Brother Odd (11 page)

CHAPTER 20

R
OOM 14 LAY DIRECTLY ACROSS THE COURTYARD from Room 32, in the north corridor. A single plaque had been fixed to the door, bearing one name:
JACOB
.

A floor lamp beside an armchair, a squat nightstand lamp, and a fluorescent ceiling fixture compensated for daylight so drear that it could press itself inside no farther than the window sill.

Because Room 14 contained only a single bed, the space could accommodate a four-foot-square oak table, at which sat Jacob.

I had seen him a couple of times, but I did not know him. “May I come in?”

He didn’t say yes, but he didn’t say no, either. Deciding to take his silence as an invitation, I sat across from him at the table.

Jacob is one of the few adults housed at the school. He is in his middle twenties.

I didn’t know the name of the condition with which he had been born, but evidently it involved a chromosomal abnormality.

About five feet tall, with a head slightly too small for his body a sloped forehead, low-set ears, and soft heavy features, he exhibited some of the characteristics of Down’s syndrome.

The bridge of his nose was not flat, however, which is an indicator of Down’s, and his eyes did not have the inner epicanthic folds that give the eyes of Down’s people an Asian cast.

More telling, he did not exhibit the quick smile or the sunny and gentle disposition virtually universal among those with Down’s. He did not look at me, and his expression remained dour.

His head was misshapen as no Down’s person’s head would ever be. A greater weight of bone accumulated in the left side of his skull than in the right. His features were not symmetrical, but were subtly out of balance, one eye set slightly lower than the other, his left jaw more prominent than his right, his left temple convex and his right temple more than usually concave.

Stocky, with heavy shoulders and a thick neck, he hunched over the table, intent on the task before him. His tongue, which appeared to be thicker than a normal tongue but which didn’t usually protrude, was at the moment pinched gently between his teeth.

On the table were two large tablets of drawing paper. One lay to the right of him, closed. The second was propped on a slantboard.

Jacob was drawing on the second tablet. Ordered in an open case, an array of pencils offered lead in many thicknesses and in different degrees of softness.

His current project was a portrait of a strikingly lovely woman, nearly finished. Presented in three-quarter profile, she stared past the artist’s left shoulder.

Inevitably, I thought of the hunchback of Nôtre Dame: Quasimodo, his tragic hope, his unrequited love.

“You’re very talented,” I said, which was true.

He did not reply.

Although his hands were short and broad, his stubby fingers wielded the pencil with dexterity and exquisite precision.

“My name is Odd Thomas.”

He took his tongue into his mouth, tucked it into one cheek, and pressed his lips together.

“I’m staying in the guesthouse at the abbey.”

Looking around at the room, I saw that the dozen framed pencil portraits decorating the walls were of this woman. Here she smiled; there she laughed; most often she appeared contemplative, serene.

In an especially compelling piece, she had been rendered full-face, eyes brimming bright, cheeks jeweled with tears. Her features had not been melodramatically distorted; instead, you could see that her anguish was great but also that she strove with some success to conceal the depth of it.

Such a complex emotional state, rendered so subtly, suggested that my praise of Jacob’s talent had been inadequate. The woman’s emotion was palpable.

The condition of the artist’s heart, while he had labored on this portrait, was also evident, somehow infused into the work. Drawing, he had been in torment.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“Do you float away when the dark comes?” He had only a mild speech impediment. His thick tongue apparently wasn’t fissured.

“I’m not sure I know what you mean, Jacob.”

Too shy to look at me, he continued drawing, and after a silence said, “I seen the ocean some days, but not that day.”

“What day, Jacob?”

“The day they went and the bell rung.”

Although already I sensed a rhythm to his conversation and knew that rhythm was a sign of meaning, I couldn’t find the beat.

He was willing to count cadence alone. “Jacob’s scared he’ll float wrong when the dark comes.”

From the pencil case, he selected a new instrument.

“Jacob’s gotta float where the bell rung.”

As he paused in his work and studied the unfinished portrait, his tragic features were beautified by a look of intense affection.

“Never seen where the bell rung, and the ocean it moves, and it moves, so where the bell rung is gone somewhere new.”

Sadness captured his face, but the look of affection did not entirely retreat.

For a while, he chewed worriedly on his lower lip.

When he set to work with the new pencil, he said, “And the dark is gonna come with the dark.”

“What do you mean, Jacob—the dark is going to come with the dark?”

He glanced at the snow-scrubbed window. “When there’s no light again, the dark is gonna come, too. Maybe. Maybe the dark is gonna come, too.”

“When there’s no light again—that means tonight?”

Jacob nodded. “Maybe tonight.”

“And the other dark that’s coming with the night…do you mean death, Jacob?”

He thrust his tongue between his teeth again. After rolling the pencil in his fingers to find the right grip, he set to work once more on the portrait.

I wondered if I had been too straightforward when I had used the word
death
. Perhaps he expressed himself obliquely not because that was the only way his mind worked, but because speaking about some subjects too directly disturbed him.

After a while, he said, “He wants me dead.”

CHAPTER 21

W
ITH LEAD HE SHADED LOVE INTO THE woman’s eyes.

As one who had no talent except for magic at the griddle and grill, I watched with respect as Jacob created her from memory, as he made real on paper what was in his mind and what was evidently lost to him except by the grace of his art.

When I had given him time to proceed but had gotten not another word from him, I said, “Who wants you dead, Jacob?”

“The Neverwas.”

“Help me understand.”

“The Neverwas came once to see, and Jacob was full of the black, and the Neverwas said,
‘Let him die.’
 ”

“He came here to this room?”

Jacob shook his head. “A long time ago the Neverwas came, before the ocean and the bell and the floating away.”

“Why do you call him the Neverwas?”

“That’s his name.”

“He must have another name.”

“No. He’s the Neverwas, and we don’t care.”

“I never heard anyone named the Neverwas before.”

Jacob said, “Never heard no one named the Odd Thomas before.”

“All right. Fair enough.”

Employing an X-Acto knife, Jacob shaved the point on the pencil.

Watching him, I wished that I could whittle my dull brain to a sharper point. If only I could understand something about the scheme of simple metaphors in which he spoke, I might be able to crack the code of his conversation.

I had made some progress, figuring out that when he said “the dark is gonna come with the dark,” he meant that death was coming tonight or some night soon.

Although his drawing ability made him a savant, that was the extent of his special talent. Jacob wasn’t clairvoyant. His warning of oncoming death was not a presentiment.

He had seen something, heard something,
knew
something that I had not seen, had not heard, did not know. His conviction that death loomed was based on hard evidence, not on supernatural perception.

Now that the pencil wood had been cut away, he put down the X-Acto knife and used a sandpaper block to sharpen the point of the lead.

Brooding about the riddle that was Jacob, I stared at the snow falling thicker and faster than ever past the window, so thick that maybe you could drown out there, trying to breathe but your lungs filling up with snow.

“Jacob’s dumb,” he said, “but not stupid.”

When I shifted my attention from the window, I discovered he was looking at me for the first time.

“That must be another Jacob,” I said. “I don’t see dumb here.”

At once he shifted his eyes to the pencil, and he put aside the sandpaper block. In a different, singsong voice, he said, “Dumb as a duck run down by a truck.”

“Dumb doesn’t draw like Michelangelo.”

“Dumb as a cow knocked flat by a plow.”

“You’re repeating something you heard, aren’t you?”

“Dumb as a mutt with his nose up his butt.”

“No more,” I said softly. “Okay? No more.”

“There’s lots more.”

“I don’t want to hear. It hurts me to hear this.”

He seemed surprised. “Hurts why?”

“Because I like you, Jake. I think you’re special.”

He was silent. His hands trembled, and the pencil ticked against the table. He glanced at me, heartbreaking vulnerability in his eyes. He shyly looked away.

“Who said those things to you?” I asked.

“You know. Kids.”

“Kids here at Saint Bart’s?”

“No. Kids before the ocean and the bell and the floating away.”

In this world where too many are willing to see only the light that is visible, never the Light Invisible, we have a daily darkness that is night, and we encounter another darkness from time to time that is death, the deaths of those we love, but the third and most constant darkness that is with us every day, at all hours of every day, is the darkness of the mind, the pettiness and meanness and hatred, which we have invited into ourselves, and which we pay out with generous interest.

“Before the ocean and the bell and the floating away,” Jacob repeated.

“Those kids were just jealous. Jake, see, you could do something better than anything they could do.”

“Not Jacob.”

“Yes, you.”

He sounded dubious: “What could I do better?”

“Draw. Of all the things they could do that you couldn’t, there wasn’t one thing they could do as well as you can draw. So they were jealous and called you names and made fun of you—to make themselves feel better.”

He stared at his hands until the tremors stopped, until the pencil was steady, and then he continued working on the portrait.

His resiliency was not the resiliency of the dumb but of a lamb who can remember hurt but cannot sustain the anger or the bitterness that brittles the heart.

“Not stupid,” he said. “Jacob knows what he seen.”

I waited, then said, “What did you see, Jake?”

“Them.”

“Who?”

“Not scared of them.”

“Of who?”

“Them and the Neverwas. Not scared of them. Jacob’s only scared he’ll float wrong when the dark comes. Never seen where the bell rung, wasn’t there when the bell rung, and the ocean it moves, it always moves, so where the bell rung is gone somewhere new.”

We had come full circle. In fact I felt as if I had been on a merry-go-round too long.

My wristwatch read 10:16.

I was willing to go around and around some more, in the hope that I would be enlightened instead of dizzied.

Sometimes enlightenment descends upon you when you least expect it: like the time that I and a smiling Japanese chiropractor, who was also an herbalist, were hanging side by side, bound with rope, from a rack in a meat locker.

Some difficult guys with no respect for alternative medicine or human life were intending to return to the meat locker and torture us to get information they wanted. They were not seeking the most effective herbal formula to cure athlete’s foot or anything like that. They wanted to tear from us information regarding the whereabouts of a large sum of cash.

Our situation was made more dire by the fact that the difficult guys were mistaken; we didn’t have the information they wanted. After hours of torturing us, all they would get for their effort would be the fun of hearing us scream, which probably would have been all right with them if they’d also had a case of beer and some chips.

The chiropractor-herbalist spoke maybe forty-seven words of English, and I only spoke two words of Japanese that I could recall under pressure. Although we were highly motivated to escape before our captors returned with an array of pliers, a blowtorch, cattle prods, a CD of the Village People singing Wagner, and other fiendish instruments, I didn’t think we could conspire successfully when my two words of Japanese were
sushi
and
sake
.

For half an hour, our relationship was marked by my sputtering frustration and by his unshakable patience. To my surprise, with a series of ingenious facial expressions, eight words that included
spaghetti
and
linguini
and
Houdini
and
tricky,
he managed to make me understand that in addition to being a chiropractor and an herbalist, he was a contortionist who had once had a nightclub act when he had been younger.

He was not as limber as in his youth, but with my cooperation, he managed to use various parts of my body as stepping-stones to eel backward and up to the rack from which we were suspended, where he chewed through a knot and freed himself, then freed me.

We stay in touch. From time to time he sends me pictures from Tokyo, mostly of his kids. And I send him little boxes of dried, chocolate-covered California dates, which he adores.

Now, sitting across the table from Jacob, I figured that if I could be even half as patient as the smiling chiropractor-herbalist-contortionist, and if I kept in mind that to my Japanese friend I must have seemed as impenetrable as Jacob seemed to me, I might in time not only puzzle out the meaning of Jacob’s oblique conversation but might also tease from him the thing that he seemed to know, the vital detail, that would help me understand what terror was fast approaching St. Bartholomew’s.

Unfortunately, Jacob was no longer talking. When I had first sat down at the table, he’d been mum. Now he was mum to twenty powers of ten. Nothing existed for him except the drawing on which he worked.

I tried more conversational gambits than a lonely logomaniac at a singles’ bar. Some people like to hear themselves talk, but I like to hear myself silent. After five minutes, I exhausted my tolerance for the sound of my voice.

Although Jacob sat here in the tick of time that bridges past and future, he had cast his mind back to another day before the ocean and the bell and the floating away, whatever that might mean.

Rather than waste time pecking at him until I wore my beak down to a nub, I got to my feet and said, “I’ll come back this afternoon, Jacob.”

If he looked forward to the pleasure of my company, he did a superb job of concealing his delight.

I scanned the framed portraits on the walls and said, “She was your mother, wasn’t she?”

Not even that question drew a reaction from him. Painstakingly, he restored her to life with the power of the pencil.