Pucker (6 page)

“Does it hurt?”

“Not right now.”

“It looks like Silly Putty.”

“Yup,” I said, for this was the truth and Patrick was the first one to speak it.

From that moment on we were inseparable.

 

Our first two years were relatively happy ones. My mother worked hard to shield me from her pain, and she
was
in pain without her Seerskin, bodily and emotional anguish. I loved her for pretending. For giving me those years of boyhood, for they were all I was going to get.

“We're alive, Thomas,” my mother would say to me while we chopped vegetables for dinner and listened to the radio. Sometimes the songs would make her sad. Then I knew she was missing my father. Other times they'd make her want to dance. She'd grab me and swing me wildly around the kitchen.

“What's happened to you?” I asked, for in Isaura she had paid no attention to me. None of the parents paid any attention to their children in Isaura.

“This world,” she said. “That's what happened to me. And to you too. Don't you feel it?”

I shrugged, unsure.

“We're living in a world that doesn't know its future. So there's wonder and mystery, pain and joy,” she said.

Pain, I understood. Joy was new to me.

She took me to movies, to concerts, to museums and plays. My favorite times were weekends. We'd just get in the car and go. No destination, just a glove compartment full of maps, a jug of Kool-Aid, and a box of Hostess cupcakes. We'd drive at night. Shadows were my friends. The smells were best then too, as if they sensed they were in danger of disappearing forever. The tar beneath our wheels still held the heat of the day and the vinyl backseats smelled faintly of old tobacco. I'd navigate, my small body hunched over in the seat, reading the map by penlight.
Go right, no, left!

Those weekends were wonderful, until we stopped for gas and the moment came for me to leave the front seat to buy chewing gum or use the bathroom. That meant leaving the secure world of me and my mother and entering a world in which I had no companions. The twenty feet to the service station store felt like twenty miles. By the time I got back to the car, I was straitjacketed in shame.

 

When I turned eleven, everything abruptly changed. My mother could no longer hide what was happening from me. She began to receive visions at all times of the night and day. She couldn't be within twenty feet of the door or she was assaulted by the future. She saw everything that would befall everybody with no discrimination. Random people: the kid riding by on his bike, the teenager throwing the newspaper, every passenger of every car. She even saw the futures of animals—moles, gophers, cats, dogs, doves, owls—for they had futures just as we did, only less complicated. Their concerns and dilemmas? Would they get a scratch behind the ears or nothing? Would their owners come home in time to let them out or would they piddle on the floor? My mother could see the answers to all these questions, and so she stayed in the back of the house, buffered by the thick plaster walls and by me.

SIX

I
DRIVE THROUGH THE STREETS unsteadily that morning, weaving my motorcycle in and out of traffic. I pull up in front of Patrick's, my tires squealing. He's sitting on the front steps in his usual uniform, a white T-shirt and camouflage pants. He's still shorter than me by about three inches, maybe five-ten, but we have completely different body types. I'm tall and what you would call rangy. John, my occupational therapist, tells me that well-developed shoulders will shift attention away from my face. I like to believe his lies.

Patrick is interested in nothing but bulk. He's a wrestler, 168 pounds. He still wears his hair the same way he did when he was seven: in a buzz cut. He's an awesome drummer and my best friend, even after all these years.

He raises his eyebrows at me. “You're late.”

“Thanks for the news flash,” I say, and toss him my extra helmet.

I have ridden Patrick to school on the back of my motorcycle every day for the last year, since I got my license. If you were to ask him why he prefers to be a passenger on my bike rather than drive his own car, I'm not sure what he'd say. Probably something about getting to school faster, running red lights, that sort of thing. For me it's one word—freedom. From the neck down I have a perfectly normal body, and when I'm on my motorcycle, nobody knows about my face. I'm just another anonymous human being, a pair of legs and boots, a torso and tanned forearms.

Patrick tosses the helmet back to me as a car pulls up to the curb. Meg Greer—Patrick's new girlfriend of one week—sits behind the wheel of an Outback.

“Oh,” I say.

“Hi, Tom,” says Meg.

Nobody who knows me ever calls me Tom.

“He prefers Thomas,” says Patrick.

“Thomas, then,” says Meg. She's Irish. Lots of freckles, a nimbus of curly black hair, pale skin. She isn't being disingenuous. She's making an effort because I'm Patrick's best friend, but for some reason this annoys me.

“Can I get a ride after school?” Patrick asks, sliding into the passenger seat of Meg's car. He's trying to make it up to me.

I feel Meg's eyes on me even through my helmet. She can't help staring. I have a face that can give life. It reminds people of how fortunate they are. They can riff off my ugliness back into their own humanity. In other words, I startle them right back into their own skins.

I'm angry. Patrick should have called and told me not to come. I climb off the bike, open the pannier, and jam in the extra helmet. I slam the lid shut. “What time?”

“Five? After practice?” he says.

I shake my head. “Sorry.”

“I'll pick you up,” says Meg to Patrick.

“You do that,” I say, starting the bike.

SEVEN

T
HE DAY GOES STEADILY DOWNHILL from there. I can't stop thinking about my mother. I almost leave, but I haven't cut even one class in all three years of high school.

“Tunisia, Mr. Quicksilver. Would you do us the honor of locating it?”

Mr. Laird, my history teacher, stands at the front of the classroom, the map of the world (well, this world, anyway) to his left, a pointer in his right. It's our last week of classes before summer break, and Mr. Laird is unhappy in the way many high school teachers are: overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated. I've made the mistake of not turning in most of my homework assignments but still acing my exams. He stabs the pointer in my general direction, which means I am to come to him.

“Puckkkkerrrr . . .” somebody hisses from the front of the classroom.

Mr. Laird grimaces but says nothing. I can't read his face. I don't think he's upset on my behalf but on his own—that he has to continually endure these interruptions.

As I make my way to the front of the class, I accidentally brush the shoulder of Susie Egan. She recoils and then tries to hide it by dropping her pencil on the floor and bending to pick it up. I can smell her hair. She uses the same shampoo as me. This unexpected jolt of intimacy startles me. Unnerved and electrified, I stumble up the aisle. I quickly find Tunisia on the map and turn to go back to my seat.

“Not so fast, Mr. Quicksilver,” says Mr. Laird.

I hate it when teachers call you “Mr.”

“The motto of Florida?” he queries me.

“In God we trust,” I answer.

“Alaska?”

Ah, so this is the game. Public humiliation. “North to the future,” I say.

“Iowa?”

“Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.”

Mr. Laird is getting angry that he can't trip me up. I can't get the scent of Susie's shampoo out of my mind, or the fact that she's wearing white pants.

“Annapurna? Where is it?”

“Nepal, 26,041 feet.” He should know better than to ask me these sorts of questions. I have a near-photographic memory.

I have a hunch. Public humiliation is indeed coming, but not to me.

“Elbrus?” Mr. Laird asks.

“Russia, 18,841 feet.” I have to get back to my seat and warn her. The class is snickering. This could go on forever.

“Jungfrau?” I fire back at him.

Mr. Laird glares at me. I'm questioning
him
?

“Switzerland, 13,642 feet,” I answer before he has a chance to. “Jaya?” I demand.

“Watch it, Quicksilver,” Mr. Laird warns.

“Jaya?” I repeat. “How high?”

“In your seat,” Mr. Laird roars.

The classroom is silent. I walk back to my desk and sit down. “New Guinea, 16,500 feet,” I whisper. Two minutes later I try and pass Susie Egan a note. She won't accept it. She looks at it with disgust, as if I have attempted to give her a horse turd.

Unfortunately, Mr. Laird sees the note too. “Bring it up here,” he barks.

I have no choice.

Mr. Laird opens the note and reads it, his lips twitching, then he folds it up into fours and hands it back to me. He nods and gestures with his head toward Susie. So my note goes back to Susie Egan, who reads it quickly while the entire class watches. She asks to be excused.

And what does my note say? Well, that's private. Let's just say those white pants would have been ruined had she stayed in her seat a few moments longer.

It isn't the first time I've had a hunch. I often have them: many times they are wrong; some of the time they are accurate. I knew this isn't unusual, given that I come from a place where 10 percent of the population is Seers. There's a big difference between having the occasional hunch and being a Seer, however. I don't read anything into my hunches; I suspect they are nothing more than neural misfirings.

But back to Susie Egan. Some would say she deserves it. What sixteen-year-old girl dares to tempt fate by wearing white pants a day before her period is due? A girl like Susie Egan, of course, to whom everything has always come easy. But I have a responsibility. Besides, I know about such things as periods. I'm not squeamish. I don't have the kind of life that affords me time or room for being squeamish. I do, however, know about embarrassment. And as much as I may hate Susie Egan for being repulsed by me, neither do I wish on her humiliation.

EIGHT

I
STOP AT MCDONALD'S AFTER school. I have a battered copy of Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
in my hand. I never go anywhere without a book. That way I'm never alone.

There are two kids in front of me in line.

“Crispy,” one of them says on seeing me. He punches his buddy on the shoulder and giggles nervously. “You want fries with that?”

The other one, whose face is covered with acne, replies, “I'd like my burger well done, sir.”

“Let my people go,” I say.

They look at me with startled faces. What? The creature speaks?

I sigh. “The burning bush? The Red Sea parting?”

Dolts. The light slowly creeps back into their faces as if I've released them from a burden they no longer have to carry. Funny, this guy is funny? Of course they are immensely grateful, but they have no idea for what. They know only that something overly swollen has been punctured and now it's safe to breathe.

“You're all right, man,” the acned one says. He looks at me good-deedishly, as if I've been waiting all these years for him to bestow on me his blessing. I feel bad for him. He has angry red boils scattered over his cheeks, miniature mountains of pus lodged in the corners of his nose and lips. I know something he doesn't: the closer their experience is to mine, the meaner they get. Me and this zitty kid are family. Of course I could never suggest that. He would kill me. I shrug and step out of line. I no longer have an appetite.

When I was young, I was ugly, but I still had youth on my side: my limbs were plump and rounded; I had baby teeth like everyone else. I was precocious and brave, wise beyond my years. I was the sad, cute burned boy. Those years are gone. Now, in place of the compassion, I see mostly revulsion and fear. A burned boy grows up into a burned teenager with size-twelve feet. He does not get more endearing. He simply takes up more space.

NINE

W
HEN I GET HOME, JOE COSTANZA, one of my mother's regulars, is leaving. We meet on the stairs. He looks shaken. I know he's been asking my mother the big question: time of death. Only he didn't want the information for himself, but for his eight-year-old daughter, Audrey, who's been in and out of the hospital with some illness they haven't been able to diagnose yet.

My mother tried to dissuade him. For weeks she put him off, telling him no parent should be privy to this data. I guess he finally wore her down.

“Hey, Sport,” he says to me in a weak voice.

“Hi, Mr. Costanza.”

“I'm afraid our session took it out of your mother. It's good you're home,” he says.

I always wonder what my mother's clients make of her bedridden status. Does it make them uncomfortable to have some woman in a nightgown telling their fortunes, or does it somehow add to the authenticity of the experience?

“She's been under the weather,” I say. That's an understatement, but I know a minimizing of the situation is required.

He grips my shoulder once tightly and turns to go. He swivels around when he reaches the bottom stair. “She was right. I shouldn't have asked.”

“Probably.” What else can I say to him?

“I just—when do I tell my wife?” he asks me.

“Never!” I'm shocked that he's even contemplating this. “You asked the question. It's your responsibility to bear the answer.”