Best Boy (25 page)

Authors: Eli Gottlieb

BOOK: Best Boy

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I'm listening to music right now. I'm listening to SÃ©rgio Mendes and Brasil '66. He's playing “The Look of Love” and a woman is singing. It's almost night out the windows and the rest of the campus is quiet. You can see the other cottages lighting up with other villagers in them. Alex Farmer is listening to his headphones in his room and I'm listening to headphones in mine. Another day has gone by. Where did it go? I have a feeling it went away to the same place as my parents. Every day the light comes down from the sky and every day it's pulled back again. Daddy always said that space, the stars and planets are a perfect machine. But Mr. B says that the universe is also dying and slowing down. If these are both true then that's another trick. I forgot to look for the compost heap when I went back to my house but I'm sure it's still there somewhere in the backyard. I'm sure it's still turning dead garbage into warmth that's alive. “Your father,” Momma said after Daddy died, “vanished into the mystery we live with every day.” I hope that Death isn't the end of everything. Or if it is, that it's the kind of end where we can all still be together and look back anyway even if we can't make ourselves heard by the people who are still living. Maybe the dead are all there in one place, crowded in an invisible giant heap stretching all the way up into the sky and leading back to the very first person. Maybe every time we have a memory of someone gone it's because they're yelling something at us that very moment from Death. I hope the train lifts off the track one day and takes me there. I can't stop remembering
what happened to me long ago, but that's all right. I don't mind. I was a Best Boy and a good little camper and now I'm a lucky man. Somebody always loved me. That's what Raykene says. She says it all the time. And the thing about Raykene is, she's always right.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To Betsy Lerner, again, for her peerless ear and heart. To Bob Weil, editorial magus, for his acumen and unstinting support. To those in whose homes I wrote: Nevine and Steve Michaan, David Kriegel and Cynthia Flynt, Amy Kaufman and Robert Boyd. To early readers: Susan Bell, Esther Fein and Mark Kamine. Most of all to Lisa Green, for love.

ALSO BY ELI GOTTLIEB

THE FACE THIEF

NOW YOU SEE HIM

THE BOY WHO WENT AWAY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eli Gottlieb is the author of the novels
The Boy Who Went Away
, which received the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the McKitterick Prize of the British Society of Authors;
Now You See Him
, which was translated into a dozen languages; and
The Face Thief
. He lives in New York City.

Best Boy
is a work of fiction. All incidents, dialogue, characters, and settings are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real.

First Edition

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Book design by Brian Mulligan

Map by Mike Schley

Production manager: Anna Oler

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Gottlieb, Eli, 1956-

Best boy : a novel / Eli Gottlieb. â First edition.