Best Boy (7 page)

Recently I was leaving the house and Tommy Doon tried yet again to give me volts. I was leaving to practice throwing the stick in the woods, where I had moved it from near Mike's cottage. As I crossed the living room past Tommy who was watch
ing the nightly news on television he said something to me. I never watch television because it goes too fast and everyone on it seems to know each other already. But Tommy likes talking to me while continuing to stare at the screen with the volume up which makes him talk loudly.

“What?” I said.

“I said, where are you going?” he shouted.

“Out,” I said.

“What are you going out to do?”

“Some stuff.”

At this point Tommy Doon turned his head so that he was staring directly at me. His skull is shaved and he has small green eyes and thick lips. He raised these lips in the strained smile of someone struggling to push a difficult number two.

“So Todd Aaron has a girlfriend,” he said and turned the volume down.

“No I don't.”

His voice was deep with happiness.

“Oh yes you do,” he said. “Why else would you be going out now? Todd has a girlfriend, Todd has a girlfriend, but what girl would be with you?”

“Goodbye,” I said.

I walked out the door but I didn't slam it behind me. Instead I closed it quietly and then walked across the campus. I told myself I wasn't angry and I repeated it several times to be sure. It was just after dusk and I could see people in their cottages as I walked. The weak, moon-colored light of televisions glowed in living rooms. But often people in the houses weren't watching television. They were simply sitting in chairs with their TVs on while facing in other directions and staring at the walls. This was the drug Risperdal. Many of the villagers took it. I took it too.
It was the staring-into-space drug. It pushed a heavy downward hand through your head that made you so tired your mouth fell open and wouldn't shut.

I kept walking, headed to where I'd hidden the stick in the woods. Eventually I entered the forest and walked on a trail for a few minutes under the light of the stars. I got to where the spear was kept and I took it up and held it in my hand.

Around me were four trees that I had marked with little Post-its on which I'd written different names. The Post-its had blown away but I remembered that one tree was
Mike
and one was
Tommy Doon
and one was
Dad
and one was
Me
. Also I'd memorized where they were located so that even in the darkish light of the evening with just the planets glowing I still knew which tree I wanted. On this night the tree I wanted was Tommy Doon. The Tommy Doon who I could never bear to push my mind back against, ever. The Tommy Doon who had convinced his mother I was a bad person who “skirted his responsibilities” and never cleaned up, left a stink in the bathroom and had no friends. I pulled my arm back and using my body I sent the spear deep into the Tommy Doon tree. Then I pulled it out with both hands and I did it again. In the night, in the quiet of the woods, it made a satisfying deep sound like an axe hitting a log, thunk. I kept on aiming and throwing and then pulling out until I was sweating and breathing hard.

I returned through the starlit campus and opened the door to the cottage where I saw Tommy Doon watching a cowboy on television. The cowboy rode a horse that stood up on its hind legs and screamed. He looked at me and then said loudly to the television, “You do too have a girlfriend. You look sweaty like you just made sex with someone. Todd Aaron has a girlfriend and now I know he does and I'm going to tell on him!”

I went into my room feeling the nerve-strings yanking on the bones of my face and in my neck and shoulders and down my sides. I tried to remember what the staff named Chuck said about hating but it didn't help. Standing in the very center of my room I opened my mouth and gradually felt the electric pulling of my body come over me. My fists clenched and my face drew back until it was in the shape of a scream. My right arm rose without my control and my hand went into my mouth. My teeth bit down on the special spot that was rubbery from biting and tasted reassuringly like me. The volts were filling a room in my head. They were bulging against the windows of that room. I was biting down just a little bit less than breaking the skin. If I broke the skin and the volts came then I would see the white again and from the forgetting middle of that white I would kick at things until a Dr. Strong was called. But the windows held as the volts banged against them. For a long time I stood there with my hand in my mouth, rocking forward and back, biting the hatred in my body till it hurt, but not too much.

PART
THREE

THIRTEEN

S
OMETIMES TO HELP IN MY CONVERSATIONS WITH
Mr B I do an Internet search. Most people don't know I can do that either. But Raykene does. She says I can use it as part of our “special understanding.” She calls the computer Mr. C. She says, “You asking Mr. B or Mr. C for that information?” Then she laughs and shakes her head. Mr. C doesn't make me calm like Mr. B does. Mr. C makes fizzing, electric noises from the work of hauling information in from all around the world. He says that no one knows when autism started but that people were autistic long before the word was invented. Mr C has lists of some of these people. He likes lists. He likes stacking information in piles. He says that maybe people
possessed by demons
were autistic, along with the monks of the Middle Ages who gave away everything,
spoke in strange tongues
and cried when animals were hurt. He says that maybe the
Yurodivi
which is the word for
Holy Fools
in Russia were autistic along with a woman named Pelagija Serebrenikova who threw stones into a flooded
pit and pulled them out, one by one, and repeated the process until she grew weak, for years.

Then there was Wild Peter.
In 1723
, says Mr. C,
a naked boy was seen running along the edge of the Weser River in the town of Hamelin, Germany
. When the fishermen saw him through the trees they lowered their nets in astonishment and said German words to one another in their surprise that such a person could exist.

Soon the boy was captured sucking milk from a cow, and brought to a farmer's house. He was very small but he moved fast through the woods on his hands and knees. “Like the wind,” local people said. “Like a squirrel,” some said. “Like a goat,” said others.

But he couldn't speak a word.

No one could understand how he'd lived through the cold German winters. The boy wouldn't talk and he ate only nuts, onions and potatoes. He had no name but people started calling him Wild Peter and he soon became a famous person in Germany. Then he was brought to London where the crowds gathering to see him were huge. One of the people who saw him there was a man named Jonathan Swift. But Peter wasn't interested in what people thought, whether they were Jonathan Swift or King George. The king invited him to his home in London to meet his friends, but during dinner that night he got volts, tore off all his clothes, ate the food from other people's plates and then escaped out the window before being captured in a tree in the public gardens. After that, he was sent to live on a farm in the British countryside.

Wild Peter finally became one of the most famous people in all of Europe but he wasn't interested in that either. He loved music and humming and rocking in place. He loved standing outside in the farmyard with the sun on his skin or at night,
watching the stars. He loved drinking gin. He never learned to speak more than a few words, but when an important judge came to see him when Peter was already an old man, he entertained the judge by slowly singing a song he'd memorized over the years. It went like this:

Of all the girls in our town,

The red, the black, the fair, the brown,

That dance and prance it up and down

There's none like Nancy Dawson

Then he died.

FOURTEEN

P
AYTON HAS A LIST OF “DO'S AND DON'T'S” FOR
villagers called a Code of Intimate Conduct. It's written on a laminated card that is in a drawer of every dresser on campus. The card says, “Mutual sexual expression, which is private and between consenting adults, is a healthy and pleasurable demonstration of affection, intimacy and sexuality.” Then it lists
The Ten Signs of Yes
and
The Ten Signs of No.

Several villagers at Payton have girlfriends. Henry Mercer has a girlfriend even if she looks like a man. Ryan Hazonyx has a girlfriend with long blond hair which is always playing in the wind. David Pemberthy used to have Greta Deane as a girlfriend but then his parents took him away one weekend and he never came back. You can see boys walking around with their girlfriends holding hands. Or boys with boys or girls with girls. They gather sometimes in the bakery together and drink decaf and eat coffee crumble. They look at each other through the air and share their teeth in a smile.

The reason I got so angry when Tommy Doon made fun of me by saying I have a girlfriend is that I don't have a girlfriend but for a long time I wanted one, badly. I even made a bouquet of paper flowers many years ago in a craft class that I gave to a girl named Edith. Edith was fat and had dimples on her face and green eyes. “For you,” I told her and looked away. When I looked back Edith was smiling at me in a way that made the slots come into her cheeks. She took the flowers and showed me the slots and said, “Thank you.” But a day later I found the flowers dropped in the dirt near the recycling bins behind the main building.

I liked Edith. I wanted to talk to her and take her for a walk in the woods and to buy her a candy bar at the nearby convenience store. I knew we would never have a house together and a car to drive in and children to whom we would explain in soft, soothing voices that they were different from other boys and girls but still perfectly good people and maybe even manzipans. But I wanted to be with her anyway. And while I was being with her, I hoped she might help me do something about the wind in my pants. The wind had begun as a small breeze at age twelve a while after I'd left the Astridge Foundation and then increased steadily until it had begun to roar.

Momma knew all about the wind in my pants and used to help me with the wind by bringing magazines of naked women on her visits to me in various communities so that I could “work things out yourself.” By this she meant masturbating, which is a bad word. We called it my “work” instead.

“How's work?” she'd ask. Momma at this time was a big hurrying woman with a pointy hairdo and heels on her feet but I knew that in her leather bag were pictures of ladies with their secret hair showing, waiting patiently to help me like nurses
do sick people. For many years as soon as she arrived to visit Momma would take the magazines of ladies out of her bag and quick put them in the drawer of my dresser. Then she'd turn to me, smile and open her arms wide.

“My beautiful little man,” she'd say and pull me towards her so that I'd feel the warm, living front of her body, “are we having a happy today? Can you smell a delicious hamburger and fries coming towards us from about twenty minutes away?” Then we'd laugh and go out to eat and I'd be in a good mood because I knew that after she left, a drawer of fresh naked girls would be waiting. These girls would always have the very same goal: to explain how nice it was to be photographed without any clothes on, just for me.

But after many years of blowing wind, the breeze in my pants had slowed and then mostly stopped. A staff explained to me that this was age, and meds. Mainly why I want a girlfriend now is to talk to her. I want to talk to her about how nothing ever stays the same no matter how hard you try. I want to talk to her about how when parents die they leave a hole through which you can feel the coldness of outer space. Girls are easier to talk to than boys. They let you hold their hands and they listen more carefully and they smell better and when you cry they wait longer before telling you to stop.

Connie is a Down's who sometimes lets me pat her bottom in the dark but I've mostly given up thinking about having a girlfriend. But then Raykene came up to me recently and said, “I got a favor to ask of you, Todd. There's this woman I want you to be an Ambassador for, okay? There's no girl Ambassadors available today and you're a natural greeter anyway. Can you take her around today and give her an orientation?”

“Sure,” I said, and didn't think about it.

But later that same day I began thinking about it more. I'd just
returned from the Demont school cafeteria when I saw Raykene walking across the lawn with a girl. I stopped what I was doing which was getting ready to heat up some lunch in the microwave and stood still as they came towards the house. Raykene knocked and stepped inside, sweating and fanning herself with a hand, and saying, “Too hot for words today!” Then she said, “Todd Aaron meet Martine Calhoun. Martine meet Todd.”

“Hi,” I said.

The girl had been looking down but now she raised her face for a moment to meet mine and I saw she had a patch over one eye. I'd never seen a girl with a patch over one eye.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hi,” I said again, and looked at her. Martine was very tall and very thin. She had long hair that was the brown color of horses. Also like horses this hair shone.

“Martine is the girl I'd like you to give a tour to today,” Raykene said to me. Then she said to Martine, “Todd is one of our Ambassadors here, which is a special category of people who have been here a long time and are allowed to give tours. Normally boy Ambassadors give boys tours and girls do girls but we're a little short-staffed today and Todd is one of our most senior villagers and a total gentleman. Okay, Todd?”