?”
The man looks at me, confused and the woman looks down. She’s much younger than I suspected. As I look closer, I realize that it’s not that she’s younger, it’s that her face is frozen unnaturally, giving her a perpetual surprised look.
“I’m sorry,” the man says. “You must have me mistaken for someone else.”
“Don’t you recognize me? I’m George, George McCord. I work at the post office down the road. You always stop in to pay your bills. It must be the uniform, you don’t recognize me without the blues.”
“Again, I’m sorry, but you have me confused with someone. My name is not Mr. Thomas and I don’t live around here. Janice and I are visiting my mother in the neighborhood.” Janice doesn’t look at me, instead choosing to pick at her food with the fork.
“I am so ashamed. I’m sorry, Mr. . .”
“Mr. Nielson,” the man says.
“I’m so embarrassed, Mr. Nielson. Please forgive me. I’ll crawl back to my table and hide under the, well, the tablecloth.” I smile and pat my stomach familiarly. Mr. Nielson laughs and I turn to catch the waitress clearing the dishes off my table. No matter, I have what I need. I grab the coffee mug and shake it over my mouth, hoping to find a few more drops. It’s empty.
I lean over the table and grab my notebook. “Mr. and Janice Nielson, son and daughter-in-law of Eleanor Nielson,” I write in my book. This week, they will receive an unexpected gift from me, a gift they will wish they never asked for. Their mother, Eleanor, will finally rest in peace. And then the real mystery will begin. Lots of investigations and clues and alibis ahead of me. For such a fat man, I have a surprising way with mysteries. I busy myself counting the number of torn-out mysteries in my notebook: thirty-two. Soon there will be thirty-three.
She entered the detectives’ room at the end of my shift. I felt sick when I saw her. I somehow knew that this was going to be a late night. She had that strange look on her face, the type that told me she probably shouldn’t be here. She should be at home, perhaps preparing dinner or taking care of her kids. Or, after I take a closer look at her clothing, she should have been supervising her nanny who would prepare dinner and bathe and put the kids to sleep. In my precinct, we get a lot of her type. I wondered not for the first time whether they paid us to fight crime or to fight these wives’ boredom. It didn’t make much of a difference in the end. Dealing with these wives was what kept the money in the bank and the food on the kids table. Their mother prepared their dinners and was happy to do it. And I was happy for her to do it. She wasn’t a trophy woman. She was a good woman. She did her share and I did my share. It didn’t take a detective to know that the woman before me never did her share.
She walked through the wooden gate and made her way to my desk. I was the only one left. I was here to catch any calls before we called it a night. Her clickity-clackity shoes echoed off the walls. She was more plastic than natural. Good to look at but not look at too closely. “Officer?” she asked as she made her way to the front of my desk.
“Detective, Ma’am. Detective Thomson. What may I do for you this evening?”
“May I sit?” she asked as she sat on the wooden chair. I should have told her that less than an hour before an HIV-positive drug addict sat on that very chair. We caught him lurking around the mansions around Turner’s bend. It was strange that he was in our precinct since no public transportation went anywhere near our precinct. He didn’t tell us, but we figured a drug deal went bad and they dropped him here as an object lesson, knowing how we treat people like him in our station. I guess that makes us the drug dealers’ muscles. We had a job to do and we did it. The addict won’t be heading to these parts again. For all I knew, while we processed him in that very chair, he might have bled a little into the wood. It was an old chair and there were many splinters. The office was one big splinter, when you really got down into it. The fresh coat of paint they threw on the walls each year was as bogus as she was. It was all rotten to the core. I didn’t speak about these types of things when her kind was in earshot. As I said, I was here to put food on my kid’s table, and if I had to baby the likes of her, I was a good father, and I’d do it.
“Please. What’s on your mind?” I asked her. I maintained a bemused look. It was the most serious I could manage at this time of night in front of this type of woman.
She looked me in the eye. She had blue eyes. The type of blue you only see in aquariums and advertisements for tropical beaches in far off islands where I’ll never be able to afford a vacation. I could see why swimming in her waters could be so enticing. It’s too bad that sharks infest her waters. I felt bad for her husband. He probably thought he was getting so much more than a plastic trophy. I guess we always think we’re getting so much more until we get it home and unwrap it.
“I had the strangest call tonight,” she said. “I debated whether I should come here. There are so many prank calls. But he sounded so honest, so sincere.”
I immediately knew that she had fallen for a swindle. This happens more than you can imagine. You couldn’t tell by looking at them, but these trophy wives are very lonely creatures. They have their chatter groups, where they get together and bitch about their help and their shopping. But when they get right down to it, they’re alone. They don’t confide in their husbands or their friends or their family. They don’t confide in anyone. I’ve seen many of them take the opportunity to confide in psychics and swindlers. They think they’ll talk for a chance to put someone down. And that includes telemarketers and swindlers. I saw how this evening was going to go down: she wanted me to pry her out away from whatever they got from her. Perhaps this wouldn’t be a late night after all. We fill out the paper, and she talks to her bank and credit cards and makes everything right. It’s better when they come early on these types of things. I’ve caught a few of these cases where they waited too long and it took hours to get all the paper straight. If she spoke to him on this night, then I might be able to get this all squared away in an hour. There’s a reason their husbands thought to keep these women in trophy cases. Better there than breaking everything in sight. A bull in a china store is no better.
“Tell me about what happened, Ma’am. It’s never worse than you think it is. We’ll take care of it.”
“Protect and serve, eh, officer?” the woman asked. Her head turned to the side and she looked at me sideways. I could see each of her black lashes curled up and away from her eyes. My wife was a good cook and great with the children, but she didn’t have an eyelash to bat an eyelash at, if you see where I’m going. I’m a man, as weak as any other man is. And don’t think I didn’t think about it right there. Finish the paperwork. Maybe she’s feeling lonely. Maybe she likes men in uniform. I have a uniform in the back, in the locker room. It was all very private. Everything was always very private back there.
“That’s what I’m here for. To protect and serve, Ma’am. In all ways.” I turned my bemused look into a meaningful one. If she was going to flirt, I was going to flirt right back at her, food on the kids’ table or not. “What is your name? For the report, I mean. We need to keep good records here.”
“Sandra MacDonald,” she said. She put her left hand on the desk and the huge engagement ring almost blinded me. It was larger than her thumb’s knuckle. I pulled out my notepad and jotted down her name. “That’s with an M-A-C,” she added.
“Okay, Mrs. MacDonald. What happened on your call tonight?”
She laughed nervously. I straightened in the chair and cleaned the ink off the tip of the pen. I chewed the pen cap and waited for her to continue. In any good interrogation, you have to let the witness talk it through first, before you start putting words into their mouth. It makes it seem like those words were their own. It helps them sound more honest since they believe the words are their own. They never are, of course. The words end up being whatever it is we feed them. In this case, I’m already working out the words I will include on the report. I just needed her to say a few keywords and sign the paper. After the paperwork, we can see if there’s anything left between us. I resisted smoothing back my hair.
“He didn’t give me his name,” Sandra started in. “I have a good memory for these things, conversations. I’ll tell it like he said it and I’ll let you think if this is as crazy as it sounded.”
“However you want it. Take your time. Do you want water or coffee or something?”
“That’s okay. He sounded so desperate. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The phone rang late this evening. It was after dinner and the kids were asleep. I was straightening up after our dinner. I don’t spend much time on the phone. I never liked phones and never gave my number out. It surprised me when it rang. Only my mother had the phone number, and she called early in the morning after I see the kids off to school. It was the only time it ever rings and the only time I ever pick it up. That’s why I was so surprised. At first I was worried. My mother isn’t in the best of health, and they know to call me if anything ever happens to her. Thankfully this wasn’t that call. But I did think for a moment that it might be, which is why I grabbed it.”
I pretended to jot down notes as she talked. I nodded often and wrote the L.A. Raider’s schedule in my pad. I almost have the games for the season memorized. Knowing when you’re going to play and who you’re going to play is important in understanding the strategy for your team. The Raiders were going places this year, I knew. I just wanted to make sure I understood how they were going to get there.
“I picked up the phone on the third ring. There was a man on the other side. As soon as I picked up he started saying, ‘hello, hello?’ He kept repeating it, as if not expecting to hear anyone on the other side. He had called me, and it was strange. I greeted him and asked who he was. He said me he didn’t know. I held the phone’s handset at arm’s distance away from and really looked at it. I don’t know what I was expecting. I thought maybe it would tell me who this strange man was. Normally I would have hung up. I think most normal people might have. There was just something in his voice that sounded desperate. It wasn’t only desperation it was also—I don’t know how to say this. He reminded me of someone but I couldn’t really place it. It was like a déją vu moment. You know the type? You are sure you’ve heard it before but you just don’t know when. He kept talking as I held the handset away from my ear. He sounded resigned, as if another person was about to hang up on him, and he kind of understood why we did that and didn’t want to hold it against us.”
I wondered what type of scam she was involved with. This didn’t sound like the typical Nigerian call. The scammers are much smarter now. Either they pretend to be a bank or something to get your information at the beginning of the call. Or the keep you on the phone for a while. They want to build up your trust before they start asking for things. This sounded like the second case. “You heard all of that when not even listening into the phone?”
“I know it sounds strange.” She laughed. “It sounds strange to me too as I describe it. But I knew that voice and I knew what it wanted. I put the phone back on my ear and I said hello again. He stopped talking for a moment. Then he started in. He spoke slowly. It wasn’t like he was choosing his words carefully, it was like he was afraid that if he said things too quickly I would run away, like a dog approaching a bone to see if it’s safe to grab. He said, ‘Do you mind if I go on? There’s just so much I want to tell you. Not many people want to listen once I get into it. I know it’s me and all my talking, and I completely understand if you want to go before I even start in.’ I assured him that I did want to hear what he had to say. At the time it was just curiosity. He reminded me of someone that I couldn’t place I figured if he spoke more I’d be able to put a name on it.”
“Have you placed him now that you’ve had some time to think about it?” I asked, looking for a way to cut this story shorter. Wherever Sandra was trying to get, she certainly was taking her sweet time.
She ignored me, lost in her memories of the strange phone call. “I asked him what his name was. He said he didn’t remember. He didn’t remember a lot of things. I was sure I had heard that voice before. It was why I stayed on the phone. I had to place it. It nagged at me like a mosquito.”
“What did he want?” I asked her. I realized it was time for the leading questions. I needed to lead her somewhere. I was again wrong about her. I thought she had come in to report something. Now I figured she had come in only to talk to someone. And where there’s talk there may be other things. I might have to give the wife a call, let her know that I’d be home late tonight. A late night report. The usual.
“He didn’t want anything, exactly. He seemed relieved to talk to someone. He kept telling me that most of the people he spoke to hung up immediately, or after they heard his story. He told me it was a fantastical story, unbelievably so. And the way he said it, I believed it. He voice was soft and had a roll to it. I could see myself falling on top of that voice and losing my way.”
I lowered my voice. “Did you catch the number when he called?” She wasn’t looking at me anymore. She was staring at the wall behind me, lost in her thoughts.
“At this point he took a long deep breath. I could hear the wind cross over his throat and down into his lungs. He held it for a second a let it out. I thought he might be crazy, perhaps delusional. I didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t that I was entertained, it was that I was enthralled. There was a mystery to it. Something real, and my life is so full of stuff that’s not real, if you know what I mean.”
I decided to take a different tact. There are always lots of ways to crack an oyster, and the more I looked at her, the more juicy I thought of the pearl inside her plastic shell. “Your life at home isn’t real?”
She looked at me with that look that spoke volumes: it was as if I had no idea how difficult her life was. I swallowed down a laugh. This woman was quite something. Her life must be very difficult, with her big house and her help and her judging the common folk. Her oyster tasted sour already, and I hadn’t chucked the shell.
Her eyes flashed with anger as if she had been reading my thoughts. “My husband has been in a coma for the past eight years, officer. So, yes, my home life at times is surreal and at times difficult. When I say that there was something real in the man’s voice, what I was talking about was an emotional connection. It’s something I only have with my children, and it’s one way with children. A parent loves their children so much more than the children love their parent. It’s not their fault. It’s how it is. You love because you give, and children take. But that’s not important. I want to finish my report. I’ll try to leave the emotional asides to the side.”
“I’m sorry about your husband. I didn’t mean anything by it. Please, do go on. I want to finish this report for you and see what we I can do to help you.” After the news about her husband, I downshifted for a moment. What she was saying really got me thinking. But it didn’t take long to return to the subject at hand. She was as good as a widow and clearly not emotionally all here anymore. I judged whether this would be considered taking advantage of someone, and it fell into the line in the middle. I probably shouldn’t do it, but if I did, I wouldn’t go to hell—at least not over this infraction.
“When I told him I’d listen to his story he told me how kind I was. It was like I was giving him something, when just listening to him talk was giving me something. I asked why he chose me. This is where I got my first clue of what was going on. He told me he didn’t call me. Don’t look at me like that, officer. Ever since I walked through those doors, all you’ve been doing is judging the best way to get into my skirt. Just listen to the story first.”
Her last word gave me hope. Maybe once the crazy woman got through her story there might be something else in it for me. I looked longingly at the phone on the desk, only half listening to her words. I was planning the call to my wife. It wasn’t that my wife was suspicious but she was no dummy. Each night I worked late she checked the police blotter. She would know if an investigation ran late tonight. The town was quiet tonight, too quiet to get away with what I had planned. I missed the first part of her words before I pulled myself back over to her conversation.
“He said he was studying the phone. He spent a lot of his time studying the phone when he wasn’t talking on it. Isn’t that the strangest thing? Who studies their phones? I mean, I see lots of business people on their fancy phones checking mail or sending messages. But who stares at a phone, especially an old rotary phone for hours at a time? When he described the phone I began to understand. I hadn’t seen a real phone is so long, it was almost comforting to know that those types of phones still exist.”
I knew I shouldn’t, but how could I resist. “Did he tell you what type of phone it was?”
“Why yes, he did. It was a large red telephone. He described it as very heavy and very large. He was very interested to know how big I thought the phone should be. When I told him about my cell phone, he was amazed. He said he had heard of them before—he had spoken often on the phone to other people—but he had never seen one. He wasn’t only amazed at the phone. He wanted to know about other modern conveniences.”
There had to be a point here. And it was time I started guiding her to it. “You must have found that a bit strange.”
“It was like he had never been outside in modern time. I thought of dementia, of course. He told me that his memory was ‘no longer his friend’ and it played tricks on him from time to time. He sounded so sad and alone. I figured he was trying to call someone else when he got through to me. I started questioning him about who he was trying to reach when he got me.”
She had been talking for twenty minutes already. It was clear from her body language that she was no longer interested in me. I had lost interest when the fraudster turned out to be such an old guy. It’s not that I have anything against old people. My parents were very old and I liked them well enough. It’s that old people scared me. It might have something to do with my job, or maybe I spent too much time hiding from my grandparents when I was younger. The old people have a smell, and it’s a smell I wanted to avoid when possible.
“But his sadness had a curiosity that was deeply embedded in his speech,” she continued. “He found everything so interesting and amazing. He sounded trapped in the past, a place he no longer wanted to be but couldn’t figure out how to escape. That’s why he called people. At least that was what I thought in the beginning. The phone was his window to the outside world. The only when he received his information. He knew things had changed, but it was hard to explain the new things. It was like trying to explain colors to a blind person. They understand at some level, but it’s not the same level as someone who had seen colors.
“It was his description of his room that nagged at me. His phone was not only big, it was also red. It was the only color in the room. He admitted it was a bit of cliché, but he enjoyed the color. The walls and floors in his room were white, as was the table and chair. He said that if it weren’t for the red phone, he would lose the ability to discern colors. There were no other colors in the room. I asked about a window or a door, but he said there were none. Just the table, chair, and phone. I asked how he ate, and he said he didn’t know.”
“And the bathroom,” I asked. It was clear this caller was insane. I still couldn’t figure out why she brought this story to me. The hospital was for the insane people. We were only interested in the criminally insane at the station.
“I asked about that as well. He claimed there was none. It was an empty room with a table and a red phone. I had my doubts about his sanity again. He sounded like such a nice man, a man whose voice I could almost place. It was there, pulling at my furthest memories. But whoever it was, I couldn’t remember at the time. This closed-in room was not the only weird part of his story. He went on to describe how the phone worked.
“The phone had a rotary, with the ten numbers working their way around the dial counterclockwise. He would sit for hours and turn the rotary. It didn’t do anything, though. He would turn it and watch it turn back. It made that clicking sound as it worked its way around the dial. When he lifted the handset, it automatically connected somewhere. He didn’t know who connected him or how they decided on the number. All he did know was that they never called the same number twice. When the person on the other line hung up, another call was placed immediately, and then another, until he hung up the handset on the phone. He wasn’t sure if anyone listened in on his side of the phone because he never heard anybody. But by the speed of the redial, he assumed they were listening.”
“I think I see where you’re going and why you’re here,” I said. “You think he’s trapped somewhere and you want me to investigate who he is and how to rescue him?”
“You make me sound like a crackpot.”
I didn’t say anything. She did sound like a crackpot. She wanted me to investigate a strange call from a man who said in a long, convoluted way that he was trapped in a white room with a red phone for so many years that he didn’t know about modern phones or the way the world worked today. He never ate and never shat and she thinks this is a job for the police. I was wrong about her when I said she was a plastic trophy. At least plastic trophies knew to only worry about themselves and perhaps their pocketbook dogs. This woman worried about crazy people—and crazy people who might only exist in her crazy head. Stranger people with stranger stories had passed through these walls. At this point, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she fell into that bucket. At least she was small and didn’t look dangerous. I didn’t need to frisk her or worry for my safety. All thoughts of a quickie in the locker room disappeared. The last thing I needed was an insane person coming to my house and wanting to continue our relationship. She did have fine legs though. The legs always got me. Maybe I could make an exception for crazy with good legs. Maybe just for this once.
“I’m not done yet, officer. He started talking about the other people he had spoken to. As I said, he never spoke on the telephone to the same person twice. At first he was happy to speak to anyone. He felt it had been so long since he had spoken to a real person. Again there was that sadness I spoke about earlier. And with the sadness came a strong tug of recognition. I still couldn’t place it but I was so close I just needed to keep him talking to find out who he was and why he sounded so darn familiar. I was so close at this point.”
The good thing about crazy people was that their stories were almost never consistent. Finding holes in their story was not exactly good for the crazy person, but it was always fun for the officers. The way the crazy people reasoned around the holes was always entertaining. I put aside the report and the pen and decided to push her. To see how far she’ll stretch to keep her story mildly coherent. “Did he remember where he was before the white room—before he started making calls on the big red phone?”
“I did think to ask that, of course. His story was so strange, how could I not ask? But his recollections were hazy. It was like he was remembering through a fog or a dream. He remembered bright lights before the room, but he did know not where he was or where the lights came from. I suggested maybe he had been interrogated. It sounded a little like the scary stories we were hearing after 9/11. He didn’t think so. He felt that he had been away for a long while, and just finding the white room had allowed him to reconnect with the outside world. I pushed him for where he had been even before the bright lights. I wanted to know who he was that remembered the old style of phones. He said his recollection grew even hazier the further he went back. He had memories of material things, but he did not know who he was or how he connected to those material things. He did know that he had been a real person interacting with other real people in a real world. He had not always make phone calls. He knew how strange it sounded to be trapped in a white room with a red phone that only made calls out to random numbers.”
“This is certainly a strange story. I’m still confused why you came here to the station. You haven’t told me much that I could investigate. I guess we could pull your phone logs, but I would be surprised if we found anything.”
She watched me for a long while after I finished. I felt her weighing me in her eyes. Crazy people don’t always trust us normal folks. I couldn’t begin to guess what or why she judged me like that.
“I said before it was eight years ago that my husband fell into a coma. That was eight long years ago. I used to visit him every day. Then it was every week. Over the years it became a monthly ritual. Now it’s a good year when I visit him on our anniversary and his birthday. We all change, officer. Everyone of us. We all have the best of intentions going in, but we have to live our life, even if our life is as empty and hollow as my turned out to be. My husband was a good man. He didn’t garner much sympathy. He was in a car crash eight years ago. He had been drunk and hit another car, killing its teenage driver. My husband was not a drunk but he did drink socially. I didn’t blame him for the accident. He worked hard and he went out hard.
“The caller grew tired at the end of the call. He described it not as a physical tiredness but as a psychic tiredness, as if every part of him needed to slow down and rest. I bid him farewell and wished him luck on finding a way out of the room or finding who it was he was looking to call. He said the strangest thing to me then. He said he had found her, and that all he wished over each twinkling star was for her forgiveness. And then he said goodbye. I held the phone to my ear for the longest time after he hung up. I listened to the off-hook ringing until after it grew silent. I must have sat there with the silent phone against my ear for another hour. You see, I placed his voice when he made his wish. My husband wished over twinkling stars. It was how he proposed. He didn’t believe in prayer or god, but he did believe in the universe. He prayed to the universe in the form of the twinkling star. The callers voice, the one I couldn’t place, it was my husband’s voice. A voice I had not heard in almost decade.”
“Why’d you come to me? Why didn’t you go to the hospital? Isn’t that where your husband is now? Why not talk to doctors about this? Did he wake from his coma to make the call?”
“Don’t you think I started at the hospital? My husband was there, and the doctors listened to my story patiently. I could tell the doctor wanted to suggest counseling for me. I could see it in his eyes. He didn’t listen through the entire story. He kept cutting me off and pushing me to get to the point. I appreciated that you didn’t do that tonight, officer. I came to you because I had to find out whether the man on the phone was real or not. If his story was true or if he was just a crazy man, then it wasn’t who I thought. Then I am crazy or he’s crazy, and either way it doesn’t get me much closer to my husband. But if it’s not—if he managed to make some connection through a different way, then I have to know, officer.”
For once I wondered who the crazy person in the police hall actually was. It might have been her shapely legs, or maybe the sadness I finally felt from her, but whatever it was, I wanted to help her. I actually believed her. I know it sounds crazy. I looked her in the eyes and told her to start over, from the beginning. To explain it slower and with as many details as she could remember.
So I wrote something. I decided to try my hand at one-day short stories again. Not sure there's much of a story here, but it is words, and since I wrote it, I decided to share it with warts and everything. Sorry about the style. I've been reading DFW again, and you know how that goes.
Planning is something you do after you finish a job. You learned that the hard way after you started your first job out of college. You thought that the smart people who ran successful businesses thought and planned and did their homework before they decided anything. You used to think a lot before you ended up in a cubicle repeating the same motions and same thoughts day after day. Most of the times you spent looking for something to distract you. You wanted a few moments of peace; thinking that if you could find peace then maybe you would find an explanation for the drudgery, and with that explanation perhaps things would get better.
When you’re trapped in a cubicle you don’t think much about why you’re there. You don’t even think about how to escape. It’s not like you’re physically restrained in any real sense of the word. You’re sitting there surfing the internet or doodling on a post-it and thinking about what you’re going to have for lunch. You’ll have lunch with the same three people and have the same conversations. You’ll laugh at the same places in the banter and you’ll wonder why this is the highlight of your day. You’ll lose touch with these people as you move up and on, but you’ll always think back fondly at this time because you’ll never have work relationships that are this easy or close again. At lunch you’ll all complain about your jobs and how people who are not as skilled or smart or good looking as you always seem to get promoted before you do. And you’ll wonder why you care so much about promotions since you’ll tell yourself that it’s not about the money; that there’s something else out there—something bigger. You won’t delve too deeply into what that something bigger is because, if you were to tell yourself the truth, you would find out that that deepness is actually as petty and small as the rest of your thoughts. You are about the status and the money and the head-turning cars. You do not care about the happiness of the people on this planet in any real sense of the word, except to perhaps drive a hybrid car and pretend like the batteries aren’t going to poison the lakes and streams to save a few cents at the gas pump.
The days pass like this and you step on others shoulders and maybe stand on their heads just a small bit to get ahead. You wander through the hallways of your building and marvel at how many people’s lives now depend on your mood and ability to deliver, which your bosses (because you always will have bosses in one form or the other) pat you on the head to reward you for understanding the flow of business and how to weather the worst recession since the last one in the 1970s.
And you’re getting places now. Your house is growing, albeit a bit smaller than your neighbor who you thought you had outpaced until he inherited money from his dead grandmother, which is not the same thing as earning it yourself, you tell yourself, as if the scoreboard really changes based on where the money came from. It doesn’t, you know. But you tell yourself that as you look at your neighbor’s ugly children and yappy dog and wonder why you even care about the scoreboard with all its beeps and blinking lights—some of which seem to have blown out during your reverie and consideration of the new garage your neighbor dropped next to his house to store his new Ferrari.
Then you go to work. Not too early anymore, since there’s no need. You spend most of your time at your desk browsing the internets still. But this time you have an assistant who sits outside your office at a desk that’s bigger than the desks you sat behind in the cubicles so many years before. She answers your phone but doesn’t get you coffee as that’s not something the executive assistants can do anymore for their bosses. She does get coffee for visitors, which is nice because she’ll grab one for you when she’s on the way as a favor. Before going to work you stop by a breakfast place inside a hotel for a meeting. Lots of your meetings now take place a breakfast places or lunch places or perhaps lobster places where they forget to tell you it’s lunch time and you need them to remind you because you just had your third martini and are wondering why the room is spinning so early in the morning. But it’s not that early anymore. That’s the point.
And your home life—because you still have one since unlike most of your colleagues you’re still married and you still know the names of your children and even spend some time with them on weekends and afternoons when you decide you’ve had enough of office life and clock out for the day—is still distinct and perfect. Your wife still greets you when you get home and you’re genuinely happy to see her since that’s another checkbox in your life: happy marriage, something that after the 1950s seemed to exist only in the lands of fairytales, where there is a possibility of living happily ever after if you didn’t spend the eighty hours a week at the office like they told you you would have to if you wanted to get ahead. It turned out that the hours didn’t count for bubkes and you got ahead the same way you believe your forefathers did: not through hard work since hard work is for suckers without luck. You rose through the ranks through knowing the right people and saying the right word at the right moment when the right person was there. It was rarely said to that right person. That would have seemed too self-serving. It was enough that the right person was there to hear what you said and to think or perhaps know that you did not say what you said solely for his benefit and certainly it was not premeditated the night before way after your wife had gone to bed and you were sitting at your desk thinking through the quagmire that was your peer ring and wondering how you were going to crush the last two contenders and impress your boss’s boss who barely even recognized you except on that one occasion where you wore that red tie and you ended up washing your hands in the bathroom at the same time and he made a comment about your tie and you were too tongue tied to even thank him or come back with a witty retort. You wouldn’t make that mistake again. And so you meticulously planned out what you were going to say and even wore a red tie, a different one, of course, since you didn’t want your boss’s boss to associate you with that moron he ran into in the bathroom who couldn’t think fast enough to respond to a simple compliment even though at the time that he made that comment there were so many more bosses between you and him that you doubted you were in the same planet let alone hemisphere as this all important man.
It wasn’t like all you thought about at home was work. It was just that work was the more interesting thing to think about when you were sitting around and staring at your children and trying to figure out what half of them belonged to you. Was it the eyes? the brains? or perhaps something between? You weren’t worried that they weren’t your kids. Not that worried, at least. You were home at the right times and you still had that good relationship with the wife. She still greeted you at the door and told you about her day and you were still amazed that she could spend so much time at home and still be as interesting as she was. And she was interesting. You chose wisely on that front. You make good choices. But you know that already. That’s how you got to where you are, sitting behind your large wooden desk on your overpriced office chair that would have been more useful to the people that sit in cubicles down the hall since they sit behind their desks for more than ten hours a day and you barely manage an hour behind your desk before the internet bores you or your hand cramps from signing so many agreements that you stopped reading years ago and just relied on your underlings to flag the right places and sign the right documents without asking questions because if you asked too many questions you might find out that there was more going on in the company than you were willing to acknowledge and perhaps it was better that way for the company that you didn’t think too much about it or plan ahead or have any idea what was going to happen next. You didn’t want to spoil the ending. And perhaps you do a little spin in your chair marveling at the smoothness of the motion and the ease in which you can push back and turn to face the window and look down over the sixty floors to the small wet streets where a parade of umbrellas of mostly black but some color here and there greeted you. Those were the workers. Those were the people who made the city buzz with activity and put the zeros on your paycheck. On the backs of others did you climb up these floors and on the backs of others did the cash registers sing. Except your company doesn’t actually sell anything real since selling stuff is for suckers. You sell promises and packaged funny money products that don’t add much to society except for the percentage you take off the top. The percentage that lets you buy your fancy cars and your oversized boat that sits at the dock where you promise your wife you’ll put into the water this summer for a small cruise down south but never actually make the call because it turns out that you don’t actually like the water after a mishap in your youth with a fishing boat and a bucket and your father who had to hold your head as he explained for the fiftieth time that a real man does not get sick on a fishing trip in a bay; that the waves weren’t even big enough to rock the boat in any real way and that if you didn’t get off your hands and knees and get back to the rod you would never catch that fish that you didn’t even want to eat since what eight year old actually wants to eat fish when there’s a plethora of grilled cheeses and macaroni and cheese in your mother’s fridge.
Perhaps it was all for the best. Your life, that is. Perhaps you’ve lived it the way you lived it because you were trying to prove something. You were trying to find some meaning in a game where they didn’t tell you the rules or winning conditions so you, like everyone around you, decided that since it was a game there must be a way to win it, and since winning in every other sport was based on that big scoreboard in the sky, you would just tick on the numbers until they came up green. On your third trip to Paris you thought about checking out of the game. You saw life for what it was: a pursuit of something bigger than a high score. You stopped reading the internet and picked up fulfilling books that you thought would enlighten you as you sat at a corner cafe and stared at the crowds of workers and school children who you knew would be impressed by the author of your book if only they read English. But you tried to put that behind you since you were here on business and not just to escape your home life which was on the rocks because your children were at that age where they were questioning everything and you were not around to give answers so you instructed your wife on the simple truths in your children’s life and then hightailed it to the nearest airport where you took a plane to Paris to arrive at this very spot where you were drinking that very large coffee and hoping that someone—and by someone you hoped a beautiful French woman with long black hair and a slight but not overbearing accent—would sit down and enter into a deep conversation about your life and the truths and not once ask you about your work or what you were doing there or, worse, what you had left behind and why you had left it behind.
You’re older now and all of that happened a long while ago. You don’t need to worry about it. You’re beyond such worries. You left your job when they paid you too much of a bonus to justify working anywhere anymore. They looked at your askance when you did so. The young guys didn’t know what to make of someone like you at the prime of your career, a prince of the industry, where you just landed your second executive assistant to manage your busy lunching schedules on a floor where they didn’t allow cubicles because the people that sat there (which they didn’t do too often) didn’t want to share the same bathroom as those who work in cubicles, who do the real work that kept the zeros added to your bonus checks. You imagined that those around you thought you insane. Or perhaps going through a midlife crisis where you would drive one of those hot red sport cars that you had when you were much younger before your children came around and changed your life—because they did do that and you didn’t need fancy sports cars to change your life yet again.
You’re not a bad man, you will concede after you sit down and introspect longer than you thought possible. Yeah, you will acknowledge that you didn’t plan any of this. This will be evident from now through all the time you will spend in boardrooms for the various charity boards that you will sit on to occupy your time and get the accolades of those around you and eventually, after many years of doing this, to help people because that turns out to be the most rewarding part of that work. There will be no planning for that either. You’ll fall into and it will not be as bad as you fear. There will be nobody to impress in those boardrooms. There will be goodness that you will do and you will be happy to do it. You’ll get a accomplished sense and it’ll make you think of perhaps going into politics until you tell your wife and she looks at you like you grew a third eyeball in the middle of your balding pate and wonder if perhaps your coworkers (who would have spoken to her after you announced your retirement and wondered if you had perhaps jumped off that pier that you were always talking about, and wondered if it wasn’t better for you just to take a little time off, perhaps a sabbatical, and come back when your brain was a bit more screwed on properly) were right when they told her about your impeding insanity and bad choices. But she won’t really believe that, and she’ll encourage you like she’s done all your life and hold you and tell you you can do whatever it is you want to do and will do it well because she believes in you. And you will try not to cry but you won’t succeed because that’s what her belief does to you.
Politics won’t be for you, you’ll realize, and you’ll continue to stay with the charities and give away larger and larger parts of your fortune much to the chagrin of your growing children, who will only understand what you’re doing after they’ve lived many more years and had the opportunity to run their own rat races and see that the cheese they were promised all throughout school and their life turns out not to be the purpose of the maze. They will look back at you with a smile through all those years and know that while you didn’t give advice on the matter, they knew through your actions that for all those years you had spent chasing the cheese, it was only when you left the maze by crawling up and over the walls (which you always secretly wished the rats would just figure out to end the experiment) that you found the answers that were always just sitting there staring you eyeball to eyeball. Your kids will learn that and they’ll laugh and laugh and you’ll wish to join them in your laughing but they’ll be old by then and you’ll be long gone. But don’t worry. There will be many more generations that will live similar lives and some will find the answers, many will not be given that opportunity, and others will refuse to see the answers. But you’ll know that that’s okay because it as the cliché says: about the journey. And the ending turns out not to be as important as they told you when you were young and foolish and believing in such things.