The Open Curtain (9 page)

Rudd read it over, made a few corrections.

“What are you writing?” his mother wanted to know.

“Nothing,” he said. “It wouldn’t interest you.”

“Come on, darling,” she said. “It wouldn’t hurt you to share your life with me.”

He stood and in a state of agitation began walking all about the room, the two loose pages pressed against his chest, words facing in. His mother stayed in the doorway, leaning slightly against the frame.

“It’s a paper,” he said, “for school. Satisfied?”

“That wasn’t so bad now, was it?” she said. “Can I see it?”

“You mean,
may
you see it?” he said, and rushed past her and out.

He meant to recopy it but ran out of time and ended up turning in the rumpled handwritten sheets, smoothing them out by drawing them taut along the desk edge, as if they were the strop for a razor. When he finished they curled slightly. Mrs. Madison smiled when she took them.

Yet the next day as class was beginning, she asked if he would speak with her afterwards. There was a matter they needed to discuss.

“But I have wood shop,” he said. “Rotkin. Can’t be late.”

“It won’t take long,” she suggested.

He sat through class, hardly listening. She was speaking about the next stage of the research paper, he vaguely gathered. Now that you had a summary you had to think about how to make an argument. What is an argument? she asked. An
argument
is where you
argue
for or against something.
Circular logic,
he thought, but even as he thought it she had begun to rephrase: An argument is where you are for or against something.

What am I for or against?
Rudd asked himself.
What do I feel strongly about?
Nothing really, or not much. He felt strongly about his mother, but it is one thing to feel strongly about something and another thing to know
what you
actually feel. To say that feelings are strong says little about what the feelings are. He could not say that he hated his mother or that he loved her, the feelings were far too jumbled for him to be able to sort them out so easily.
This must be true,
he tried to convince himself,
with anything you care about.

When the bell rang, he gathered his backpack and started to leave, and then remembered and waited fidgety near the door, ill at ease, not quite sure how to stand. He tried putting his backpack over one shoulder, then held it hanging from one hand near his waist. Mrs. Madison was talking to Jenny Kindt but seemed to be trying to break away from her.

I will give her until the count of ten,
he told himself,
and then I will leave.

But when he had finished counting he instead shifted his weight to the other leg, let his loose hand toy with the hem of his shirt. By twenty, Mrs. Madison had stopped talking, was moving things about on her desk, cheeks slightly flushed.

What would it be like,
he wondered,
to be Hooper Young and look at a woman and know you intended to kill her?

He looked immediately away from his teacher, searching for other objects to occupy his attention. A desk, the straps of the backpack biting into his hand, the weave of the puke-colored carpet,
What am I for or against?

Unless Young didn’t know,
he thought.
Unless he didn’t know he would kill her until she was already dead.

He shook his head, dizzy. If you didn’t know for certain what you might do in advance, you were capable of anything. There was nothing solid to you. He asked himself what he was for or against again and considered some tentative answers, but they were all so general and vague that they rang hollow. Hooper Young had not been for or against anything: he had been “easily influenced.”
There was nothing to Hooper Young and nothing to me,
he thought, and knew that Lael’s belief in an actual Elling was safer, less dizzying. But Rudd couldn’t convince himself that Elling existed, not really, unless Elling was a part of Hooper Young. Which was at least as bad, for who was to say who else was hidden in the folds of your brain, waiting to worm their way out? Better at least to think there was volition, that Young had known beforehand, maybe even that he had killed her to prove something to himself. Better still: believe he had plotted and planned the killing for years.

But he could not believe it.

“I’m worried about you, Rudd,” Mrs. Madison claimed. “Concerned.”

He looked at her with dull eyes, stared at her prim mouth.

“This summary,” she said. “You’ve not exactly chosen a savory topic.”

Savory?
he thought. “No,” he said. “But I did get three of my four areas.”

“Don’t you have a hero, Rudd?” she asked, and he flicked his eyes up
long enough to see her eyebrows crease with slight pity. It hurt him. “No one? Boys who don’t have heroes end up in trouble.”

“No,” he said.

“Everybody needs a hero,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“This,” she said, and he realized she was waving his summary in his hand. “This, this Young fellow. What interests you about him?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I worry that he’s becoming a hero of sorts for you.”

“Look,” he said. “It’s just an assignment. I didn’t even want to do it. I said in there he
wasn’t
my hero. I didn’t choose my topic, my topic chose me.”

“Don’t,” she said. “Please. No need to get upset.”

“I’m not upset,” he said. “Or yes, I am, but it’s just … I’m going to be late for Rotkin’s class.”

“Under the circumstances,” she said. “You being from a troubled home and all—”

—
A troubled home?
he wondered. What did she mean,
a troubled home?
He and his mother were both smack dab in
the common sector,
no different from anyone else—

“—I think it would be better for you to choose another topic. One with a hero.”

He shook his head.

“At least think it over,” she said. “I’m not going to
force
you to change. I just want what’s best for you. Just think it over.”

“I’ll think about it,” he said.

She reached out and touched his shoulder. It made him flinch. He found himself out in the near-deserted hall, halfway to Rotkin’s shop, before he realized he had forgotten to ask her for a late note.

He would give it up. He knew he would choose another topic, even before he made it to Rotkin’s door and went in to be confronted with the greasy-haired, ovoid teacher standing in a blue smock and wearing horn-rimmed safety goggles, greeting Rudd with his perennial “About time you showed up, Mr. Tardy.” He would choose something that was thoroughly grounded in the
common sector,
something that wouldn’t allow him to be singled out, at least not in that way. He hated to be defined as worthy of pity. He wanted to be above the crowd, not below it, or if being above were not possible, just
part of it, nameless and mixed in. By the next day he had a new summary, a benign topic, Reed Smoot, an early Mormon U.S. Senator, and it was all Mrs. Madison could do not to embrace him.

“I knew you could do it, Rudd,” she said. “I just knew you could!”

When he told Lael about it the next Saturday, he just smirked.

“What did you think would happen?” Lael asked. “People don’t want to face things.”

“What things?”

“Things,” said Lael. “It doesn’t matter what.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Teaching’s not about truth. It’s about comfort.”

“You don’t even know her. How can you say that?” He was talking too loud, he knew.

“I was right about her before. I’m right now.”

“Leave her alone,” said Rudd.

“You’re the same way,” said Lael. “The truth’s all around you yet you want no part of it. Why?”

Rudd got up from the grass and started pacing. “What the Hell do you know?” he said. “Motherfuck.” The word came out singsongy and ridiculous, hardly a curse.

“Motherfuck yourself,” said Lael calmly. “You want stability. You want to fit in. You don’t want to see yourself as you really are.”

“What’s truth anyway?”

“Don’t be clever.”

“But—”

“Cut it out,” said Lael. “Listen for once.”

Rudd closed his mouth, opened it again. He walked over and stood by the scooter. He stared at it, one hand in his jacket pocket, then thumped the seat loudly with his other half-closed fist.

Maybe Lael was right, he told himself, then told himself no, not right at all. It was like that on the silent ride back home, then that evening, then as he lay in bed. He hated Lael and then a minute later loved him, no transition between the two emotions. A strange two-fold vibration between extremes, a leap between one extreme and another, no middle ground between.

It had been a stupid thing to argue about, he knew that, but he was angry. He resented Lael. His brother did not care about him, he told himself, that was something he had not wanted to face, but he would face it
now. And how did he know Lael was his brother anyway? Nothing was certain. He had never spoken directly about it to Lael’s mother, except for the first time he called. Then, while stuttering and confused he had tried to piece together the story, she had interrupted brightly and almost airily: “You’re a boy, right? You must want to speak to my son,” and then hung up. That was all she had said, and it was clear from the little he had seen of her since that she wasn’t exactly sane. She had never said, “Your father is Lael’s father.” True, Lael hadn’t denied it after listening to Rudd’s story. But Lael was the type to go along with things just to see where they would lead.

Yet if Lael wasn’t his brother, who did he have?

No one,
he told himself, and then,
My mother.

That was not much. He stood and went to the window, pushed the curtains apart with his hand. There was no moon. The streetlight had nearly gone out. It gave off only a pale orange glow that lit the top of its pole and little more. He could see through the streaked pane the Milky Way above, unless it was just streaks, and pale clumps of stars. Closing the curtains, he returned to bed.

What had Hooper Young wanted?
he asked himself.
Certainly not the truth.

I don’t need anyone,
he told himself.
Truth is overrated.
He lay in the dark, fingers softly rubbing the wool blanket. He could feel himself starting to fall asleep, his legs and face numbing until it seemed as if the sole thing that existed, suspended in a void, were his fingertips, and, around each, a few square inches of wool, his soul crowded into what little was left of him, then that fading too until it was gone.

He thought of nothing but Lael through the whole course of the week, but when Saturday arrived, he couldn’t bring himself to call. He uncradled the telephone and held it in his hand, rubbed the earpiece against his scraggly chin, then replaced it.

He spent Saturday lolling around the house. He lay in bed until late, past noon, and when his mother called him lazybones—it indicated a good mood, for her—he said nothing and still didn’t get up. He didn’t wash and when he ran his hand through his hair felt the skin between his fingers go greasy.

He decided to look through his father’s old books. He thumbed through them without reading them. In the rafters of the attic, there was a stack of gnawed newspapers bound in twine. He took them down, bringing down a slow sift of torn scraps and dust with them. Untying them, he discovered
five tiny, eyeless, pink baby mice in a chewed-out space in the middle, their only movement a near-convulsive shuddering. He dropped them one by one through the dormer window, watched each roll down the black shingles into the gutter.

He spent the better part of the afternoon looking at his hands, nails flecked with white streaks, knuckles large probably from his having cracked them ever since he was a child. His mother caught him staring, asked if everything was O.K.

“Fine,” he said.

“At church tomorrow—” she started.

“—I’m not going to church tomorrow,” he said.

He could not look at her while he said it. He heard her wheeze. “Excuse me?” she said, her voice severe. His heart was beating terrifically, though he told himself that there was no reason to worry, that he was long past caring about what she thought, though he knew he did care, fuck all.

“Excuse me?” she said.

“You heard me,” he said.

“I swear, your father would roll over in his grave.”

“Let him roll.”

For the rest of the day that phrase was stuck in his head,
Let him roll,
sliding around with a kind of mute doom that was hard to evade. His mother had stomped out. When, near evening, she came back, he made no attempt to reconcile with her.
Let him roll,
he thought from the doorway, watching her core and slice a head of lettuce at the sink, the dull knife bruising the edges of each leaf. She turned and looked at him and he fled.

She did not call him to dinner, and he told himself he wouldn’t come if she did call. Before she went to bed, he heard her walking around the house turning off the lights. He thought she might stop outside his door, but she didn’t.
I don’t need anyone,
he thought, and snuck into the kitchen to find his plate cellophaned in the fridge. He ate it, he tried to believe, not for himself but for her benefit, to keep her from worrying. It was an act of kindness to her, though he had enough spite left to eat the food cold.

He spent the night wandering the darkened house, dragging his hand along the walls, imagining that he was establishing a tactile knowledge of the house that would come in handy if he went blind. Then she would be sorry. He awoke on the floor of the half-attic, dust drifting in the sunlight coming through the window. He couldn’t remember falling asleep there. He
went into the bathroom and splashed his face with water, then called for his mother. She didn’t answer.

The car was gone, his mother already at church. She had left his black leatherbound scriptures on the kitchen table. Next to them was a crudely drawn map to the church, with just two squares indicated, one marked “House,” the other marked “Church.” An arrow pointed from the first to the second. “In case you forgot the way,” was written on the bottom. On the table she had also spelled out the word HELL in white grains that he took for salt but which, tasting, he found to be sugar.