A Good and Happy Child (5 page)

The room, though dark, felt still and strangely vivid. Shadows leapt out at me in blue and pale shapes. The window seemed to grow in size. It was a giant luminous square, big as a movie screen that seemed to grow big-bellied and convex, as if it were pulsing toward me.

“Yes?” I answered.

Yes, yes, yes,
came the voice inside my head, almost exulting. A rush filled my ears. It was like a crowd roaring at a football game. I smiled. I felt I had answered a question correctly, and the boy on the branch seemed to smile, though his face was a blur. The bough bobbed with him on it.

What’s your name?
I asked him.

At this question I felt a sudden growl of anger and restlessness from the boy. I regretted asking; even felt a flash of fear. But the boy recovered, and answered sadly, so that my momentary worry turned to pity.
I don’t have one,
he said.

It was as if the boy did not even need to speak to communicate with me; we seemed to be using images, ideas. I asked him how he appeared there, and whether he was the same frightening figure that had come to the shower the night before. He answered that before, he had only been becoming aware of me.
How?
I asked.
I knew you could
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be my friend,
he answered simply. He told me he had only showed me part of himself, like an introduction. He told me how this was the better part, his favorite part, the whole. I knew what he meant. I knew then the boy would be my friend, and I resolved privately to call him that, to myself.

Suddenly, into my mind crawled a picture so vivid, I felt as if the floor had dropped out from under me: I was suspended. Not in air, not in water, but in something warm and buoyant, gray and thick, where I had complete movement of my limbs, and I could breathe freely. It was like hanging on a rope upside down with a blindfold on; I was not sure which direction “up” was. After a few seconds it became impossible to remember which direction “up” had ever been; after a minute, I stopped searching for “up” at all and simply realigned myself.
Like walking in a spaceship
in flight,
I thought.
That’s right,
came the answer with an appreciative laugh, and I laughed, too, happy at last to have a friend who got my jokes, my oddball comparisons. This thinking, so free and liquid and supple, was like something I had been hungering for. All my stilted conversation, my awkwardness with people, just disappeared. I was like an eel slithering in oil, quick as lightning and impossible to catch.
Yes, this is
the best,
I agreed.

I followed my Friend through this ether, neither aware nor caring where the “real” space of my bedroom had gone. Eventually, we came to a long, black shape, like a giant battleship seen from underneath.
What is that?
I asked.
That’s the earth.
I looked again. Notches appeared in the shape, like windows in a skyscraper, and the battleship grew and grew until it surrounded us. It was like swimming into a sunken vessel, a shipwreck, that was miles deep and miles across, silent, and black. I noticed that, every once in a while, one of the “windows” in the shipwreck would light up a pale yellow-white. Some of the windows were dim and pulsed only briefly; others kept beating like insistent hearts.
What are those?
I asked.

Those are Beacons.

I was puzzled.
What’s a Beacon?

A Beacon,
he said,
is anybody who is interesting.
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J u s t i n E v a n s

And who is interesting?
I asked, desperately hoping that I was one of those interesting people.

My Friend suddenly flooded my mind with that delicious oil slick of ideation that I was coming to crave.
Someone interesting is anyone who
takes an Interest.

An Interest! Interesting! It was like some crazy pun that I could not quite get, circling around in my head. I laughed a delighted, nervous laugh, and my Friend laughed with me, and I felt relief to be understood, and above all, to be wanted.

r r r

Exhausted. I woke up curled in a ball on the floor. I was shivering with cold in my pajama bottoms. My mind was full of echoes of my night journey. With the light streaming in my window, my room felt heavy, ugly. I peered out the window: the bough, and its twiggy fingers, bobbed quite normally in the wind. I checked closer to see if there were any telltale marks on the branches: a footprint, a scratch. There was nothing.

“George, you look awful!” my mother exclaimed as I came into the kitchen. “Didn’t you sleep well?”

I thought about this.

“I’m not sure,” I said truthfully. “It was hard to tell.”

I could feel her eyes on me after I gave this answer. But I could not explain what I had seen in my bedroom. My mother was already sending me to a therapist; telling her about the figure, about traveling in the ether, would only frighten her. And her, trying to get to work on time, after making sandwiches, after already taking one day off . . . No, I could not tell her.

But I recognized one other thing: I was so spent, so hollow feeling now, only because the world my Friend showed me was so rich. I wanted more.

n o t e b o o k 3

Frequent Headaches,

Inability to Sleep

It was October now. Windbreaker season. I left Julius Patchett Middle School with my lunchbox and took out the paper crumpled in my pocket.
11 Slopers Creek Road.
I started my journey. School was festooned with Halloween decorations: wobbly-limbed scarecrows, Sesame Street vampires, cardboard witches with warts, all Scotch-taped to the walls, above the lockers. My father had told me about Halloween—the real one. It was a Celtic holiday, he said. In ancient times, people celebrated winter as the season of death, and the day that season began, they believed spirits visited the earth. They held a festival; they slaughtered winter livestock. Ghosts and goblins and the shades of dead ancestors walked among living people.
That’s how trick-
or-treating began,
he said.
Imagine being a farmer back then. No electricity,
no street lamps. Walking home from the fields, you’re prey to all sorts of spir-
its. The only way to avoid attack is to go in disguise.
The earth, on that night, was crammed with spiritual energy, he told me. Women who practiced magic—
yes, real witches, in the sense that, without a pharmacist
and medical treatments, every village had some old woman who would look
at your cancer and give you a piece of parsley and mumble a few words,
which was the best they could do for you
—saved their charms for that night, in order to be assisted by the power of the dead.
People put out
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meals for their dead relatives, the way we do for Santa Claus. If you didn’t
appease them with hospitality, they might play a trick: drag you down to hell,
to the sound of wild animals snarling!
My mother was pissed when he told me that. She told him I was too young to hear such things. (I was four at the time.) He told her it came from the legend of Saint Andrew. Preston, too, I observed as I walked up Main Street, my lunchbox plunking against my leg, was bedecked with Halloween decor. McCrumb’s drugstore had paper monsters taped to the windows. In the Hobby Shop gossamer streamers and plastic bats hung in the display window alongside the airplane models and electric trains. The public library had propped a life-size gorilla outside its doors. By contrast the Mental Health Clinic bore no reference to the holiday, except for a small jack-o’-lantern full of Tootsie Rolls by the receptionist’s desk. The clinic was a low, brown brick building in a generic suburban office-style building, there in a quiet corner on a back street alongside Slopers Creek Park. The lobby smelled vaguely of disinfectant, and the waiting area was in the same milk-chocolate color as the brick, with plastic seats like at an airport gate. I gave my name to the receptionist.

“Did your mom come with you?”

“She’s at work.”

A frown. “Take a seat.”

I sat near a man with wispy hair and colorless skin, and a head shaped like a spaghetti squash. He stared at his hands. He looked poor. His clothes, too, were colorless, the kind of crappy Kmart clothes my mom always said fell apart five days after you bought them. He gave off a faint odor. There was nobody with him, either. The receptionist handed me a clipboard with a yellow sheet to fill out. It asked which of these things applied to me:
Problems with coworkers/supervisor

Frequent headaches

Inability to sleep

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Frequent/excessive drinking

Use of illegal drugs

Blackouts/memory loss

I checked “Inability to sleep” and “Frequent headaches.” I looked at the rest of the list: rotten-sounding things that only applied to grown-ups. Then I looked at the ghostly man with his eyes downcast, sitting by himself. I wondered which of these he had checked off. Eventually the receptionist called my name.

“George Davies? Richard Manning will see you now.”

He was never “Mr. Manning” or “Doctor” anything. He was always Richard. Richard. Funny how the name came to mean calm, and kindness, when before, “Richard” was a dashing fellow, a blond, a guy in an ascot with a sportscar, also known as “Alan” or “Ken.” My Richard, the child psychologist, had a sad face—two layers of big brown rings under each eye, as if his heart had been broken a decade ago, and he hadn’t slept since. He was in his forties, but looked older. He had a bushy mustache and a mane of brown hair, both running gray. He wore slacks and a yellow cardigan. When he greeted me, he had the air of some old craftsman meeting me at the door of a shop. I felt a sense of pride there, maybe tinged with sadness. I told my mother this. She said, “It must be an occupational hazard for therapists. Half the time they’re not sure whether they succeed or fail—and when they do, they can’t tell anyone. Especially in a town like Preston. They work alone.”

“George Davies,” he declared.

I sat in the chair he offered me, a slightly too large, nylonupholstered affair. The office was clean, modern, carpeted. Richard sat not at the desk, but in a chair identical to mine across from me. I noticed that his chair was as much too small for him as mine was too big for me. I liked that. If the world was designed for normal people, neither Richard nor I quite fit.

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He asked me my age. “Eleven and a half,” I replied. He smiled. What grade was I in? Seventh, I told him. He frowned. “You’re young for your grade?” I nodded: “I skipped sixth.” Then he asked me if I knew why I was there. I told him, “Not exactly.”

“Your mother says you’ve been sad lately.”

I nodded.

“Why do you think you’ve been sad?”

I shrugged. “I’ve been having trouble with my friends.”

“Friends at school?”

I nodded.

“What about them?”

I explained: about Dean, and how Toby Van der Valk had been my best friend—though even as I said it, I knew it had hardly been true—

and that he had betrayed me. Richard let me talk. He asked me how it made me feel. I told him about coming home and shutting myself in my room.

“But how did it make you feel?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

He seemed nonplussed by this. “Um,” he said, “describe the emotions you had, when Dean told you he hated you.”

“I felt bad.”

“Okay.”

“I felt . . . I don’t know. Sad.” Bad, sad. My quavering disappeared. This was turning into an unexpected exercise in vocabulary. I didn’t know what he wanted.

“Let’s try a little role-playing,” Richard suggested, sensing my struggle.

For the next half hour, Richard acted the part of Dean, Toby, and eventually, my mother. I played the part of me. It was a funny feeling. I was Hansel and Gretel, following a trail of my own conflicts and encounters, and picking up the crumbs I had left behind.

“This is really interesting,” I said at last.

Richard cocked his head.

“Why interesting?”

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“It’s like . . . artificial life.”

Richard threw back his head and laughed. I laughed, too, but I wasn’t sure why.

“I probably shouldn’t say this,” said Richard, “but you’re a very unusual boy. You perceive and express things many adults would not be able to.”

I glowed.

“We only have a few more minutes,” he said, in a softening voice—

I soon learned Richard’s voice always went quiet when he approached a serious subject. “But I’d like to discuss your father a little bit. When did he die?”

“Um . . .” I stirred in my seat. “Over the summer.”

“How did you find out?”

“My mother.”

I had been in my room, playing a game of chess with myself, and cheating, when I heard a howl from my mother’s bedroom. I did not even connect the sound with the phone ringing, which I had tuned out in the throes of my game. I froze, on my knees next to the bed, holding a black rook suspended over the board, listening. Richard nodded sympathetically. “Was your father in an accident?”

“He was sick.”

Richard waited.

“He had been in Honduras.”

Surprise. “Ah.” Then: “Your mother didn’t mention that.”

“He was a volunteer worker,” I informed him, “at a refugee camp.”

Hesitation. Richard must have been trying to figure out how the hell a man who lived in Preston, Virginia, with a wife and child would find himself trotting around Honduran refugee camps. “I see. Did he get sick down there?’

I nodded. “He was sick, and . . .” It was strange. I had almost forgotten. The details of his death were so much less important than the allabsorbing
fact
of his death. Then the phrase returned to me: “He didn’t recover.”
He’s not going to recover.
Those were the first words from the doctor’s mouth, outside the hospital room, as my mother and I waited.
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