The Everborn (39 page)

“They
did
adopt him. You know, he was found in a homeless shelter four or five years ago and eventually a family took him in. He was thought to be autistic. His first foster parents were robbed and murdered; the police found him cowering in the guest room closet playing
Don’t Spill the Beans
in the dark. That’s what Brother and Sister BoLeve said. Someone else looked after him not long after that happened. I forgot if it was another couple or a school for boys, but the daughter of a Catholic woman was discovered in bed with electric drill holes in her throat. The boy was close to that family somehow, and the boy was fascinated with the woman’s husband, how he’d undergone an operation which left him with a hole in his throat so he could breath better after years of smoking.”

Eliza tossed down her cigarette and crushed it beneath a heel in disgust “What, they think the boy did it?”

Malmey shifted and took another drag. “It was a mystery to everyone and they couldn’t prove anything anyway. The point is, no one wanted anything to do with the boy after that, until the BoLeves came along. They could’ve adopted any other child, but they were looking for a problem child they could rehabilitate and introduce to the Lord. You know how people in this church are. The spooky thing is, before they adopted him his personality changed. He went through all kinds of tests and by the time the BoLeves decided on taking him he was re-diagnosed as an average kid. His autism was choked out of him somehow. Everyone took it as a miracle and the BoLeves took it as a sign from God that their taking him was meant to be.”

“So how was he, I mean, at dinner the other night?”

“You know the swing set in my backyard? We went out to it and sat for a little while, he wanted to swing and I wanted to get away from the folks, and he bit me.”

“He bit you?”

“He bit me on the arm, left teeth marks. He told me he wanted to be a vampire and he grabbed my arm and bit me so hard it almost bled. Then he cursed and said,
“The little black boy won’t let me be a vampire, I’m supposed to be something else,”
then he paused and told me that raccoons rape cats when the cats venture into their territory. I didn’t eat much and went to bed before the BoLeves went home. This kid freaks me out. And this is his first day in
Children’s Study
and
he’s in my class.”

“I hope it works out,” Eliza told her, deathly concerned. “What’s his name again?”

“His name’s Simon.”

***

The young boy went through the motions of bidding the mid-forties couple a prompt farewell as he retreated from the outside walkway and through the beige metal double doors of an entranceway leading into the ground floor of the
Church of the Divine Jesus Christ.
The couple then went their own way together, scanning the building down the walkway in thoughtful concern for their newly adopted son.

Brother and Sister BoLeve had faith in their Simon, a skeptical faith watered down by a methodical conviction that things would work out just fine. More importantly, they had faith in God, and as far as Simon went, any one person with faith as petty as a hole in one's pants pocket was capable of not only mending the threads but placing in that pocket a rare wallet carrying a gold card with enough credit to move mountains. The BoLeves believed in that, they believed in God, and they learned to believe in Simon.

The BoLeves were simple and responsible. They mortgaged a clean and proper home for themselves, virtually debt free, meditated on God’s Holy Word and otherwise exclusively on the publishings of the
Church
. Clinging steadfast to the
Church’s
ways, which demanded a strict separation from the ways of the wicked world, they did not watch television, did not celebrate holidays save birthdays, entertained themselves with board games and with music purchased only at the
Church
consisting of cassette tape recordings of hymns sung by the congregation itself at five dollars a pop.

If there was ever a couple to rear a child in a way right and just, it was a couple that served the Lord as devoutly as a
Divine Jesus Christ
couple, for sure. The BoLeves were a mixture of Polish and Irish, converted to the
Church
four years ago after their third miscarriage and after Brother BoLeve’s son from a previous marriage disowned his father to join the road crew for Alice Cooper.

But things were all right now and in retrospect, everything was meant to be.

The
Church
was how
they
handled things meant to be.

***

Simon handled
things meant to be
quite differently from the ways of his new parents, from those who claimed him before, from those even before them who gave him his first name after a nameless and homeless woman who claimed to be his mother expired in her sleep and rendered him at the mercy of State authorities.

He’d been through a tumultuous succession of ordeals for a boy of nine years, and he likewise had positioned others against successions of ordeals to spite his diverse abhorrent traumas. For someone so young, he was aware of the give-and-take of consequence, of
doing unto others as others have done to you
, regardless of who gets it in the end, as long as it wasn’t always
him
.

As of then, Simon did not know who or what he was, nor had any notion of the events of the first few years of his life. His only sense of self-worth lay in the confused selfishness of his endeavors to realize it, to find it and to find himself, and to try his goddamn hardest to mock the world as surely as it seemed very clearly to mock him.

Life for him never appeared to be the way life was for anyone else.

If he only knew how he came to be this way, of the answers to the riddle of his own existence, he might rediscover peace in the knowledge that it wasn’t all his fault. We all make our own decisions, yes, we make our own choices, but in the end we all have inherited countless pieces of somebody else’s pie, which amounts to who we came to be and to why we did the things we’ve done. Simon was merely a complex work-in-progress, a thousand components of an erector set still under construction by a power that was beyond him with a blue print in mind.

And this power
wasn’t
the power of
God
....

***

Simon BoLeve was escorted down the carpeted corridor by an indomitable Chinese woman five times his age, past on occasional child or children younger than he scampering about playfully until the Chinese woman barked a command for them to disperse to their classes. She led Simon past several doors both open and shut, the shut ones either silent or permeating with muffled voices, the open ones disclosing a room of children or teens or darkened rooms empty but for shadows of rows of metal folding chairs. Simon was at once curiously aware of how, while in passing, the younger groups of kids required more time for the teachers to tame than the older, for the older teens’ rooms were ordered and quiet as the younger kids were still running around being rounded up. Simon figured that this was because the older kids
knew
what they were there for, and were bored with it, while the younger children didn’t yet know what their parents had gotten them into.

The Chinese woman and Simon rounded a corner to yet another endless corridor, and upon doing so Simon spied a sign baring a white and blue plastic generic imprint of a stick-figure man upon one of the doors. He was led several doors past it, until something caused him to glance back in its direction and halt momentarily. It was as commonly simple as an abrupt, premonitional impulse. But whenever he’d known himself to experience this particular impulse, it would always mean that what he would see when he turned around was...

...was...

...was the little black boy.

For each time this sort of premonition took place in an average nine-year-old’s life, for each time any single child had looked over its shoulder because it was afraid of the dark or fearfully apprehensive that the bully or abusive stepfather or that horrible unknown thing was swiftly gaining ground as he or she fled from it in the waking world or while asleep, Simon always found the little black boy there. Somewhere, there, beyond the efforts of his reach to find him, to touch him, to discover whether or not that little boy was real.

No one else ever saw him and Simon had grown weary of asking around. No one ever believed him, of how the little black boy would oftentimes come to him in a daydream or at night while in restless slumber and tantalize him with suggestive proposals and dares, mischievous dares, atrocious dares, subliminal manipulations when he was most susceptible and easiest to persuade. If that wasn’t enough, Simon would at times awaken to find manifested at his bedside the tools with which to oblige those dares.

Along with the motivation.

While
the Devil
made other people
do it
, to Simon it was the little black boy.

And, over a few years’ time, he realized the necessity to keep it all a secret. It was best that way. Because no one ever believed him.

When Simon glanced back, he found the boy there, down the hall, at the bend where he’d turned the corner with the Chinese woman and was led past the boy’s restroom door. The little black boy was standing still as clear as the outside day, wearing a t-shirt of red and white stripes over a mild brown pair of corduroy-type trousers, both three times over his size, and dirty-white tennis shoes garnished with soiled shoelace loops long enough to evoke a fall if the pant legs didn’t do it first.

The boy stood dead center upon the white-colored shag carpeting of that semi-far section of hallway behind, facing Simon, staring upon him with fixed eyes and eyebrows lifted devilishly about the edges, smiling at him with two rows of impossibly revealed teeth encompassed by windshield-wiper rubber lips. His presence there appeared to be disproportionate and vague, almost plastic, nearly dreamlike, as if the
way
he appeared was merely an
interpretation
of another side of him that had once perhaps been physical.

The sight of him vanished when the boy himself turned to the door with the generic stick-man and escaped towards it and into it, rendering the hallway empty and bare where not even the voices of the inner classrooms could be heard.

Another opportunity arose for Simon to confront the little bastard. He made a mad dash for the restroom door where the boy disappeared through, careful firstly to excuse himself from the company of the Chinese woman with a desperate plea to drain his bladder. She in turn directed him to the location of his
Children’s Study
classroom which lay two more doors further to the left, then she continued onwards without him.

Simon raced back, right straight up to the door of the blue and white man-sign, pushed it open, and moved inside.

At the far end of the boy’s restroom, the metal door of the handicapped stall swung shut and bounced against its frame. Simon went for that door, past a wash basin and two urinals and the only other stall, slamming the stall door’s backside against the tiled wall as he entered.

***

....and the voice
said
, in a childlike frailty with an accentuated sinister hush behind its vain innocence:

“Do you really want to find me, Simon, as I find you? Do you
reeeeeally?”

“Yes,” Simon said to the voice, his gaze darting in rapid surveillance. “Show yourself!”

“I show myself the way I
need
to. I show myself in dreams, in my whispers, too close for you to see me and to far away to catch when you do. But don’t worry, Simon. Our Beloved One needs your help and she will clear things up personally with you reeeeal soon.”

Simon found himself speaking to the stall’s metal door now; the voice seemed to be coming from behind it. “Who is ‘Our Beloved One’? What are you talking about?”

“I’ll be told everything?” Simon asked, his heart pounding, his impulses throwing him forward to re-open the stall door and when he did, no one was there on the other side. “Will I really?”

“
Reeeeeeally,”
said the voice, growing ghostly distant, leaving behind an audible trail of fading retreat towards the restroom door and then silencing.

***

Today’s edition of
Children’s Study
for all the kids in the (loosely) eight-to-ten age bracket was to take up more than two hours’ time and Simon was informed of this beforehand. On any other day it would have mattered to him, but without realizing it he’d become entangled in the distracting newness of the experience, in sharing the company of so many vibrant children he’d never met before in the strangest of churches. Time didn’t seem to matter. He found himself thrilled to be a part of it all, part of them and he was thrilled by what he intended to do to them. All of them.

None of them would know what hit them until it was too late, and any adults smart enough to catch on to the possible cause of it all would never figure out how they owed everything to
Simon
, one of four newcomers to the church and a poor little feel-sorry-for-him
adopted
boy besides, regardless of what anyone had heard concerning his questionable past.