The Boys of My Youth (13 page)

The first call comes at four o’clock. I’m reading on the bench in the kitchen, one foot on a sleeping dog’s back. It’s Mary,
calling from work. There’s been some kind of disturbance in the building, a rumor that Dwight was shot; cops are running through
the halls carrying rifles. They’re evacuating the building and she’s coming over.

Dwight, a tall likable oddball who cut off his ponytail when they made him chair of the department. Greets everyone with a
famous booming hello in the morning, studies plasma, just like Chris and Bob. Chris lives two and half blocks from the physics
building; he’ll be home by now if they’ve evacuated. I dial his house and his mother answers. She tells me that Chris won’t
be home until five o’clock, and then they’re going to a play. Ulrike, her daughter-in-law, is coming back from a trip to Chicago
and will join them. She wants to know why I’m looking for Chris; isn’t he where I am?

No, I’m at home and I just had to ask him something. Could he please call me when he comes in.

She tells me that Chris showed her a drawing I made of him sitting at his desk behind a stack of manuscripts. She’s so pleased
to meet Chris’s friends, and the Midwest is lovely, really, except it’s very brown, isn’t it?

It
is
very brown. We hang up.

The Midwest is very brown. The phone rings. It’s a physicist. His wife, a friend of mine, is on the extension. Well, he’s
not sure, but it’s possible that I should brace myself for bad news. I’ve already heard, I tell him, something happened to
Dwight. There’s a long pause and then his wife says, Jo Ann. It’s possible that Chris was involved.

I think she means Chris shot Dwight. No, she says gently, killed too.

Mary is here. I tell them not to worry and hang up. I have two cigarettes going. Mary takes one and smokes it. She’s not looking
at me. I tell her about the phone call.

“They’re out of it,” I say. “They thought Chris was involved.”

She repeats what they said: I think you should brace yourself for bad news. Pours whiskey in a coffee cup.

For a few minutes I can’t sit down, I can’t stand up. I can only smoke. The phone rings. Another physicist tells me there’s
some bad news. He mentions Chris and Bob and I tell him I don’t want to talk right now. He says okay but to be prepared because
it’s going to be on the news any minute. It’s 4:45.

“Now they’re trying to stir Bob into the stew,” I tell Mary. She nods; she’s heard this, too. I have the distinct feeling
there is something going on that I can either understand or not understand. There’s a choice to be made.

“I don’t understand,” I tell Mary.

We sit in the darkening living room, smoking and sipping our cups of whiskey. Inside my head I keep thinking
Uh-oh
, over and over. I’m in a rattled condition; I can’t calm down and figure this out.

“I think we should brace ourselves in case something bad has happened,” I say to Mary. She nods. “Just in case. It won’t hurt
to be braced.” She nods again. I realize that I don’t know what
braced
means. You hear it all the time but that doesn’t mean it makes sense. Whiskey is supposed to be bracing but what it is is
awful. I want either tea or beer, no whiskey. Mary nods and heads into the kitchen.

Within an hour there are seven women in the dim living room, sitting. Switching back and forth between CNN and the special
reports by the local news. There is something terrifying about the quality of the light and the way voices are echoing in
the room. The phone never stops ringing, ever since the story hit the national news. Physics, University of Iowa, dead people.
Names not yet released. Everyone I’ve ever known is checking in to see if I’m still alive. California calls, New York calls,
Florida calls, Ohio calls twice. All the guests at a party my husband is having call, one after the other, to ask how I’m
doing. Each time, fifty times, I think it might be Chris and then it isn’t.

It occurs to me once that I could call his house and talk to him directly, find out exactly what happened. Fear that his
mother would answer prevents me from doing it. By this time I am getting reconciled to the fact that Shan, Gang Lu, and Dwight
were killed. Also an administrator and her office assistant. The Channel 9 newslady keeps saying there are six dead and two
in critical condition. They’re not saying who did the shooting. The names will be released at nine o’clock. Eventually I sacrifice
all of them except Chris and Bob; they are the ones in critical condition, which is certainly not hopeless. At some point
I go into the study to get away from the terrible dimness in the living room, all those eyes, all that calmness in the face
of chaos. The collie tries to stand up but someone stops her with a handful of Fritos.

The study is small and cold after I shut the door, but more brightly lit than the living room. I can’t remember what anything
means. The phone rings and I pick up the extension and listen. My friend Michael is calling from Illinois for the second time.
He asks Shirley if I’m holding up okay. Shirley says it’s hard to tell. I go back into the living room.

The newslady breaks in at nine o’clock, and of course they drag it out as long as they can. I’ve already figured out that
if they go in alphabetical order Chris will come first. Goertz, Lu, Nicholson, Shan, Smith. His name will come on first. She
drones on, dead University of Iowa professors, lone gunman named Gang Lu.

Gang Lu. Lone gunman. Before I have a chance to absorb that she says, The dead are.

Chris’s picture.

Oh no, oh God. I lean against Mary’s chair and then leave the room abruptly. I have to stand in the bathroom for a while and
look at myself in the mirror. I’m still Jo Ann, white face and dark hair. I have earrings on, tiny wrenches that hang from
wires. In the living room she’s pronouncing all the other names. The two critically wounded are the administrator and
her assistant, Miya Sioson. The administrator is already dead for all practical purposes, although they won’t disconnect the
machines until the following afternoon. The student receptionist will survive but will never again be able to move more than
her head. She was in Gang Lu’s path and he shot her in the mouth and the bullet lodged in the top of her spine and not only
will she never dance again, she’ll never walk or write or spend a day alone. She got to keep her head but lost her body. The
final victim is Chris’s mother, who will weather it all with a dignified face and an erect spine, then return to Germany and
kill herself without further words or fanfare.

I tell the white face in the mirror that Gang Lu did this, wrecked everything and killed all those people. It seems as ludicrous
as everything else. I can’t get my mind to work right, I’m still operating on yesterday’s facts; today hasn’t jelled yet.
“It’s a good thing none of this happened,” I say to my face. A knock on the door and I open it.

The collie is swaying on her feet, toenails clenched to keep from sliding on the wood floor. Julene’s hesitant face. “She
wanted to come visit you,” she tells me. I bring her in and close the door. We sit by the tub. She lifts her long nose to
my face and I take her muzzle and we move through the gears slowly, first second third fourth, all the way through town, until
what happened has happened and we know it has happened. We return to the living room. The second wave of calls is starting
to come in, from those who just saw the faces on the news. Shirley screens. A knock comes on the door. Julene settles the
dog down again on her blanket. It’s the husband at the door, looking frantic. He hugs me hard but I’m made of cement, arms
stuck in a down position.

The women immediately clear out, taking their leave, looking at the floor. Suddenly it’s only me and him, sitting in our living
room on a Friday night, just like always. I realize it took
quite a bit of courage for him to come to the house when he did, facing all those women who think he’s the Antichrist. The
dogs are crowded against him on the couch and he’s wearing a shirt I’ve never seen before. He’s here to help me get through
this. Me. He knows how awful this must be. Awful. He knows how I felt about Chris. Past tense. I have to put my hands over
my face for a minute.

We sit silently in our living room. He watches the mute television screen and I watch him. The planes and ridges of his face
are more familiar to me than my own. I understand that he wishes even more than I do that he still loved me. When he looks
over at me, it’s with an expression I’ve seen before. It’s the way he looks at the dog on the blanket.

I get his coat and follow him out into the cold November night. There are stars and stars and stars. The sky is full of dead
men, drifting in the blackness like helium balloons. My mother floats past in a hospital gown, trailing tubes. I go back inside
where the heat is.

The house is empty and dim, full of dogs and cigarette butts. The collie has peed again. The television is flickering
Special Report
across the screen and I turn it off before the pictures appear. I bring blankets up, fresh and warm from the dryer.

After all the commotion the living room feels cavernous and dead. A branch scrapes against the house and for a brief instant
I feel a surge of hope. They might have come back. And I stand at the foot of the stairs staring up into the darkness, listening
for the sounds of their little squirrel feet. Silence. No matter how much you miss them. They never come back once they’re
gone.

I wake her up three times between midnight and dawn. She doesn’t usually sleep this soundly but all the chaos and company
in the house tonight have made her more tired than usual. The Lab wakes and drowsily begins licking her lower region. She
stops and stares at me, trying to make out my face in the dark, then gives up and sleeps. The brown dog is flat on her back
with her paws limp, wedged between me and the back of the couch.

I’ve propped myself so I’ll be able to see when dawn starts to arrive. For now there are still planets and stars. Above the
black branches of a maple is the dog star, Sirius, my personal favorite. The dusty rings of Saturn. Io, Jupiter’s moon.

When I think I can’t bear it for one more minute I reach down and nudge her gently with my dog-arm. She rises slowly, faltering,
and stands over me in the darkness. My peer, my colleague. In a few hours the world will resume itself, but for now we’re
in a pocket of silence. We’re in the plasmapause, a place of equilibrium, where the forces of the Earth meet the forces of
the sun. I imagine it as a place of silence, where the particles of dust stop spinning and hang motionless in deep space.

Around my neck is the stone he brought me from Poland. I hold it out.
Like this?
I ask. Shards of fly wings, suspended in amber.

Exactly
, he says.

A
t age three, my most successful
relationship was with Hal, a boy doll. He had molded brown hair, a smiling vinyl face, and two outfits. One was actually
his birthday suit, a stuffed body made of pink cloth with vinyl hands and feet attached. Clothes encumbered me; I liked the
feeling of air on skin, and when left alone for more than five minutes, I’d routinely strip us down to our most basic outfits
and we’d go outside to sit on the front stoop. Hal’s other outfit was a plaid flannel shirt with pearl buttons and yellow
pants with flannel cuffs. He had black feet molded in the shape of shoes.

The gorgeous thing about Hal was that not only was he my friend, he was also my slave. I made the majority of our decisions,
including the bathtub one, which in retrospect was the beginning of the end. Our bath routine was like this: My mother would
pick me up and stand me in the tub — I had fat,
willful legs, and I wouldn’t bend them while she was touching me — then while I was settling into the water and coordinating
the bathtub toys, she’d undress Hal and sit him down on the toilet tank to watch me.

“Tell Jo-Jo she is
not
to stand up in the tub,” she’d say to Hal, before leaving us to our own devices. I found it unnerving to have her speak directly
to him; didn’t she know he was a doll? Plus, Hal couldn’t stop me from doing anything. The moment she left I’d stand up and
sit back down whenever I felt like it. Hal’s job was to watch.

The bathtub toys were dull in an indestructible kind of way. You could drown them or bounce them off the ceiling and they
were still unbreakable plastic in primary colors. Hal, however, was both filthy and destructible; my mother had proved it
by trying to scour his head with an S.O.S. pad — he now had a small bald patch on the crown of his head, just like a real
guy.

I decided on impulse to bring Hal into the tub with me, just to see what would happen. First he floated, then when I pressed
on his stomach he submerged, smiling placidly. It was at that exact moment that the spark went out of him — he became waterlogged
in an unflattering way and all I could do was put him back up, dripping, on the toilet tank. He sat more slumpedly, and the
pink cloth of his stuffed body had a gray cast to it. Something had gone wrong with my experiment.