Fish in the Sky (18 page)

But it’s only Peter.

“Reporting for duty, sir!” he says with the harsh soldier’s grimace on his face, snapping his hand to his forehead and his heels together so it echoes in the hall.

He can be so childish. I don’t move a muscle, just nod. When his salute isn’t answered, his hand moves down; he smiles apologetically and probably thinks he dragged me out of bed with a deadly fever.

“Mom wanted me to visit you,” he says.

“Oh?”

“To get infected,” he says.

“Really?”

He follows me up to my room and sits by the desk, but I sit on the bed and don’t know what to say to him. I don’t feel like talking to him now; I have nothing to say.

“Can you breathe in my face?” he says.

“Huh?”

“Breathe in my face,” he repeats, and lets out a breath to show me what he means.

“Why?”

“To infect me.”

I place myself in front of him, and he closes his eyes and opens his mouth and I take a deep breath and blow into his mouth, and he inhales at the same time.

“One more time,” he says. “Just to be certain.”

After I’ve repeated the procedure, I move back to sit on the bed and try to look sick, but Peter stands up and looks into the fish tank.

“How’s school?” I ask, to make him think that I’m devastated about missing it.

“You know,” he says, and shrugs.

“No one else sick?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “Now you have time to write about the falcon for our magazine.”

“I feel dizzy if I write,” I say.

Peter sits back in the chair, spins in a circle, and then leans forward, his face beaming with exciting news.

“Ari beat up Tommy!” he says.

He gloats while he describes what happened.

“There was a fire drill on Friday,” Peter says, and immediately I regret that I wasn’t there. Everybody knows that fire drills at our school are the best. Because the school building is so old, the fire brigade itself has to come for our drills to put up this huge slippery cloth from the balcony all the way down to the playground. Then everyone has to slide down it really fast, under their watchful eyes, to the great applause of everyone already in the playground, watching and clapping.

“And when it was Miss Wilson’s turn, her skirt flew right up her legs! She couldn’t decide whether to cover her eyes or hold her skirt down!” Peter says, laughing, and I can just picture Pinko coming right after her, rigid like a general as usual, self-assured and serious with his red tie flying up in his face.

“Our class was the last one, and the girls had to go first, according to the rule: women and children first. Finally everybody was down except Tommy and Ari.

“But then Tommy pushed Ari to the side because he wanted to throw himself down,” says Peter. “But Ari grabbed Tommy’s collar and dangled him in thin air, like a kitten, and then gave him a good one on the nose, before throwing him headfirst down the cloth! Then Ari jumped after him, flying like a cannonball driving his heels full force into Tommy’s ass,” says Peter, laughing.

“I can just picture Tommy dangling in Ari’s grip,” I say, and laugh out loud. I can’t believe I missed this; why does school suddenly become fun the one day I decide to play hooky?

“You just left after gym the other day?” Peter asks, and then I stop laughing.

“Yeah. Suddenly I just felt really sick,” I say.

“Sandra said you screamed at her.”

“Shower Sandra?”

“Yes.”

“That was just because I felt so horrible,” I say as sweat begins to sprout on my forehead, and to avoid suspicion, I lie on the bed and moan a bit and hold my head.

“I can’t laugh too much,” I explain. “It gives me a headache.”

But I’m thinking how Mr. Penapple must be proud of his son and how Ari is lucky to have a dad who works on dry land and wants him to help in the fish shop. It’s easy to be brave when you have a father. Then, no matter what happens, everything will turn out all right.

Peter turns the falcon on the desk and investigates every feather. He’s saying something I don’t hear, because my mind has turned into a screaming circus elephant running wild again. Before I realize it, I’ve blurted out the things that are on my mind.

“Why don’t they teach us about anything that matters in school?”

“What do you mean?” Peter asks.

“Just, you know. Things that matter.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Just something about life,” I say, and am already regretting having opened my mouth in the first place.

“We do math and literature,” says Peter.

“I know.”

“And PE and geography and history,” he counts on his fingers.

“I know that,” I say.

“And physics and French and English and biology and about Christianity,” he adds. “What more do you want to learn?”

“I don’t know,” I say, and sit up in bed. “But you’re never going to need any of that, or most of it,” I add.

“You need to know how to read and write and do math,” he says, and he sounds as if he’s a bit shocked.

“I just want to learn something else as well.”

“Like what?” he asks, irritated. “There is nothing else. Not until you get to college.”

“For example, to think,” I say, but feel at once that I’m on thin ice.

Peter shakes his head, turns on the chair, crosses his arms over his chest, and snorts. “That can’t be taught,” he says. “I mean, everybody thinks; it’s innate.”

“What do you think about?” I ask.

He sighs and looks around him like he’s searching for an answer, turns the chair, making the wheels squeak, scratches his head, and picks his nose.

“I think about school, about my homework. I think about what I’m reading when I’m reading. I think about what I’m saying when I’m talking. I think about what I’m watching when I’m watching something, what I hear when I’m listening to something, and sometimes I don’t think at all.”

“But don’t you ever feel that you are different from who you are, I mean that you’re not really who everybody thinks you are?”

“I’m just me,” he says, astonished. “I can’t be anybody else. What kind of flu do you really have?” he asks. Maybe he’s regretting having come over to be infected.

“I guess there’s something wrong with my brain.” I sigh.

We’re silent for a while, and the only noise is the bubbling of the water pump in the fish tank and the squeaking of the chair as Peter turns it from side to side. I shouldn’t have started talking about this. Now he definitely thinks I’m crazy, which is probably true, but it would have been better to keep it secret.

“There’s going to be a costume party at school soon,” he says.

“Oh, really?” I say, with great interest to cover up how bad I feel, relieved that he says something so both of us can forget that stupid conversation.

“I was thinking of going as a gorilla,” he says.

“Really,” I say. “Cool.”

Then we don’t say anything, but Peter turns on the chair and whistles a tune. I sit up in bed and wait for him to leave. But then he starts telling me about a movie he saw with his dad yesterday, and I pretend to listen.

I feel like there’s so much distance between Peter and me. Once we were so close, but not anymore. When I watch him speak now, he seems so childish, so naive. I never thought I would feel that way about Peter. I thought he was the coolest guy; I worshipped him, found everything he did or said brilliant, everything his father did, everything his mom said. What’s changed? While this question runs through the flames in the circus in my head, I hear a voice, almost like my own. It resounds in my head like it’s coming through a huge sound system:
It’s you, Josh Stephenson. You’ve changed.

I sit stupefied on the bed, watching Peter’s lips move, but I can’t hear a word he’s saying. It’s like this voice has calmed the frenzy in my mind, put out the fire, comforted the animals, and led them back to their cages. And suddenly I realize I’m perfectly at ease.

“Are you listening?” I suddenly hear Peter say as if the volume of his voice has been turned up.

“Yeah,” I say, and go on pretending to listen.

Finally, when Peter has told me the entire story line of the movie, and repeated it, because he forgot a part that happened in between, and I haven’t done anything except nod my head, he starts to describe the ending, which is so complicated and manifold that it takes him longer to tell me about the last ten minutes than the whole movie. When he stands up to leave, I don’t have to pretend to be feeling feeble. When he’s gone, I lie on my bed, glad to be home alone on a Sunday and grateful for the silence in my head.

It almost feels like spring when I walk down to the harbor and there’s nobody around; the day is bright and still, almost no wind. Sundays are days of tranquillity, of rest, and for the first time in a long while, my mind is not spinning around but calm and smooth like the sea below my hollow.

I start to listen to the soft breeze, listen to the whispering lapping under the rocks, listen to myself breathe. And then it’s like I’m hearing that voice inside my head again.

“There you are,” it says, and it sounds almost like my own.

And I think I can see him out of the corner of my eye, the boy that this voice belongs to. He could be wearing a blue cap, pulled down low, a brown raincoat, jeans, and sneakers, like me.

“Who are you?” I ask, though I don’t need to ask, because I think I know the answer. But I ask anyway because I want to hear him talk.

The stillness is so thick I can feel it resting in the palm of my hand, touching the tips of my fingers, and the scent of seaweed is salty and fresh.

Maybe he’s standing there, by the red rock, looking around him with a smile on his lips like he’s remembering the good days when he came down here with a catapult to shoot at the seagulls or throw a line and tackle out from the rocks, far out to sea, and sat in the shelter of the hollow when the spring rain trickled down and the fish nibbled the hook.

“You know very well who I am,” he says, and sends me a teasing smile.

“Maybe you’re just a genie from a bottle,” I say, but then he laughs and I do too.

His hair pokes out from under his cap and his eyes are like mine, but his face is brighter and happier. He picks up a pebble and throws it far out onto the calm water. The stone disappears with a low clap and ignites circle after circle on the smooth surface. He sits on the red rock and watches the circles grow wider and stretch out until they subside and disappear and the ocean gleams, untouched.

He is the boy who fell asleep the night before my thirteenth birthday, but I am the one who woke up the day after. I’m the one who sweats and gets chills when I look at Clara, not him. I’m the one whose voice is breaking and who’s getting pubic hair, not him. I’m the truant. I’m the deviant. Not him. He is twelve years and 364 days old. I’m merely a newborn.

He’s the one who learned to walk and talk, read and write and do math, the little he can. He learned to think and imagine and conclude and understand. He became a perfect intelligent human being. And as soon as he reached that point, he had to step aside because I was born.

“You’re so serious,” he says into the silence. He takes off his cap and ruffles his hair, the same way I sometimes do when my head’s hot.

“I’m just thinking,” I say, and look at some eiders rocking gently on the undercurrent.

“Remember how much fun it was to fish here?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“Why have you stopped doing that?”

“Well, you know, what’s the point?”

He shrugs and draws down the corners of his mouth, but then he looks at me sideways, squints, and grins.

“It’s the teenage thing, isn’t it?” he asks.

“I guess so,” I say.

“What a state to get yourself into,” he says. “Look at Gertrude. Do you think her behavior is normal?”

“No, not at all.”

“Far from it,” he says. “But I guess it’s something everyone has to go through, in their own way.”

I wonder if Clara is going through this too,
I think.

“Of course,” he says. “I guess it’s pretty much like waking up in a cradle one day, not being able to talk or walk.”

“Do you think you know everything?” I say, slightly irritated by how cocky he is.

“I’m a perfect intellectual human being,” he says. “You said so yourself just now.”

“I only thought that.”

“Well, I heard it anyway,” he says, and throws another pebble far out to sea. The pebble hits the surface and skips once, twice, three times.

“Did you see that?” he says joyfully, watching the circles on the surface grow wider.

“Why haven’t we talked before?” I ask.

“You have been so preoccupied with yourself, whining in your hollow, day after day, writing poetry! And when you were thinking of killing yourself ! I thought you had gone mad. Tell me, how in the world could you sit there for a whole day, making up obituaries about yourself?”

“You don’t know what it’s like,” I say to silence him.

“No, that’s true,” he says. “But I can sort of imagine.”

“Can you imagine anything about me and Clara?” I ask suddenly.

“That’s your problem.”

“Didn’t you claim to have answers to everything?” I ask.