A Good and Happy Child (33 page)

“Mister Paul,” it said. “I’m ready to continue now.”

I looked up. A teenage boy had entered the tent, closing the flaps behind him, shutting out the blinding daylight beyond. He was speaking to me. He did so with respect—I knew, the way you do in dreams, that it was not eleven-year-old George whom he addressed. My arms were full, hairy. My body, fevered as it was and stretched out on a hot floor, felt like a long, lean instrument.
Mister Paul.
The boy was addressing my father. Me.

The boy seemed fresh, alert, if a little pale. He was fourteen, and gaunt, with shaggy black hair, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts. The odors of latrines and unwashed urine-y clothes filled my nostrils. I felt a wave of revulsion looking at him, despite his bright eyes and pleasant smile. He looked Mexican.

Everything caused pain. The daylight. The heat and the sweat. But most of all, that voice.

“Just a minute,” I said. I licked my lips. Even whispering required effort. “I need to rest.”

In Honduras, in his sickness, your father interviewed a demoniac. Fol-
lowed him into deep places.

The scene jumped.

The same tent, but nighttime now. I sat at a table with a lit kerosene lamp at my elbow—a new one, with a green hood, a dirty price tag still affixed to its base—producing an orange glow. I must have fallen asleep. I was bent over blue sheaves of airmail letters. They stuck to my sweaty arms. I had to keep unsticking them and laying them down again.
Distractions. I needed time to write!

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I felt them for the first time,
I wrote, at last placing pen to paper.
It
was a horrible sensation. We all wish from time to time, abstractly, for the
experience of someone else’s mind, mostly out of curiosity. But now that
I have had this wish fulfilled, it seems I will never be rid of the feeling.
I gripped his hands, which were deadly thin, pale and clammy even in the
heat—dead man’s hands—and shut my eyes, and prayed. At first there was
nothing, then, slowly, I realized that I was listening to the trail of a voice. It
was like someone passing behind me, speaking softly, but with purpose.
I nearly turned around. Then I realized this voice led to another voice. This
went on for a time, as I tried to catch one phrase after another. It was like
someone waving a hundred perfume bottles under your nose. Only then did
I realize that the voices were not consecutive as I had thought, but were
simultaneous, some of them soft and wheedling, some bold like a stump
speaker, others rising in a sort of fury, raging with real rage, shrieking, ani-
mal rage, like grief or loss that has turned to vengeance. I opened my eyes,
and I saw his face staring at me, and his expression chills me even now. I
tried to pull away from him but he gripped me tighter and he leaned close
and his eyes bored into mine. I lost track of time. I am not sure how long I
lay there, the boy by my bed, ever patient—as if he were the one ministering
to me.

Perhaps I am sick. I have been feeling tired lately and prone to cold
sweats and dizziness. These physical sensations have been accompanied by
what feels like a thinning of the world—the colors of trees and grass seem
grayer; I feel weak; and daily, sometimes hourly, I will “come to” standing
somewhere arbitrary, where I have evidently passed into a brown study and
stopped in my tracks, emerging exhausted, on the same spot, studying the
ground at my feet, my mind following an insidious, circular path. I feel that
my body and my senses are going dull. Even my soul, if it is not a sin to say
it, seems to be shutting down, out of self-preservation, or irrelevancy. My
prayers now feel automatic. I suppose that is better than no prayers at all.
I stopped writing. I was gripping the table to hold myself upright. I felt a sickly swoon coming on. It rose, became a tightness in my belly and then a roar of nausea. I bent over and vomited.
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J u s t i n E v a n s

When I righted myself, I found I gripped something soft. I had returned to Tom Harris’s living room. The sofa—I felt its worn fabric under my fingers. But something was not right.

I looked over and saw Tom Harris, Clarissa, Freddie, peering at me, with expressions of revulsion and pity. Then I turned my head and saw myself—Other George, now awake again—beaming proudly, and with genuine pleasure. Other George seemed to glow, as if filled with sunlight, while my friends appeared dreary, dingy. I shivered violently, from puking, from the fever. But none of it mattered. At all costs, I knew, I must continue writing.

I put my pen to the paper again. My fingers trembled. So I spoke the words aloud. That helped. Kept the mind focused, kept the ink flowing.

“They came for me again last night, Tom. The villagers think I am
perdito
—their word for the boy, so now I am lumped with him. Not a good sign,” I laughed grimly. “The relief organization leaders are trying to persuade me to medevac, since there’s no proper hospital. I tell them no. I don’t want to be moved. Because fighting them off requires all my concentration. I lie still all afternoon. At evening, as the horizon dims, I feel a sinking dread. I feel them muster, as if I’m in a beleaugered fort, a doomed captain on the wild frontier. It begins with the whispering. Then I begin to see their world again.

“Tom, I am cursed with sympathy—I see it all the way they do. First the interminable racket of their talk, their thinking, like a hundred, no a MILLION souls, shouting at a bazaar. There is no distinction between beings. All arguing, all fighting, all insinuating and insulting and damning, the air is full of curses, and it is maddening. Here is the comedy: they are trying to get away from it. They are like ambitious assistant professors angling for a trip to the MLA, trying to get out of Idaho State University, get a job, go away, leap into some other sensibility the way I have leapt into them. But what they are looking for is a human. They are all looking for holes, holes into human beings and into materiality. They want us because the violent motion and incessant noise compels them. Their search is like that of an animal a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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looking for a tree to scratch itself on. And I am a target, I am handy, so they pound me like mosquitoes. But something about me keeps them back, and though I should be gratified, and I am, when I return to my bed, I can still feel them buzzing about me, and feel weak. I just lie and lie and cannot move for hours and days. When I see the boy I ask him about this. ‘They are looking for us, aren’t they,’ I say, and he lies there staring at me as if I were already dead, a smile on his lips.”

I shuddered so violently that the pen fell from my hand. I reached down for it. Grasped it. But I touched the floor—so cool, and solid—it felt welcoming. I lay down on it, and slept.

In my sleep, an angel came to me and placed soothing hands on my cheeks.

“
Our Father, who art in heaven,
” she said. Gray streaked her dark hair. The angel had a Tennessee accent. Her eyes were as cool as drinking water and full of mercy.

“Hallowed be thy name.”

I opened my eyes. I saw Clarissa. I was seized by a jolt of animal fury. I jerked upright with a sudden, violent movement. She stepped back.

“Leave him!” I heard Other George’s voice scream. “Leave him or he’s dead.”

She must have come down to help me,
I realized. I yearned for the feel of those hands again.
Keep on with the prayers, you idiots,
I wanted to shout. But that desire to speak disappeared, quick as amnesia, and was replaced by another.
I must write.

It was an overwhelming compulsion. I had to let the others know what I’d learned. It’s what I came for. I knew I was going to die, but I had to tell them
this.
Or it would all be for nothing. I groped my way to the table.

I must tell you this,
I write.
I have seen something so terrible it
has taken my sight. Among them, it is called the kingdom. Are you laugh-
ing? They are, it is a mockery. Thy Kingdom Come. Like a placenta,
only gray, ethereal. I was there and I had a guide like Dante, I think it was
the boy.

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J u s t i n E v a n s

He said spirits had a means of identifying souls who are open to them.
He said there are ways into a human’s soul, the foremost of which is tricking
them. How can they be tricked, I asked, since the decision to do good or ill
must be made with free will? The answer is, they are tricked, because they
ask to be tricked. “They create a gap,” he told me. “It is as much as saying
into the great emptiness, Where should I go? There is always a voice ready to
respond. They have wandered out to the fringe and may fall.”

A light appeared above us. I knew it was a soul. It was very bright, but
the warm, sickly grayness crept over it like a lichen, only unnaturally fast.
Then the light vanished. I heard a whimpering, like a child feeling sorry for
itself and moaning. Then I realized, that was the characterization of all their
noises, a sound that tugs at you as potently the last moment as the first, with-
out diminishment, because it is circular: self-pity so deep it is nearly grief,
grieving over the soul that self-pity has destroyed. It is unbearable. Then the
boy uttered a phrase I would like to forget: “All of these souls shine out of the
world and into the Kingdom like beacons.” This is what they name them,
beacons. “The world is full of them,” he said, “and in hell they light the
night sky like stars.” Surely you see how important this is . . .
The pen fell from my hand again, but this time, I knew there was no hope of picking it up. I had no strength. I scarcely had strength to reflect—only to feel, only to be, only to sense the pain in my head and limbs and feel the beating of my own heart, and my breathing. I was taken away—away from the tents and the danger, and back somewhere, back home.

I opened my eyes. My arms had grown bone-thin, just sinews, and knobs where the joints were, yellow in tint—
jaundice.
My hands were long, ghastly, tendons exposed, fingernails long, and pale yellow, all pigment faded except for the color of sickness and corpses. I was in a hospital. I shuddered. I drew the sheets around me, feebly, but the cotton chafed and stung. I saw myself again—Other George—only this time, it was the real George,
my
George, standing beside the hospital bed, wearing a worried expression, too mature in depth of sadness for such a small boy, and I felt my heart break.
Oh honey,
I said,
oh sweetheart, please
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don’t be sad.
Only I was not strong enough to say the words out loud.
Oh
please God, let me tell him,
I thought,
let me tell him not to be afraid or
sad,
but I couldn’t, and that thin pulse that drew out breaths from me, and heartbeats, and even pain, stopped. My vision closed. It all went silent.

N o t e b o o k 1 7

The Birthday Card

Wool and mothballs.

Strong, thick arms.

My father has come back to me.

“Get him on the sofa,” said Tom Harris.

A grunt, up close, and then a sniffle. I opened my eyes and saw Uncle Freddie’s face—his puffy cheeks, mustache, and wire-frame glasses—inches from my own. His tweed coat scratched my face; the odor of mothballs, just like my dad’s, tickled my sinuses. He propped me up on the sofa. His cheeks were slicked with tears.

“He’s awake,” Uncle Freddie announced. He withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose loudly. “Oh thank God. He’s awake.”

“I can see that,” said Tom Harris, also hovering nearby. Clarissa appeared, too. I was lying supine on the sofa, looking up at them.

“George, can you hear me?” asked Tom Harris.

“I hear you,” I said.

“And it’s you?”

I sat up. The three of them crowded around me. There was a bucket on the floor. Clarissa’s sleeves were rolled up. She wore
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elbow-length rubber gloves and had been sponging my vomit from Tom Harris’s rug.

“You turned yellow,” said Uncle Freddie, weeping again. “You turned yellow and shrank down like a skeleton. Or maybe it was just my eyes.”
Muh eyes.
“Oh, God in heaven, I never want to see that again.” He wiped his cheeks. “You sure you’re all there, sonny?”

I sat up a little. “Yes,” I said. I trembled and felt chilled, but recognized the sensation: postvomit tremors. “Sorry I barfed.”

Clarissa knelt down with a glass of water.

“I didn’t realize . . . I didn’t know what would happen,” she whispered. “That sounds so stupid now, doesn’t it?” She shook her head.

“I’m sorry.”

“S’okay.” I gulped the water gratefully.

Tom Harris towered over us, face livid.

“Do you remember anything?” he demanded.

I returned his gaze, with a dead feeling.

“I saw what my father saw,” I said. Then I curled myself into a ball in the corner of the sofa, nursing the water and a sullen silence. The three of them watched me for a stunned instant. Then Tom Harris emitted a groan, collapsed into a chair, and placed a hand over his eyes. “What have we done,” he said. We sat like that for a long time, a clock ticking somewhere measuring the time and the silence. Dusk crept over the meadow outside Tom Harris’s picture window. After a stretch, we heard a distant grinding noise—a car on the drive.

Clarissa stood and squinted out the window.

“Someone’s coming,” she said. Then, after a moment: “It’s Joan.”

None of them moved. They slumped where they sat, waiting for the inevitable. We listened to the car crunch to a stop. Heard the parking brake creak; then the sound of the screen door swing open, and bang shut. My mother appeared in the doorway.