In the Land of the Living (12 page)

“Look what you did, you
idiot!
” Mack yelled. “You broke my tooth! He broke my tooth!” Mack’s face crumpled into an expression of pure terror. “My grown-up permanent tooth is broken! Look!”

Now Leo saw that in addition to blood, Mack had spat into his palm what looked like a triangular shard of bloody tooth.

“Oh no!” Leo said.

“It’s not broken,” their mother said.

“Yes, it is! Look!”

“That’s not your tooth.”

“Yes, it is!”

“Oh,” their mother said, looking more closely. She sighed. “Leo, would you go get a towel and some ice cubes?”

“That won’t work,” Leo said, “a towel is too thick. You can’t feel the ice through it—”

“Will you just get it?”

Leo ran to get the towel. Philip had gone to a shopping center convention in Las Vegas, so the hall upstairs was perfectly still and the linen closet cursed with Saturday-evening gloom. Leo grabbed a hand towel and ran back down the stairs and into the kitchen. He filled the towel with a small pile of ice.

“I’m sorry, Mack! I’m sorry,” Leo cried. “I didn’t mean to! I didn’t mean to!”

But Mack’s glacier-blue eyes beamed icicle rays at him from across the stone coffee table. Leo had destroyed the joy that the birthday candles had brought. It was his fault. And he could see Mack sitting there thinking,
You just had to ruin my birthday. You just can’t let me have
anything.

They watched their old pirated Betamax tape of
Sleeping Beauty
without talking and Mack held the ice cubes in the hand towel against his upper lip.

The movie sang:
I know you, I walked with you once upon a dream.…

“I think you must have banged into the table there,” Leo said, pointing to the Lucite table by the couch.

Mack just stared at Leo with the ice against his face.

“I hate that table,” Leo said, loudly enough for his mom to hear. It was hard and sharp and he didn’t understand why anyone would intentionally make a piece of furniture that looked like the windows at the bank. He didn’t like the coffee table, either. It was cold as Dr. Barr’s stethoscope when he rested his bare feet on it in the morning and with all its gaps and crannies it was not good for drawing on. “I didn’t push you that hard,” he said in a pleading voice. “Mom says the dentist will fix it.” He kept thinking of that surprised and grateful look on Mack’s face when their mom brought out the birthday cake.

Mack just stared. He was smart, all right. And he didn’t have a sympathetic bone in his body. It was as though they were still caught up in some kind of game, and Mack was going to kill him at it.

Leo stared back at Mack with the rage again boiling up. His brother didn’t know anything about death or about his sorrows and didn’t care to imagine. He was in fact an ice-man who didn’t care. Or if he cared, his compassion was buried in a snowdrift.

Mack stared back with grand indignation, the way a defenseless villager might stare at a Viking who has just finished up burning and raping everything and everyone. He had his indignation, at least. And he wouldn’t let that go.

“You don’t care about me, you Wampa,” Leo said, and smiled hopefully. It was supposed to be a joke. The Wampa was the ice-creature on the planet Hoth in
The Empire Strikes Back
that Mack was still somewhat afraid of, which fact Leo had not pointed out. He couldn’t remember what had been said or how they’d gotten into the mess. He couldn’t remember what had once been different in their lives, and preferred to think there wasn’t anything much, preferred to think that he remembered all but the details from the time he was lifted from his mother’s belly in the operating room. But it was hard to deny that a mysterious influence had today entered the solar system of their family and distorted the orbits of normal life. And the dark energy that had disturbed affairs in their dimension might as well have been that forgotten once upon a time—what else should it be? The past was maybe even bigger in size than the visible here and now—as if the past were the larger, lower part of the iceberg that the ship’s lookout doesn’t see. The lookout just sees a little climbable, hospitable ice-world in miniature with glittering shelves to use and facets to sit on, a white-blue island of charming scale like the asteroid that the Little Prince lived on, an island no bigger than a whale and rising just above the ship’s gunwale, fit for a child’s imagination. And down below is something of a more adult size with a more adult meaning.

Leo contemplated Mack in sorrow and Mack stared back at him with glacier eyes and the towel full of ice held still against his mouth.

SOME YEARS, LEO
promised himself that this time, this spring, he would not get sad, and some years he forgot that anything bad happened in the spring and entered summer with a naïve optimism, but every year it was exactly the same: spring’s end aggrieved like the end of time and his depression humiliated him publicly and mercilessly as though he were naked and kneeling in a stockade. By the time he was fifteen, he had hopes that a summer job would relieve him of this syndrome. He went to work as a lifeguard at a camp, and he wouldn’t let himself cry then. Fifteen was too old.

Mack went to a day camp in Cleveland called Anisfield. Leo went away to Camp Wise in the Ohio woods. He thought he could do it. Because it was a coed camp, he thought he might even have sex—he wanted to have sex—but then the summer came and “orientation” and he just watched that girl bend over to tie her shoe with a genuine lump of pain in his throat. Backpack buckles clinked and clinked in a row of cheerless little bells. From ahead came a voice that sounded like one of his friends from home, but was not his friend—he heard it like a rescuer’s call that he couldn’t answer, like he was buried under rubble and his diaphragm could barely move so that he hadn’t the air to make a sound while someone called his name above.

“Are you okay?” someone asked.

Got a feelin’ inside that I can’t explain
.

His friend Ted had just been there beside him. Now he was not. “No problem,” Ted had said, “I’ll take you to pick up the film,” and Ted, who was a year older and could drive, had driven him to Fairmount Circle while the
Who’s Greatest Hits
tape played on the stereo. He could see Ted like he was standing right there. But he wasn’t. On the ground were leaves and two crossed sticks. Mack was at home in Cleveland, and completely fine without him. There were no beetles that needed picking out of his hair and there was no lizard tank this summer. Leo would kill for Mack, but Mack didn’t give him a thought anymore, not the whole year and not now. Next year, Mack would go to the junior high.

Leo trudged on with the Who lyrics going over and over in his head. It had to be less than an hour now till camp, where the others would eat without looking at him. He hadn’t really spoken in four days—a few words maybe, but not a conversation. There was that boy who never laughed but had the broad still smile on his face when they joked with him, who chose sometimes to read by himself in his tent, who drank one beer, then stopped. Maybe he could be a friend. Leo tried to switch the music in his head onto another song but a different one by the Who just took the first one’s place and kept going and going and going:
Captain Walker didn’t come home, his unborn child will never know him.…

At the campsite: tin pots on the ground and balanced on rocks, some with peeled potatoes in them under clear lake water like stones, some freckles of dirt or a pine needle spinning slowly on the meniscus. The bend-over girl with big breasts came close to him and mimicked his grave expression. She brushed a leaf from his hair. He said hi and looked away, blushing. Her opinion was on him like a fever on his skin. His blush was a chain reaction that crescendoed and exploded on his face.

“Stop the world—I want to get off,” he said, and he wondered if he’d made it up, because if so, it should be a saying. It sounded clever enough to be a saying, but it didn’t make him feel any better.

In fact it was the title of a musical that his mother and dead father used to play on the record player, but Leo didn’t remember that until many years later after a great deal of psychoanalysis. Years later, he found the record. There was a clown on the album cover. There was another record behind it called
The Roar of the Greasepaint—The Smell of the Crowd
that he remembered slightly better. The same pair of Englishmen, Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, had written both, and years later Leo remembered dancing to the song “A Wonderful Day Like Today,” dancing when he was so short that he could see the individual piles of the green shag carpet and the hairs on his daddy’s legs and the shine of his mommy’s nylon knee-highs in the prismatic light of the living room glass.

But he didn’t remember any of that yet, only the title of the one musical, and he thought maybe he’d invented it, and decided to write it down.

The skeleton of tent poles had entangled him. When he’d got the thing up at last, he crawled into his tent, dragging in with him a lot of dirt and pine needles. The tent had a bad sweaty air that made him feel he was inside the body of a dead fish. He opened his bag and his mother’s handwriting on the packing list jumped out and struck him in total silence like a pit viper. He pulled out his yellow legal pad and wrote, “Stop the world—I want to get off.” He wrote after it, “Ha ha ha,” as if it were a joke, but really he meant it. The measure would be if he’d been with a girl by the time he was eighteen. If not, he’d kill himself. He took some comfort in the idea: he would not be tortured or alone forever. He could stop the world and get off.

Time went as slowly as if he’d taken a drug, as if a drug like marijuana had confused the labels on past and future and kept him spinning in the present like the pine needle on the surface of the pasta water. He felt the nanoseconds.

Evening. The tent walls hung close. He heard the voices by the fire. His clothes and the sleeping bag felt tacky and damp. Rocks gouged his side and his hips, and the wall of the tent pressed against his feet; by invisible increments he was undeniably sliding toward the tent flap. The beer-smelling Gore-Tex and insect repellent worried his nerves at all times. The repellent felt like gasoline on the skin. He thought of the lonely places that awaited him, the fire circle, the path between the showers and the barracks, the bright burning wastes of the sports fields where the grass dried in the baking heat. An exile that hurt so badly but could not be understood from without, even by himself, when he thought back on it from someplace or sometime else. Inside the barracks the smell of cedar, itchy army blankets and thin mattresses unrolled on sagging metal chains. Mesh on windows without shades or curtains. Blaring music that was not of his choosing, en masse toothbrushing in cement-floor bathrooms, standing in damp flip-flops that his mother had bought at the beginning of the summer and checked off a typed checklist. Fluttering coma of moths around a bare bulb. Supposed to be teaching kids to swim. Supposed to be administering candylines and bug juice. And the whole time feeling every pound of saltwater inside him and drowning in it.

He stood in the circle of tents in the dark of the middle of the night, alone. Someone snored. The darkness seemed to move. Rocks did curvets like black horses down into the gorge. He knelt on the lichen before the gorge. His father was Harvard and merchant marine and doctor and man. He felt for his father in the rocks and looked for him in the tree where the cold lantern hung.

In the morning the breasts approached again.

“Are you sick?” she asked. She made a ponytail of her dark brown hair. He looked into her loose sweatshirt at her tits.

Everything worried him like a bad condition of the air.

“I get depressed,” he said. “I’m not always like this, but I’m like this now.”

“Oh, you’re all right,” she said, and watched him for a little bit. “Wow, you really are depressed, huh?”

“I can’t explain,” he said.
Quoting the Who. Ha ha ha.
“I’m an anachronism.”

“You’re a deep kid, aren’t you, honey,” she said.

“It’s like there’s an evil hypnotist in control of me,” he said.

“Huh! Have you been hypnotized?”

“No. I mean a hypnotist makes you feel things that don’t make any sense.” He had other theories but that was all he dared to say. He’d read parts of medical textbooks because he worried about his brain. He’d also read Viktor E. Frankl’s book on existential logotherapy to try to cure his blushing. He tried to thrust his red face out brazenly as Viktor E. Frankl would have instructed. It helped a little.

The girl brandished a wooden spoon at him. “Rrrrrr, I’m a killer,” she said. “Just kidding. Come on, help me make breakfast.”

Before the talent show, he saw her change her clothes. She pulled her skirt down and stood before him in black tights. She caught him looking and looked down at herself. The crotch was swollen but not like a man’s. Her belly was flat, a smooth clean sweep from up beneath her red chamois shirt all the way down between her legs. She pulled on her jeans and zipped them without turning away from him and her fingernails scratched on the denim as she buttoned the pants. Her breasts jutted before her like sister stemheads on a pair of boats.

They thought he was funny because he couldn’t shit and he did stand-up about the rocks up his ass with a loop of toilet paper sashed over his shoulder like he was mayor of Turdsville. Which he had anointed himself.

But in the evening in the field behind the pool where dandelion tufts floated like fireflies drunk on nectar, she said, “You’re beautiful. I’m sure you know that.”

It remained a remote possibility that something could happen with a girl that summer: the thought returned. The sports counselor taught him how to drink beer in a parking lot. He coached him to “double-swallow.” He was good like that, that kid, he understood the in-between steps. Taught Leo finally how to shoot a basketball, too: “Just wave good-bye.” They played basketball with the hoop in the pool and Leo didn’t need anybody to teach him to swim. He was a born porpoise because his father was the keeper of the Eddystone Light and he married a mermaid one fine night. The kid said, “If I could just get you on a basketball court on dry land, you bastard.” The kid did tricks with his scrotum—could make his balls click, or seem to, and could empty his sack—stuffed his balls up their canals or something and made them really disappear and flapped his empty scrotum around like an empty coin purse. Said Leo should get started fucking girls, God bless him.

“You’re beautiful,” she’d said, “I’m sure you know that.” Even pretty girls liked him sometimes. There was that girl Kathy Main at school who people said liked him.

The darkness lifted with the little crumbs of love he got with his jester act and he thought he might even lay his eyes on his very own “naked lady” that summer—it was a little like that dream he’d once had where some fuzzy little creatures had opened a window for him (a literal one with panes and sashes), opened it on the harmony of the universe, and he believed, he believed, all he wished for could be true.

But he was just a jester, just the mayor of Turdsville, and she had a boyfriend to whom she gave a blow job in the first-aid closet at the pool and she showed up to a meeting with come in her hair, which was much talked about for the rest of the summer.

At least the darkness had gone. Just as easy as waving good-bye.

In the fall, Mack started at the junior high and he brought a girl home with him on the first day. She was kind of cute, with cheeks still round with baby fat and braces, and a freckle on her nose. Mack brought her upstairs to his room, and they closed the door and didn’t open it for hours. Leo wondered what of a sexual nature could go on in that time capsule Mack called a bedroom, with the same football posters and dwarven bookshelves, and buckets of toys that had been there since the third grade. Leo wondered, too, why his own room was so virginal a place, with its austere grown-up desk and ink blotter and black-humored comic strips tacked to the wall. One of the clippings was a photo of Woody Allen with the caption, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it through not dying,” and another was a
Bloom County
strip with a guy worrying about getting run over by a bus or catching AIDS from a dirty soup spoon. He had a poster of Einstein next to the strips. He wondered why he had a framed Philippe Halsman portrait of Einstein on his wall but had never had a girl on his bed.

He wondered and worried and wondered while he sat in his history class, and pretended not to look in the direction of Michelle Katz. She played field hockey, might have even been the captain of the team, and she made all the posters for the theater department and the art for the school newspaper—a girl with a mannish love of being the best, and yet soft and feminine in her body, and she sat at her desk with her head slightly lowered. She won all those things and said straight out: no way would she let anyone beat her at art or on a hockey field. And yet at the awards ceremony last year when she’d won the freshman-sophomore art prize, she’d come up onstage with red ears and head slightly lowered and took the certificate with a somewhat childlike expression of surprise and gratitude, as though however much she’d coveted and anticipated the prize, she was not thoroughly convinced she really deserved it. She was soft when she looked at him, and he wondered if that soft look was just for him or if she gave it to everyone. She was
popular
.

She looked up at him.

Fool!
Could his smile have looked as tense and awkward as it had felt? No, not possibly so bad. Maybe she couldn’t tell. Still, you had to consider it in contrast to her ex-boyfriend, Josh Helpern. Was he tense and bad by contrast with the Helpern kid, an older male whose self-assurance was presumably the template by which Michelle judged potential successors? Of course he looked bad by comparison with Josh! Look at her, gone cold now. Her initial gesture of friendliness was already being reconsidered and withdrawn. She could smell his fear. Like a dog. Though he was in fact incredibly brave and stout of heart, this he knew! He was a hero in a wind-shot sea! Sometimes he was. Maybe it had been fear, then, of a temporary nature. People don’t like to be around that, the camp sports counselor had said, the one who taught him how to shoot a basketball and drink a beer. And they don’t like to hear you’re depressed. You’re making me depressed, the sports counselor would say. Don’t show that, the sports counselor said. Don’t be yourself, then, the sports counselor said. Or were the drops of dried semen in his boxers perhaps subliminally detectable to human smell? Or the sweat in his boxers from having done it after his shower? (He’d been late to school because of it.) His mind was a stockade that ridiculed him with paranoia:
She thinks you’re a freak! She knows you’re a pervert!
But maybe he did better than he thought. Or maybe every girl, every person for that matter, could see his nervousness right there in plain sight, and something that might have gone well went instead, each time, badly, or did not happen at all. Like at the camp. Maybe endowments meant nothing next to self-confidence. Someday he’d go to Yale, where people would be sensitive and thoughtful, and wouldn’t judge others superficially. Was he a narcissist? The horror of it. Someone had called him a narcissist once, a girl who liked him whom he didn’t like back. You must like narcissists, then, he’d said. What exactly was narcissism? He had seen it in Viktor E. Frankl’s book. God, that blushing. Was he blushing even now? Damn the corpuscles, full shame ahead. God, his blushing would ruin him. Then all those people like Josh Helpern would go around feeling sorry for him. Probably, they already did.
No, you don’t feel sorry for me, I feel sorry for you,
see!
But every year the record of all his accomplishments, which couldn’t even show all he was capable of, that record was over and over wiped clean, every summer in fact, when people just took him in their eyes for a second and shrugged, said “prove it” and—