Time of the Locust (4 page)

Night

S
ephiri awoke. He could hear the wail of a cargo train whistle in the night and the rhythm of its movement over the tracks. Hypnotic. Predictable. Soothing. He rolled over without opening his eyes and listened for something breathing, for he wanted to be certain that there was no creature hiding under the bed. Satisfied that he was safe, he opened his eyes and turned over onto his side and was startled by an ice-cold patch on the sheet. He had wet himself again. He tried to think about the steps. But he sometimes got it mixed up. Even after all this time, it was still like a puzzle: release, find toilet, urge. Or was it urge, find toilet, release? These were the kinds of things that didn't order themselves, that did not have a place. They weren't like the blocks or the green apples down the aisle. The steps couldn't be touched. They couldn't be handled. They weren't like the medicine cabinet.

The train horn sounded again, and Sephiri sat up. The train was going to the edges of green mountains, snaking through the plains of tall grass and brush, sliding by mirrored lakes. Sephiri stood up. There was position and sanctity at stake. There were things that needed his help, his facilitation in getting them back to where they needed to be in the world. The sodiums and the phosphates. The melons and the apples. The jars in the pantry. If he couldn't keep them in order, he worried that he wouldn't be able to manage the order of anything else. The things he could grasp and handle, at least. The rest was enigma. He took a step forward and smelled his reek, felt the clamminess of his wet pajamas against his skin. Should he try to change his clothes? He remembered then that there was a different lock on the medicine cabinet. Something shiny. He noticed it yesterday morning as his mother held him still and brushed his teeth in the mirror. There was something with a big ring and a black wheel with numbers on the front, stabbed into something on the side. He remembered watching his mother spin that wheel thing. Was that how it worked? He hadn't been able to concentrate with the fluoride froth in his mouth and the sound of the water running down the sink hole he wanted to explore. He was too distracted by the bottle of mouthwash and its emerald majesty, its greenish gleam against the white porcelain.

He regretted all of that now. He could feel the tension rising in his head, the nausea in his stomach. He spun around until he was dizzy enough to calm down. He would have to pay close attention the next time. He would concentrate on the wheel and what was to be done with it. He would make sure to understand.

Sephiri padded out to the dimly lit hallway. Silence. He liked it when the house was asleep, when all things were motionless with the night. He could enjoy the stillness of things that understood their place when it was not day. At night, there were fewer sights and sounds to take in. But he always found it difficult to sleep, and for as long as he could remember, the Land of Air filled him with so much when he was awake that when he tried to sleep, he could not hold it all. It overflowed and spilled out, and then he had to get up and find a way to clear and reorder his mind. He thought about his mother's perfume bottles, amber everlasting. They were in her room, on the dresser, which was their correct plain of existence, and he headed toward his mother's door. Not so long ago, he held them, caressed them, looked into their incandescent light in the rays of so many dawns. He lined them up along the dresser, atop the white lace, and lined them up again. The last time he was in his mother's room, he thought to check if the amber was the same color as her skin. But in the moonlight coming through the windows, he could not be sure.

So on that other night, Sephiri went over to his mother's bed. He stood over her as she slept and struggled to see her eyebrows, the rounded chin, the twin pillows of her cheeks, the markers he had memorized. He was about to put the perfume bottle on the little soft mound of one of her cheeks, to match the color, as one might match paint to a section of canvas. But his mother woke up wide-eyed, and her face had shifted into something. He thought it looked something like the look she had when he mixed up the steps and urinated on the carpet. Or the times he wanted to feel physics by tossing ceramic plates across the room. But he couldn't be sure.

And he couldn't tell if the look meant something bad or something good. It made him sad that he didn't understand the faces the people made in the Land of Air. He wanted to feel good when he was with his mother, like the feeling he had when he was eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Satisfaction and bliss. He wanted to crawl inside the quiet she always seemed to have at the kitchen table, the humming sound she made when he sat in the tub as she washed him. The humming sound took away the feeling of touch. It gave the soap and water frequency and order. He wanted to find a way to conjure the seconds of that warm sun feeling that sometimes moved through him when she held him on her lap. When he could keep still. When he was able to block everything else out and let the warmth sheath him like a blanket. But he didn't know how. They spoke different languages, he and his mother. And sometimes when he thought of this unfortunate situation, it made him want to cry.

Sephiri took a few more steps in the dim hallway and looked down at the patterns in the Persian rug runner to make sure that they were where he had left them. He thought of that time he had hidden in the crook of a tree trunk in the woods of a park for a few hours. He needed to get away from the playground confusion, from the moving colors and the talking sounds. When his mother came with the men and the dogs to find him, he was counting the grooves in the wood and the termites. Someone pulled him out, and he screamed and kicked and rolled on the ground to tell them he wanted to stay there.

After that, there were special meetings at the Autism Center, more talking. There was that Dr. Watson lady who spoke more to him while he colored. Requests to draw pictures. Requests to listen to sounds. To look at something. To listen to something. To touch swatches of brown fur and palm bunches of white cotton. There were pictures held up to him: butterflies, oranges, balls, chickens, rabbits. He banged his forehead on the table when he tired of the exercises. They tried to stop him but he banged anyway. Then he picked up the chair and threw it to make his point. He screeched and flailed. He jumped up and down. When that wasn't comprehended, he stood immobile, statue-like, to get them to stop the chaos of the Land of Air.

In the hallway, Sephiri paused at his mother's bedroom door and walked on. He would leave the perfume bottles for now. He would not risk changing his sleeping mother's face. His reek grew stronger and wafted up his legs, past his big-boy spot, where it was the most pungent. It filled his nose and the air around him. To distract himself from the smell, he thought of the grandfather clock at the end of the hallway just before the stairs and moved toward it. He loved to watch the pendulum swing and listen to the
tick tock tick tock
in the quiet of the night. The
tick
s and
tock
s knew their order. They understood their place. He pressed his ear to its mechanics, its genius and symmetry. The sound was like his favorite shape: a cube. A shape of perfection, with its height width depth balanced against itself, whole and complete. Like the night in the coat closet. When he was able to enter and close the door, before his mother could catch him, he was encased. He was protected by the sublimity of height width depth. That was how everything should be.

When he had his fill of flawlessness, Sephiri turned from the clock and went to the stairs. One, two, three, four . . . He walked back up to the top to enjoy the start of the count, the repetition, the timing. Five, six, seven . . . It was then that the place he'd drawn on the piece of construction paper reappeared in his mind, the giant box like the coat closet. The flying creatures had been there, too, swarming in the sky above it. And there was the matter of the voice he'd heard that day. If he went back inside the coat closet, would he hear the voice again? Would he have more time to figure out whether the voice was really there and whether the voice knew anything about the place he drew in the picture? Maybe if he got close enough to it, he'd be able to understand. “Come here,” the voice had said. What did that mean?

Air had limitations. Like the frozen things in the refrigerator that were too hard and stuck together to take apart. The extra peanut butter he wanted but couldn't have. The milk he wasn't allowed to drink because of the craze that came over him when he did so. The dancing blue flame that lived on top of the kitchen stove he was not permitted to touch, to play with. The static in the television he couldn't pick up and hold (the screen kept getting in the way). Then there was the matter of the holes that he would never be able to explore because they were too small to fit him: the garbage disposal, the sink drain, the washing machine, that tunnel at the bottom of the toilet bowl, the air-duct vent, the little place where the pencils went into the sharpener. And worst of all, the locks on the medicine cabinet that kept trying to stop him from rescuing the boxes. There was always something standing in his way in the Land of Air. And now there was this voice in the clutter of this world to also decipher.

Sephiri finished with the step counting and headed downstairs to the living room. A nightlight extended from an electrical socket. It looked like the flashlight of the anglerfish in the depths of Water, only dimmer. The curtains were drawn like huge blankets over the windows. He avoided the sofa, because to sit on it was to be enveloped, pulled down to the unknown depths of its brownish bulkiness to be caught by some long-fingered monster that lived inside. The man called Manden sat on the sofa a few times, and the sofa never got him. Nor did it ever bother his mother. Why? Sephiri wondered.

He didn't linger on the thought, because now the green carpet looked different without the lights on. He became frightened, and in his excitement, he couldn't remember where the light switch was. It wasn't the dark that worried him. It was the fear that something was different in the dark. In his mind, day things needed to stay day things and not change in the night. They ought not try to become something else. Without the lights, he couldn't see the legions of carpet fibers waving, a comforting reminder of the seaweed that grew where his friends lived.

In the dark, the carpet looked like that enormous bog with the bestial amphibians—just like the ones in his picture books—waiting in the murk to grab him, beings that didn't seem to belong to the Land of Air or the World of Water. In those first minutes when he was climbing into his boat to sail away from his troubles, they would watch him float off with ominous eyes. “Where do you think you're going?” the cricket frogs would say. The mudpuppies and hellbender salamanders crowded around his boat, staring and hissing, so that his departure was slowed for having to shoo them out of the way. The newts and the dart frogs sat around smirking and laughing, and he could hear them for several hundred feet. Amphibians were ambiguous, Sephiri thought, shaking his head. Traitorous. Whose side were they on, anyway? His Water friends? The Air people? He had never been able to figure it out.

But he had to be brave this time in the living room. He had to remember that this was the carpet, even in the night. It was his mother's carpet, where he shouldn't have an “accident.” To get to the cube-shaped black, he would have to overcome his fear and keep moving. He scaled the streaks along the wall cast by the nightlight, past the blankets in the windows and the boy-eating sofa, until he reached the coat closet by the front door. It was not locked, to his delight. There was a pile of coats and sweaters on the floor that had been there since the morning he'd lunged inside and pulled them from their hangers. He went in and closed the door behind him.

The darkness was complete, compressed. A safe dark. He sat on the heap of clothes cross-legged, listening to his heart beat. He thought of all the times when his mother would hold him to her cushiony chest, with her big legs hanging out of the open door, him kicking at the tops of her knees and shins with the heels of his feet. She would not let him go. He would get tired of screaming and struggling and grow quiet enough to hear the clouds move across the sky. In that kind of quiet, sometimes his mother would begin to cry. He knew that one thing for sure (what crying was and what it sounded like). He would rise and fall with the heaves of her great chest and listen to her sniffle. He never wanted her to cry, but he didn't know how to get her to stop. “It's OK,” he wanted to say.

One of Sephiri's legs was going numb, and he shifted position. He listened to the roof rafters and the floorboards creak. And then he felt the tight space widen around him. The walls, floor, and ceiling seemed to rise higher and away from him. He lost the close-up sense his breathing had before. It was no longer the pressed-­together sound he was used to, like when his mother cornered him there and they both panted in exhaustion on the floor. There was the sensation that height width depth had elongated, like a tunnel, pushing farther and farther out.

He held his breath in the thickening silence. Then, far off, he saw a sliver of light drip into the pitch black. It was a faint, fuzzy light, like the television static he had never been able to get in his hand. The blackness was widening and lengthening still, until he could no longer hear even his heartbeat. He had the urge to stand up and start walking, but he was too frightened. But he couldn't stay in the same place forever, could he? That's what the Great Octopus once said to him. He had to do something if he was ever going to find out about the light, about the voice.

There were a lot of things Sephiri wanted to know. For example, he wanted to know if he could will himself to shrink down to the size of ants and follow them down to their kingdom or if he could will himself to be so tall that he could have a look at what was inside the bird nests he saw at the tops of trees. Then there were the practical matters he wanted to know about. Where did music go when a radio was clicked off? Was it possible just to stay awake, to decide that no more sleep was ever needed, and to go about the night as he would the day? How could he save the things he had lined up and organized and delivered from disarray, from being sullied by the meddling hands of the world?