No Book but the World: A Novel (28 page)

One morning he found himself across the skinny river from the back of a house he thought was Loreen’s. It was hard to tell because all the houses here were the same and they were all stuck together in a row, and also the chain-link fence between the houses and the river made them all look blurry. But behind this one house was a clothesline hung with all different pieces of Popsicle-colored underwear and he thought of Loreen’s green and purple bras and her pink and turquoise leopard spotted panties, and he stood there a long time, waiting for what he did not know. He just watched, his hands in the pockets of the smoky wool jacket, the blades of grass at his feet sketched white with frost. The river, sluggish and low between its banks, stank of cabbage. After a long time he heard a police siren, far off, but still: he turned and hurried away.

Other times he’d walk in the opposite direction, away from town, cutting across the soybean field that spread in rows beyond the salvage yard, and head deep into the forest. He’d come across old trails and follow them until they petered out, then forge his own. He looked for owl pellets, which he’d put in his pockets and bring back to the apartment to dissect. It gave him something to do at night, sitting at the table that was really a door. He’d soak the pellets in warm water and use the tweezers from Neel’s pocketknife to take them apart, separating the tiny bones from bits of fur and reassembling the skeletons according to his best guesses: hare, shrew, bat, vole.

He did not think about what might happen next. He did not think about what might not happen next. One afternoon he opened up June’s map and spread it out on the table, where he studied it for a long time. Then he folded it carefully along the creases and put it away. Inside his chest he could feel the nip of tiny metal teeth, the grinding of a tiny metal handle.

The morning he saw the boy Jimmy for the first time, he stood at the toaster-sized window in the bathroom and stared and stared. It was like a mirage. Like magic or a trick. Like seeing a boy standing at the edge of a cliff and then seeing only the empty edge of a cliff. He wondered if his eyes were fooling him, if it really was only a dog or a coyote, transfigured by the strength of his loneliness. It wasn’t until the boy lost his footing, falling partway down the junk heap, and said, “Shit,” the word distinct as a speech bubble printed on the vacant morning, that Fred stirred from the bathroom window, zipping his fly as he hurried to the door and jogged down the rickety metal stairs.

“S-ah hi,” he panted, slowing as he came up to the heap, where the boy sat on a fender inspecting a gash on his shin. He’d pulled up his pant leg to expose the cut, but at the sight of Fred he quickly lowered it and got to his feet.

No smile, no hello. Narrowed eyes that pulled down a little at the outsides. Big full cheeks like he was storing nuts in them.

Fred had his hands stuck up under his armpits, partly because it was cold, partly because he was afraid he’d flap his hands if they were loose. “Do you-ah need a Band-Aid?” he asked.

“No.”

“S’okay.”

“This is private property.” He had big front teeth. Even when he closed his mouth, a tiny bit peeked white through a gap in his lips. Fred had the thought he’d seen this boy before.

“S’ah, I know. I-ah live here.” Fred nodded in the direction of the garage.

The boy glanced at the metal stairs that led up to the second-floor apartment. When he turned, Fred saw how half his jaw was covered with a bruise, greenish-yellow with age.

“That’s my grandpa’s garage.”

“Ah-yeah.”

“Yeah. So who are you?”

Fred let his gaze slide away, over the boy’s head, over the pile of car parts, drawn toward the raw-looking sky. A ribbon of wood smoke crept from some unseen chimney, unfurling through the air. Fred’s stomach growled. It was pretty loud. The boy reddened and a grin broke out across his face, sudden and unbridled, only to get muscled back with a scowl.

“Ah-Fred,” said Fred, and immediately his stomach growled again, louder this time and longer. Fred listened to it thoughtfully. It was a thing kind of like farting. You couldn’t spell the sound it made.

The boy seemed to fight a little battle with himself, working to keep the scowl in place, but the next rumble from Fred was too much: he burst. His laughter was young and high and helpless. “Shit,” he said finally, still giggling. His shoulders and belly shook with it. “You hungry or something?”

Behind the boy, behind the junk heap and the aluminum storage shed and the dark, jagged pines along the far edge of the lot, the sun was just beginning to bore tiny little holes through the morning pall.

In general, never substitute the sign for the thing itself.

J
EAN-
J
ACQUES
R
OUSSEAU,
Émile: Or, Treatise on Education

THE THING ITSELF

I
T IS THE FIRST WEEK
of the new year and I am back in Perdu, back for a third time in Mrs. Tremblay’s saltbox house, in the mauve-and-blue room with the burn mark on the carpet and the white rattan table by the window, but it is different this time. Dennis is here with me.

We were at home in the living room—this was yesterday evening, right after supper—and I had just put down the phone. “That was Bayard Charles,” I told him. “He says there have been developments. Potentially good, he says, but he doesn’t want to raise false hopes. Something in the medical examiner’s report. I’m going to drive up in the morning.”

“Okay.”

“Would you come?” I was as surprised as he must have been to hear myself ask.

Dennis looked at me. “Of course.” Then nothing, a very pregnant sort of nothing, during which we gazed at each other actively and dumbly. Then after a moment he said it again, “Of
course
,” and we moved toward each other, fell almost literally into each other, our movements simultaneously tentative and urgent, and the waves that came over us were full of gratitude and forgiveness and remorse, everything mingled, nothing like the straightforward passion of our early years when sex had been celebratory and dirty, all swagger and prowess and culminating in splashy attainment. This was altogether a different thing, and if you’d told me at twenty-four that freighted, fraught intimacy could outshine the unencumbered kind, I wouldn’t have believed it, but this was something fine. It was startling and heartrending and lush with humility. We wound up on the brick hearth, my hair full of ashes and my head tender from where it had bumped against the andiron.

Being here is different this time, too, in that Mrs. Tremblay has warmed to me. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say I have warmed to her. At any rate I noticed some change the last time I came up, for five days in December. The absence of pretense was a relief: we both knew she knew who I was. Also I had a better sense of what to expect. The single-egg breakfasts were by then familiar to me, and seemed less parsimonious than endearingly prudent. I let myself move more freely through the house—not much more freely, but enough to make a cup of tea, say, in the afternoon, and on my last evening I had let myself read in the living room instead of up in the guest room. I sat on the couch across from Mrs. Tremblay in her recliner. We even made a little awkward small talk. I learned that the guest room had been her daughter’s bedroom growing up, that this daughter now lived in Toronto, that she was an optometrist, married, and had two children, “one of each.”

The same things that had seemed dismal and forbidding on my first visit had assumed a different cast by my second. No longer did the bedroom feel hauntingly barren, or the mustard plaid recliner grimly ugly. No longer did the sounds of Mrs. Tremblay moving about her kitchen (I still maintain she is uncommonly noisy in this regard) seem to carry reproach. Now I see my assumption on the first visit, that she must have looked at me askance, must have judged me poorly, was inextricably linked to my own judgmentalism, my limited vision of who
she
could possibly be.

When Dennis and I arrived here this afternoon, Mrs. Tremblay did not even bother removing her apron. It was the same bib apron of yellow gingham I’d seen her in before, and when she came to the door with it tied around her ample hips, I swear a lump rose in my throat.

“This is my husband, Dennis.”

She extended her hand. “Mr. Manseau.” It was at once a greeting and a correction. The house smelled of baking.

We are upstairs now, just the two of us, lying on top of the blue-and-mauve bedspread, resting before we head over to Criterion. We speak in low voices, as if not to be overheard, even though Mrs. Tremblay is downstairs in the kitchen and could not possibly hear. For some reason I have been taking enormous satisfaction in pointing out to Dennis every little detail I’d described to him previously. (“Did you catch the old-school telephone in the hall?” “That’s the little wicker desk I told you I would sit at to write.” “Doesn’t her mouth really look like she’s sucking on a hard candy?”) Each one another proof that my stories about the place have all been true. From downstairs comes the sound of what could only be a drawer full of silverware being poured down a metal chute. I turn to Dennis. I have told him about this, too: the decibel level of Mrs. Tremblay’s routine housework. “See!” I whisper, vindicated.

His eyes crinkle. He kisses me twice.

The ivy on the windowpane has gone skeletal with the season; leafless and scraggly, it has a wild beauty. Its tendrils whorl and grope across the glass. I think of the giants we used to pretend lived under the woods, stretched out in great warrens there; think, too, of the pair of crooked pines, bent toward each other like cupped hands. The ghost children we used to imagine peeking out at us from behind the trees, with their queer, grainy, film-projector light: the specters, we told ourselves, of former students. I think of those former students themselves, immortalized in black and white on Neel’s office walls, extending back through the story of his life long before we came on the scene, before we even existed; I think of their hold on his imagination, as insistent and tenacious as the winter ivy. I realize my whole life I have thought of them as superior to us, to Fred and me. I have thought of them as Neel’s preferred children: those Jills and Johns who populated his books, who populated Batter Hollow in its heyday, who
gave
Batter Hollow its heyday, gave Neel’s philosophies form, outlet, life.

“It’s snowing,” says Dennis.

So it is. Flakes as fat as goose feathers. While I have been looking at the pane, he has been looking through it.

•   •   •

I
N
C
RITERION WE FEED
a nickel into the parking meter, cross the green, go up the narrow, wood-paneled, banana-smelling staircase, and open the door with
Bayard Charles, Esq.
stenciled on the glass. Inside, the same clutter as before. I watch Dennis take it in: the stacks and stacks of books, the file folders spilling their contents like sloppily assembled sandwiches, manila envelopes, legal pads, yellowing magazines and journals, also tabloids and circulars and shopping catalogs and phone books and bags from the drugstore and loose receipts, and under this thick, variegated blanket of paper the vague shapes of sturdier objects: treadmill, photocopier, bookshelves, filing cabinets, folding tables and chairs.

The granddaughter is installed behind the reception desk as before, reading in the glow of the amber-shaded lamp. When she sees us, she marks her place in her romance novel with a finger. “I’ll just let him know you’re here.” We get a cursory flash of dimples before she ducks through the door.

“I’m having déjà vu,” I whisper to Dennis, although that is not quite the right term for it. I feel as if I’ve stumbled onto a kind of loop, and a weird dread comes over me, as if I am trapped in a world I could never hope to impact, fixed in some unremitting, unvarying pattern. All at once I find myself thinking again of Freddy at the music festival when we were children; the way, when the audience began to clap rhythmically, he hurled himself, in a fit of agony or rage, onto the ground. Or that’s not quite right, either. I’m not thinking—I’m just seeing him,
feeling
him as he was that day, curled fetally in the dust below the stage, his eyes screwed shut, his mouth agape, any sound he might have been making lost, ineffectual, within the noise of the crowd. Then I’m seeing him, feeling him on the day we met Kitty under the sassafras tree: her smooth, pert face and the roundhouse motion of his arm as he brought the wooden spoon cracking down upon her cheek. And I feel myself on the verge of grasping something vital about his need to disrupt, to alter. As if in another moment it will all become clear: I will be able to put into words—explain convincingly to others—why this impulse in him is benign, why it is natural.

A line from Rousseau muscles into my head, not one I recall Neel ever spouting, not one I’d ever seen burned into wood. I didn’t even know I had this line stored in my brain, but it comes to me now as if from some deep recess of memory. Something about a child’s wish to disarrange whatever he sees:
Whether he makes or unmakes matters not; it suffices that he changes the state of things
.

Isn’t this really what he desired, to change the state of things? As a way of validating his presence, his mattering. Fred’s rhythms—really his arrhythms, his drummings and tappings and bouncings and rappings, for which I’d long ago accepted the lofty, Neelesque interpretation that they were based in a need to resist order, resist the conventions of civilized society—were, I think suddenly, nothing so complex. That was a story we told ourselves about them, a way of ennobling the action and painting Freddy as a kind of idealized figure, the ideal Batter Hollow boy. In fact, while I knew I was never the model Jill for any of Neel’s writings, I have long believed Fred really
was
his John, the closest living example of the model pupil he had in mind.

Yet it seems to me now that Fred’s destructive urges stemmed from a more basic need: simply to know his own agency. To know himself not powerless. Which is not a quirk, an oddity, but a need we all share.

Oh! I think of Dilly now, biting down with her new white teeth on her mother’s finger, and the delighted chortle she gave when Kitty screamed in pain and surprise: her utter and gleeful lack of remorse.

Through the window of Bayard Charles’s outer office, we can see the snow falling under the streetlights. The flakes are smaller now and more plentiful than the goose-feather stuff. This snow will add up to something; already I see it is accumulating on the cannon in the green and on the tops of cars.

Bayard Charles comes out to greet us. The same looming figure, his sharp little eyes like caraway seeds tucked into a doughy bun. Hearty handshakes all around. He says
Mr. Manseau
and
Mrs. Manseau
and
Please, come in
,
Please sit down
, and we are in his inner chamber now. The condensed smell of cough syrup. The clutter, even more intense than that of the outer office. The little row of picture frames lined up on his desk, their backs to us.
Lisa, would you bring some waters, please?
and a few niceties about the drive, about the weather, about the new year, while we wait for the waters: warm, tap, served in plastic cups.
Thanks, sweetheart
, he says, and on her way out she shuts the door.

“Well,” Mr. Charles rumbles in his sonorous bass. And folds his large, brown-spotted hands leisurely upon his desk. I understand that this is simply the tempo at which he operates, but I am too impatient not to prompt: “You say there have been positive developments?”

He looks first at me, then at Dennis, and nods, allowing an expression almost of amazement to settle over his face.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I believe so. Including now something that came to my attention since we last spoke, just this afternoon.” He taps a folder on the desk in front of him. “Might be game-changing. Don’t say that lightly. Didn’t expect . . . well, don’t often see something like this.”

In all, he tells us, the new developments number three.

First, the medical expert—the one Dennis and I have scraped to pay for—has been, Mr. Charles says he’s pleased to inform us, very well worth it. The expert found, in examining the autopsy report, what he is willing to testify are clear indications that the victim’s fractures (wrist and rib) are old injuries.

“Old?”

Mr. Charles nods, opens the folder, refers to the top sheet a moment. “It seems there’s a kind of cartilage that gets formed during healing, and this stuff eventually ossifies into new bone tissue. And in both the wrist and rib fractures, this process was well under way.”

“Meaning the injuries would have occurred when?”

“Hard to pinpoint, but well before the time the boy was found in Meurtriere State Forest. The more important thing is, well before the victim is alleged to have had first contact with the accused.”

“Before . . .”

“Before your brother arrived in Perdu.”

“Then someone else hurt him?”

He is quick to shrug. “Can’t prove it was anyone’s fault. Could be the result of an accident. Or accidents, plural.” But, Mr. Charles says, further details in the autopsy report point to additional previously incurred injuries—“burns on both palms,” he reads, “and scarring on the back”—of the sort the medical expert would be willing to testify are consistent with those commonly seen when there is a history of abuse.

“Oh. But . . . oh.”

Dennis touches my arm.

Mr. Charles draws a breath and closes his eyes, as though his next utterance—and it easily qualifies as the longest unbroken sentence I have ever heard him produce—requires his full concentration. “Mr. and Mrs. Manseau, we may be looking at a case that would bring more light to other parties’ liability regarding harm done to James Ferebee over the course of his short lifetime than to any such liability on the part of the accused.” He opens his eyes. “Understand, other parties haven’t been charged with any crime. They never will be. But that’s not to say it wouldn’t be deeply unpleasant for certain parties if any of these suggestions were to be raised—or even hinted at—at trial.”

I think of the Ferebee abode, that dark green ranch house they showed on TV. The “family friend” they interviewed on the porch, her rasping voice,
He shouldn’ta died and it’s terrible how it happened
, and the indeterminate face glimpsed fleetingly as the camera panned away at the end, the face of some person unwilling or unable to do more than peer out from behind the window beside the door.

“But it isn’t up to the family, is it?” I ask. “Whether this goes to trial.”

“Correct. It’s up to the district attorney.”

“And even if this changes some things, it wouldn’t change everything, right? I mean, the other evidence, the other charges. The part that when they found James Ferebee he was . . . he didn’t have any clothes—”