Freewill (6 page)

So, who?

Do you know?

You're afraid you might.

•  •  •

“Here it is, Mr. Jacks.”

“Will.” Mr. Jacks springs up out of his office chair to greet you. He acts as if it is a surprise and an honor to have you arrive, even though you are a student and arriving is the barest minimum of what you are supposed to do. What do they think? Has it sunk to where the barest minimum is more than you can manage?

What are the options after that?

“Oh,” he says, taking the gnome out of your hands and examining it like he's some kind of art collector making a very important purchase. “Oh,” he says, twisting it around, rubbing it, looking into its eyes ears and nose. “Yes, ah yes, this is good, Will. My mother will be thrilled with it. Very fine work.”

It isn't though, is it? It isn't, because you made no effort to make it so. A gnome is a gnome is a gnome, and you some time ago became disconnected from the very freakishness, garishness, inhumanity of the creatures. Do you understand why anyone would want one? The only way you could make any kind of distinctive statement would be to make the thing look human, friendly, pleasant. But you're not capable of that either. So the only distinctive feature of this guy is the morbid thrust of his eyes, bulging two inches out of the sockets. Like when they find drowning victims washed up on your shore, or people who've been hanged. He does, however, have a nice, fat face.

“Great,” Mr. Jacks says weakly.

“Thanks, Mr. Jacks,” you say, backing out of the office quickly. “I'll just get back to work then.”

“Hold on,” he says, dropping the gnome onto his desk hard, as he comes to shut the door. “I haven't even given you your next assignment yet.”

“Do I really need one? I mean, can't I just go back to doing what I feel like?”

“Well,” he says, “I'd really rather see some more of . . . your best stuff. Frankly you seemed to be losing your way for a while there.”

Ah.

There it is.

Your way.

Can't be losing that.

Not again.

That's why you are where you are, isn't that it? It's not because somebody might have topped somebody and then did himself. It's not because one day you had parents of a sort and the next day you didn't. That stuff happens to people every single stinking day, and you don't get framed for it.

No, you're here because of you, Will, not because of anybody else. Because you lost your way once.

And how many chances you suppose you get with that? Two? Yes, two sounds about right, doesn't it? We can't let you get lost again. You hear? You hearing? Who are you listening to? We can't let you get lost again. Listen to what you're hearing.

Lost a second time means you don't come back. Do you understand? Lost twice is gone for good.

“Are you listening? Will? Are you listening to me?”

Who are you going to listen to? Who's a boy going to listen to?

“I didn't lose anything, Mr. Jacks. I just wanted to do something besides gnomes and furniture.”

Apparently—and surprisingly, considering the population he works with—Mr. Jacks does not have a great gift for handling situations like this, situations like you.

He puts his hand on your shoulder. “We really need you making gnomes and furniture, Will. The world needs something from each of us, and what the world needs from you is gnomes and whirligigs and furniture.”

If he had been joking, it would have been very funny, and relaxing. He wasn't, and it wasn't.

You are walking out the door as he tells you, “So no more of those things you were sculpting, okay? And the rest of them, just leave them be. We're not going to make an issue of the ones that have gone missing, but in exchange you don't remove any more school property. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough,” you say.

You haven't a clue what that even means, do you? Fair enough. Is anything fair enough? It's like there's this arrangement where we acknowledge that we won't ever have
fair
, so we'll just settle for fair
enough
. And it's never enough, is it?

You walk out into the workshop and it comes to your eye as if it is in neon. It has been there all along, since the beginning of time or at any rate since the beginning of your
time in this place but you never quite noticed it before. But you must have. The words have been in there, burned in your head, all along, all during your confinement. The sign that looms—carved capably in wood, of course—above the shop door. You walk under it every time you come into the class and you walk under it every time you go out again and you work almost directly under it when you are working.

BE NOT IDLE.

Well, of course. Isn't that what shop, shops, workshops are all about? Alternatives to the devil's workshop, right? Busy hands. Flying woodchips for snow, falling over fevered young brow.

Except, what idleness do we mean?

You know what they mean.

“Fair enough,” you say out loud. “Fair enough. I won't be idle. Not anymore.”

So you go, or anyway, you attempt to go. Marching straight across the room, not stopping at your station, not cleaning up your wood shavings or shelving your important carving implements. You head for the door. You make the door. An achievement right there. You are through the door. You stand there, numbly. Now what? Now what, Will? What was the plan? What is the plan? On what impulse did you propel yourself through that room and out the other side, out into—what? Into nothing and nowhere? Do you think
the people inside noticed your demonstration, of strength, clearheaded determination, and be-not-idleness?

Do you suppose you are missed?

Do you care?

You stand for a good full three minutes before turning and staring at the door you so proudly came out from. And you edge it open. Looking inside, looking at all the busy, not-so-busy, and idle beavers in the woody wood center, you notice.

You notice—that nobody notices.

You go back in.

“Come on,” you say to Angela.

“Come on, what?”

“Come on with me. Bug out.”

“It's a little late for that. You're already bugged out.”

“Come on, take a day off with me.”

“You are confused. I, unlike you, am here because I want to be here, remember? I have no reason to go.”

You wait on that. How many times does she have to remind you that you are confused?

“I'm asking you to go. That's a reason.”

Angela stops gluing two bits of a spice rack together to look up at you. “You remain confused,” she says. Then she goes back to work. “Why don't you just go back to work?”

How do you feel, Will? Go on now. You feel something. This is . . . your friend, right?

Right?

Or are you confused? Maybe we should pause. Have you got a friend here, Will? Or anywhere?

Why isn't she up on her feet and traveling with you to a better place? Why isn't she being not idle with you, rather than remaining locked in this mine chipping away at nothing, like everybody else? She knows better. Don't you think she knows better? Isn't that why you picked her out? Or did she pick you? Even more so then, if she picked you, she knows. She is different. What do you feel, Will? What do you feel?

Anything?

If it's not friendship . . .

She told you, Will. Why don't you listen? You should listen.

She's a ghoul. Likes deadness. And you are dripping in it.

So maybe then, if you are causing death, attracting death, being death, you are of interest. And if you are a common confused young man who just can't make his way . . . then don't be wasting people's time.

You listening for once? When are you going to listen?

“Okay,” you say softly. “Okay, I'll just go by myself. See ya.”

“See ya,” she answers, just as airily.

Once again you are out there, out in the nowhere corridor with no one. Well,
you
are there, aren't you, so you are
not quite with no one. Never alone if you are with yourself, isn't that right? And in the end,

and the beginning,

and all the days in between,

isn't that really what it is anyway? That you are with yourself, alone. People are nearby, in front of your face or working shoulder to shoulder or whatever it is, but they are never really
with
you, are they? Nearby, that's the best they can ever be. Not their fault. Nobody's fault. Just the impossibility of it, is all.

But still you stand there, outside that door, and nobody else does. There are a good many bodies inside the room, but none where you are. No matter. You wouldn't even be talking to any of them, but for the odd obligatory, are-you-using-that-planer-right-now type of shop exchange. They would just be bodies, near your body.

You stare ahead, away from the shop, toward the entire rest of the world beyond the shop. Where and what? Will? Where and what and why?

And then, you are back, through the door, to your station, on your stool. You have a block of soft pine in one hand. Turning it, turning it, before picking up a carving tool once you can see in there the shape of a blade of a whirligig.

•  •  •

There is, of course, another large and teary and entirely well-meaning demonstration of love and support for teenage casualty number two. There are flowers. There are teddy bears. There are balloons and notes and teenagers with, for a change, authentic reasons for stumbling across the brown river bridge looking dazed and confused.

And there is your monument to the meaning of it all.

Which is?

Will?

“Will?” Gran asks through the closed door of your room. She is very good, Gran, about respecting your privacy, your
space
as she so earnestly calls it. She respects your space in much the same way most people do these days, which is about the same way people respect the space of an electrified fence.

“Are you all right?” she asks in the warm and woolly tone between fondness and fear.

“I am, Gran, thanks.”

You give her as much reassurance as you can by raising the pitch of your voice without raising your head from the pillow and without offering the extra sentence or two that might actually relieve her concern. You know the scene, Will. You know the signs and the tip-offs as well as she does and you know why she is hovering and you could just as easily defuse the thing as let it burn on. You know these things now,
just as everybody seems to know them now, just as nobody seemed to know them back before when the information might have done some good. You could make it better, if only a little better, but still you don't. Why not? Why don't you want it better?

“Do you want something to eat? I could fix you something to eat.”

“No, thank you, Gran. I'm fine.”

Like there. You could just let her do the fixing, as you know well how happy she is in the kitchen especially working on remedial nutrition for a bone rack like you. Busy hands. Being not idle, don't you know. Or did you think that applied only to you? Did you think that, Will? That the whole show is a show? All the people around you, the grandparents and teachers and
helping professionals
and wood shop flotsam all set up for the purpose of sustaining the almost-life that is you? Did you ever consider that being not idle might apply to people who aren't even you? Doesn't mean you would have to actually eat the food.

“Gran?” you say.

“Yes?”

Do you hear that, Will? Do you hear the hope in her voice? Do you hear the power of the word, of your word, as she waits and wants and wishes to somehow be able to deliver? Go ahead, if you still won't believe, run it again. Go
on and roll a second time, ask, and listen to hear if Gran's lips brush the door panel because she is listening so hard into you.

“Gran?”

“Yes?”

Yes.

“Do you think I could bring the small TV up here into my room?”

And you can hear that too, can't you? You can hear quite clearly as that little bit of something whooshes out of her, like a puff of steam, when you ask for that next extra bit of isolation.

She wants to say no. You know she wants to say no. No would be good, helpful, right. See how it can all hinge on the smallest thing? You could have said, Sure, Gran, I'd love a sandwich, and who knows? She could, should now say, No, it would be unhealthy for you to lock yourself away with the television up here. You'd almost like her to say that, wouldn't you?

Wouldn't it be nice to hear
no
, at the right time?

“I suppose,” she says wearily. “I suppose, for a while anyway.”

Why? Why can't we do what we know we need to do?

How do you suppose things would be different, if we could change one small thing in the sequence?

But the sequence continues, unchallenged, eh, Will? Can you not change it? Can we change sequences?

Do not look away this time, boy. Not this time.

“Thanks, Gran.”

•  •  •

Can you take somebody with you, do you think? When you go down
there
where you go, where you are now going. Do you have that kind of power, that your descent can pull someone else along?

Conspicuous in his silence since you have taken to your bed—isn't that quaint, the way you can make that sound,
taken to your bed
—is Pops. Pops isn't here. He's there. Here and there may mean only the physical distance of the twenty-foot length of hallway between the two bedrooms, but here and there can be entire worlds apart, can't they?

You have barely been aware of his presence through this, though Gran makes her infrequent kind fumbling attempts to coax you out into the light. You hear him, leaving the bathroom as you are about to use it yourself. You hurry, you make deliberate noise, he speeds up, and closes his bedroom door just as you open yours. You hover outside his door, to hear what you can hear. He could very well be holding his breath.