Keeper of Dreams (22 page)

Now, though, I have come to think that while they were both right, the answer is even deeper. We didn’t kill them, and we continue not to kill them, despite the reality of all those dangers, because they are not “they” at all. There, but for the fact that we happen to be the tiniest bit ill, go we.

I had troubling dreams for months afterward. I had mood swings, alternating between aggression and despair. There were times when my parents wished they had just answered my questions about Elizio by taking me to the priest and getting me on the roster of altar boys.

But they were not wrong to take me there, any more than they had been wrong
not
to tell me up till then. I needed to know before my education was complete. Those who do not know, who continue through adulthood oblivious, in a sense remain children, forever naive. Within the fence of the North American Wild Animal Park is the Garden of Eden, and the people there eat freely of the Tree of Life. Here, outside, in this world of thorns, we dwell in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, madly eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, as much of it as we can get before we die.

You cannot straddle the boundary. If you bring children into the world on this side of the fence, you must take them to eat the fruit of the tree—not too young, not before they’re able to bear it. But don’t wait too long, either. Let them see, before you die, that death is truly the gift of a merciful God.

This is one of those stories that wanted to be a novel, but I couldn’t get a handle on it. To make an idea into a novel, you have to have a character strong enough to carry the reader through the whole ride. A mere idea isn’t enough for a whole book.

But it’s enough for a story. It just hit me as I was reading up on the latest advances in the science of genetics: What if human intelligence, the vast jump from non-language-using animals to us talkers, came with a price?

There’s a long tradition of great one-idea stories in science fiction. Think of Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God.” It’s just a weird thought—it’s not as if Clarke actually believed in a religion where the purpose of the universe was for all of God’s names to be uttered. But it was a
fun
idea, and what did it cost?

There were no characters in “Nine Billion Names,” just as there are no characters in “Heal Thyself.” Oh, yes, technically there are, but the
whole point of the story isn’t any individual person’s choices, it’s about the social order. The characters exist only in order to have somebody see and understand this situation for the first time.

I’m in good company here. There are no significant characters in Clarke’s “The Star” or Asimov’s “Nightfall” or Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Just an idea, which the author shows us in a short story.

Of course, readers are the ones who decide whether the idea is interesting or truthful or fun enough to be worth the read. All I know is that I couldn’t let go of it until I wrote it down.

Todd memorized the solar system at the age of four. By seven, he knew the distance of every planet from the sun, including the perigee and apogee of Pluto’s eccentric orbit, and its degree of declension from the ecliptic. By ten, he had all the constellations and the names of the major stars.

Mostly, though, he had the astronauts and cosmonauts, every one of them, the vehicles they rode in, the missions they accomplished, what years they flew and their ages at the time they went. He knew every kind of satellite in orbit and the distances and orbits that weren’t classified and, using the telescope Dad and Mom had given him for his sixth birthday, he was pretty sure he knew twenty-two separate satellites that were probably some nation’s little secret.

He kept a shrine to all the men and women who had died in the space programs, on the launching pad, on landing, or beyond the atmosphere. His noblest heroes were the three Chinese voyagers who had set foot on Mars, but never made it home. He envied them, death and all.

Todd was going into space. He was going to set foot on another planet.

The only problem was that by the time he turned thirteen he knew he was never going to be particularly good at math. Or even
average
. Nor was he the kind of athletic kid who looked like an astronaut. He wasn’t skinny, he wasn’t fat, he was just kind of soft-bodied with slackish arms no matter how much he exercised. He ran to school every day, his backpack bumping on his back. He got bruises on his butt, but he didn’t get any faster.

When he ran competitively in PE he was always one of the last kids back to the coach, and he couldn’t ever tell where the ball was coming when they threw to him, or, when it left his own hand, where it was likely to go. He wasn’t the last kid chosen for teams—not while Sol and Vawn were in his PE class. But no one thought of him as much of a prize, either.

But he didn’t give up. He spent an hour a day in the back yard throwing a baseball against the pitchback net. A lot of the time, the ball missed the frame altogether, and sometimes it didn’t reach the thing at all, dribbling across the lawn.

“If I had been responsible for the evolution of the human race,” he said to his father once, “all the rabbits would have been safe from my thrown stones and we would have starved. And the sabertooth tigers would have outrun whoever didn’t starve.”

Father only laughed and said, “Evolution needs every kind of body. No one kind is best.”

Todd wouldn’t be assuaged so easily. “If the human race was like
me
, then launching rockets and going into space would have to wait for the possums to do it.”

“Well,” said Father, “that would mean smaller spaceships and less fuel. But where in a spacesuit would they stow that tail?”

Really funny, Dad. Downright amusing. I actually thought about smiling.

He couldn’t tell anybody how desperate and sad he was about the fact that he would probably have to become a high school drama teacher like his dad. Because if he
did
say how he felt, they’d make him go to a shrink again to deal with his “depression” or his “resentment of his father” the way they did after his mother disappeared when he was nine and Dad gave up on searching for her.

The shrink just wouldn’t accept it when he screamed at him and said, “My mother’s gone and we don’t know where she went and everybody’s stopped looking! I’m not depressed, you moron, I’m
sad
. I’m
pissed off
!”

To which the shrink replied with questions like, “Do you feel better when you get to call a grownup a ‘moron’ and say words like ‘pissed’?” Or, worse yet, “I think we’re beginning to make progress.” Yeah, I didn’t choke you for saying that, so I guess that’s progress.

Nobody even remembered these days that sometimes people were just plain miserable because something really bad was going on in their lives and they didn’t need a drug, they needed somebody to say “Let’s go get your mother now, she’s ready to come home,” or “That was a great throw—look, after all these years, Todd’s become a
terrific
pitcher and he’s great at math so let’s make him an astronaut!”

Ha ha, like that would ever happen.

Instead, he took a kitchen timer with him out to the back yard every afternoon, and when it went off he’d drop what he was doing and go inside and fix dinner. Jared kept trying to help, which was OK because Jared wasn’t a complete idiot even though he was only seven and certifiably insane. Todd’s arm was usually pretty sore from misthrowing the ball, so Jared would take his turn stirring things.

There was a lot of stirring, because when Todd cooked, he
cooked
. OK, he mostly opened soup cans or cans of beans or made mac and cheese, but he didn’t nuke them, he made them on the stove. He told Dad that it was because he liked the taste better when it was cooked that way, but one day when Jared said, “Mom always cooked on the stove,” Todd realized that’s why he liked to do it that way. Because Mom knew what was right.

It wasn’t
all
soup or beans or macaroni. He’d make spaghetti starting with dry noodles and plain tomato sauce and hamburger in a frying pan, and Dad said it was great. Todd even made the birthday cakes for all their birthdays, including his own, and for the last few years he made them from recipes, not from mixes. Ditto with his chocolate chip cookies.

Why was it he could calculate a half-recipe involving thirds of a cup, and couldn’t find
n
in the equation
n
= 5?

He took a kind of weird pleasure from the way Dad’s face got when he bit into one of Todd’s cookies, because Todd had finally remembered or figured out all the things Mom used to do to make her cookies different from other people’s. So when Dad got all melancholy and looked out the window or closed his eyes while he chewed, Todd knew he was thinking about her and missing her even though Dad
never
talked about her. I made you remember her, Todd said silently. I win.

Jared didn’t talk about Mom, but that was for a different reason. For a year after Mom left, Jared talked about her all the time. He would tell
everybody that the monster in his closet ate her. At first people looked at him with fond indulgence. Later, they recoiled and changed the subject.

He only stopped after Dad finally yelled at him. “There’s no monster in your closet!” It sounded like somebody had torn the words from him like pulling off a finger.

Todd had been doing the dishes while Dad put Jared to bed, and by the time Todd got to the back of the house, Jared was in his room crying and Dad was sitting on the edge of his and Mom’s bed and
he
was crying and then Todd, like a complete fool, said, “And you send
me
to a shrink?”

Dad looked up at Todd with his face so twisted with pain that Todd could hardly recognize him, and then he buried his face in his hands again, and so Todd went in to Jared and put his arm around him and said, “You’ve got to stop saying that, Jared.”

“But it’s true,” Jared said. “I saw her go. I warned her but she did the very exact thing I told her
not
to do because it almost got my arm the time I did it, and—”

Todd hugged him closer. “Right, I know, Jared. I know. But stop saying it, OK? Because nobody’s ever going to believe it.”

“You believe me, don’t you, Todd?”

Todd said, “Of course I do. Where else could she have gone?” Why not agree with the crazy kid? Todd was already seeing a shrink. He had nothing to lose. “But if we talk about it, they’ll just think we’re insane. And it made Dad cry.”

“Well he made
me
cry, too!”

“So you’re even. But don’t do it anymore, Jared. It’s a secret.”

“Same thing with the monster’s elf?”

“The monster itself? What do you mean?”

“The elf. Of the monster. I can’t talk about the elf?”

Geeze louise, doesn’t he let up? “Same thing with the monster’s elf and his fairies and his dentist, too.”

Jared looked at him like he was insane. “The monster doesn’t have a dentist. And there’s no such thing as fairies.”

Oh, right, lecture
me
on what’s real and what’s not!

So it went on, days and weeks and months, Todd fixing dinner and Dad getting home from after-school play practices and they’d sit down and eat and Dad would tell funny things that happened that day, doing all
the voices. Sometimes he
sang
the stories, even when he had to have thirty words on the same note till he came up with a rhyme. They’d all laugh and it was great, they had a great life . . .

Except Mom wasn’t there to sing harmony. The way they
used
to do it was they’d take turns singing a line and the other one would rhyme to it. Mom could always make a great rhyme that was exactly in rhythm with the song. Dad was funny about it, but Mom was actually
good
.

Grief is like that. You live on, day to day, happy sometimes, but you can always think of something that makes you sad all over again.

Everybody had their secrets, even though everybody else knew them. Jared had his closet monster
and
its elf. Dad had his memory of Mom, which he never discussed with anyone. Todd had his secret dreams of going to other worlds.

Then on a cool Saturday morning in September, a few weeks after his thirteenth birthday, he was out in the side yard, screwing the spare hose onto the faucet so he could water Mom’s roses, when he heard a hissing sound behind him and turned around in time to see a weird kind of shimmering appear in midair just a few feet out from the wall.

Then a bare child-size foot slid from nowhere into existence right in the middle of the shimmering.

If it had been a hairy claw or some slime-covered talon or the mandibles of some enormous insect, Todd might have been more alarmed. Instead, his fear at the strangeness of a midair arrival was trumped by his curiosity. All at once Jared’s talk about Mother disappearing in the closet because she did the same thing
he
did when the monster “caught his arm” didn’t sound quite as crazy.

The foot was followed, in the natural course of things, by a leg, with another foot snaking out beside it. The legs were bare and kept on being bare right up to the top, where Todd was vaguely disgusted to see that whoever was coming was
not
a child. It was a man as hairy as the most apelike of the guys in gym class, and as sweaty and naked as they were when they headed for the showers. Except that he was about half their size.