Tom Finder (5 page)

News.

Tom watched, hoping someone had reported a lost boy.

There was no lost boy reported, but he came again the next day. He came every day to watch the news and hoped that “McCullough Avenue” would be on.

Sometimes he listened to music while he was there.

“Got any Mozart?” Tom asked the clerk one day after he'd spent time staring at the notes in his notebook.

“Sorry. All out,” the clerk said, focusing his eyes on a grease stain on Tom's shirt.

A few days later, after he had found a clean shirt at the Sally Ann drop-off bin, Tom asked again. “Got any Mozart?”

This time the clerk looked in his eyes. Tom's throat closed. “You're hanging around here too much,” the clerk said.

Tom stayed away from the Future Shop for a while, until one day he woke up and knew he couldn't stay away any longer. He was sure that if he listened to Mozart, he'd remember something that would remind him of home.

On the way he stopped before the MAGIC FLUTE billboard. Someone had pinned a handwritten sign to it: Find God. Tom wondered if he had believed in God before the Forgetting. He wondered if God were playing some sort of cosmic hide-and-seek, which didn't seem fair since God could make Himself invisible if He wanted. If a guy was a Finder, though, that would make the game easier. If he were an invisible Finder, that would definitely even up the game a little. Samuel was so sure he was a Finder that sometimes Tom believed him. After a long day of searching and not finding Daniel or home, he knew it couldn't be true. Still, there was the pen, and the blanket, and the food.

The Future Shop was closed, and while he was waiting for the store to open Tom noticed the church next door had its door propped.

He figured that was likely a good place to look for God.

Tom peeked in. Before his eyes could adjust to the dark, he heard a man say, “Come in.”

Tom stepped in. Tom could make out a man in a black robe and white collar, a priest, probably. He could remember priests. The priest's hair was a tall pile of black curls on top of his head, as if his hair were trying to get to heaven first. He could see Tom. He glanced at him, smiled, and looked again. Tom's stomach didn't seem to mind this man seeing him.

“I'm just waiting for Future Shop to open,” Tom said.

“Ah.” The man's voice was old, but his face was young. “Sit, then.”

“I like to catch the morning news on one of the TVs,” Tom said. “I like to stay current.”

“You don't have a TV in your house?”

“Don't have a house,” Tom said.

The priest pressed his fingertips together and nodded thoughtfully. He didn't stare at Tom, but he didn't make Tom invisible either.

“Are you Catholic?” the priest asked.

“I forget,” Tom said. “I think so.” He thought maybe his family was Catholic, or maybe Buddhist.

“One doesn't forget if one is Catholic,” the priest said. “But we serve all God's children here. Rich or poor, it is all the same to God.”

“You must have found Him, then.”

“Who?”

“God.”

“Oh.” The man nodded, and so did his hair. He smiled. “It is not finding Him that is difficult, it is following Him that takes a lifetime. Are you hungry? I have some cookies in the office—”

“Do you talk to Him?” Tom asked.

The priest was silent for a time. “I do,” he said finally.

“Maybe you could tell Him about me,” Tom said. “Just in case He's forgotten.”

“God does not forget His children.”

Tom thought about the woman he had seen this morning sleeping on a park bench and wearing red high heels. She had such small feet.

“Well, just in case,” Tom said. “Have you ever run into a boy named Daniel Wolflegs?”

“Daniel. Good name.” He thought for a moment. “Tall?”

“I don't know,” Tom said. He dug the school photo out of his pocket and showed the priest.

“Yes. I haven't seen him in a while, though. First time I met him, some kids were egging the church. He chased them off. I saw him eating the eggs they left. Raw. I talked to him for a while, learned his name, but when I suggested he go home, he bolted.”

“Next time you see him, tell him Tom is looking for him. A nice guy. I'm always around.” Tom began to leave, then turned and added, “And next time you're talking to God, maybe you could tell Him that if rich or poor's all the same to Him, I'd rather be rich.”

“I'll do that,” the priest said. “I believe, however, you should approach him about it yourself.”

“Yeah. Well, Future Shop is open,” he said, and he left.

A new clerk gave Tom a Mozart CD. “It's
The Magic Flute,”
the clerk said.

“Hey, thanks,” Tom said brightly because of nice.

He put the headphones on.

He listened.

The first strains were familiar, beautiful . . . but . . .

He tore off the headphones.

Gravity.

When he saw the clerk staring at him, he realized that he was gasping like he'd just run a mile. Tom could feel that morning's distressed green apples in his stomach creeping back up into his mouth. He ran out of Future Shop and threw up into an open waste bin in the parking lot.

He needed to hide. Gravity was looking at him, concentrating all its efforts on him. He went around to the back of the church and crawled under the skirt of a large pine tree. He lay there breathing deeply for a long time, and then he fell asleep.

The priest found him in the morning. He bent down on his knees, looked under the tree, and got up again. A little while later he was back. He rolled two bagels to Tom, rolled them like tires toward him. Tom ate them before he came out. When he did, the priest was watching for him.

“Can I use the bathroom?” Tom asked.

The priest showed him the way.

“Shower,” he said, and he handed Tom a towel.

Showers, Tom decided, were one of the great inventions of mankind. In the shower, he knew that it wasn't Mozart's fault. He knew Mozart had won the hide-and-seek with God. He could tell that just by listening to his music for a minute. But there was gravity in it, serious gravity that squeezed out all your stomach contents. He thought he'd heard that music before, knew it in fact. Just those few bars made him see himself, dirty; made him smell himself. This was crazy, sleeping in a park like this. Why didn't he just go to the police and find his parents? Why didn't he do something, anything?

The priest invited him to sit in the chapel alone while he went about his work. Tom said, “Thank you.” He still didn't feel very good. He remembered the feeling of gravity in the music. This is what gravity could do to you if it decided to pick on you: it made you too heavy to get up and look for a job; it made your heart so heavy inside that you could feel it beating where your stomach should be, and how could you care about anything with your heart half-eaten-up like that? It made breathing take all your energy. Sitting up deserved applause; making yourself clean deserved a hero's medal.

Tom was suddenly angry. He wasn't going to let it. He was going to look up; he was going to look it in the eyeball, gravity's heavy, round, slimy eyeball.

He opened his book.

Something had happened to Tom, but that was the first thing he forgot. Too bad, because Tom, he was a nice guy.

He wrote in the margin beside this entry: Something bad, something to do with Mozart.

He puzzled over this for a moment. He wasn't sure if he was writing fiction or not. It had to be true, or it wasn't anything. Beside Tom found food, he wrote Tom is a garbage eater. In the margin beside Tom lives on Prince's Island, he wrote Tom evacuated in a public place.

He could write 2 + 2 = 5 if he wanted, he knew that, but if he did, nothing would ever make any sense. You only had to listen to a minute of Mozart to realize you had to figure things out. He just didn't know what was true. He didn't remember what was true.

Later in the afternoon, the priest sat down near Tom. He held out two new twenty-dollar bills.

Tom hesitated.

“We are all beggars before God,” the priest said, placing the money on the pew beside Tom.

Tom looked at his notebook. “I'm looking for a job. I'm saving to rent a billboard.”

The priest said nothing for a moment. His hair shook a little.

He folded his hands as if they were just sitting together being quiet on purpose.

“I asked about Daniel Wolflegs for you,” the priest said.

“You did?”

“Only one person I spoke with had seen him recently. He saw him . . .” He cleared his throat. “He saw him at a house where illegal substances can be purchased.”

“Where?”

“I don't know the address. This person called it . . . ‘The Eye.' That's all. The Eye.”

Tom knew right away where it was. It was an old house with a huge eye painted on the side of it. Suddenly, he felt good. He felt clean, full of bagels, rich, and like he was going to find Daniel, and then home, and soon this would all be over.

“I guess you don't believe in magic,” Tom said.

“What kind of magic?”

“A medicine man said I was a Finder.”

The priest nodded. “Did you find anything?”

“A pen,” Tom said.

The priest rubbed his beard and then folded his hands again.

“A magic pen,” Tom said. “And a blanket and a bakery dumpster . . .”

The priest considered his folded hands.

“Seems like whatever I write comes true,” Tom said.

The priest nodded, and after a time said, “This I do know: Words have the power to create and destroy, to wound and to heal. God created the world with words. One of His titles, in fact, is ‘The Word'.” He clasped and unclasped his hands. “Unfortunately, sometimes I am so busy with words that I forget that they cannot be eaten. Tom, will you let us help you? If you don't have a place to go, there are people who can help you.”

“I'm sure I have a home. My parents just haven't found me yet,” Tom said. “They might be rich so I can pay you back the money.”

“No. Please.” He stood up and put his hand on Tom's head. “I love you, my boy. Go to the police. Surely they will help you find your parents.”

Tom said,
I love you, too,
but not out loud. Something inside him said it, something in the vicinity of his wishbone.

So,
Tom thought,
that's where You are.

Tom left to find The Eye. On the way he stopped and wrote in his book, Tom found God.

Tom had seen the house before in his wanderings, and he easily found it again. As he came closer he could see that the pupil of the eye was a black bird or a pterodactyl or something. Tom stood on the sidewalk and took a deep breath.

P–T–E–R–O–D–A–C–T–Y–L.

He smiled and marched to the door. Someone was playing drums inside. He knocked. A man with hair down to his waist answered the door.

“I was told I might find Daniel Wolflegs here,” Tom said to him.

The man turned away and shouted, “There's a kid with a backpack here, looking for Daniel.”

Tom didn't hear the answer over the drums, but the man turned back to him and said, “Not here.”

“Do you know where—”

“Sorry.”

Tom put his left hand up to the door frame just as the man shut it. Slam. Tom could hear little bones snap. The door bounced open.

Tom knew a trick.

He separated his mind from his body.

His hand had just been murdered, but that had nothing to do with him. With his brain he wondered how he had learned to do that, while the whole time his hand was screaming.

The man with the long hair stared at Tom as if he were the living dead. He was afraid of Tom. Tom decided this was a power almost as good as fighting.

“I need to know if Daniel is really here or not,” Tom said. His voice hardly shook. “I have to talk to him.” Don't move the hand, he told himself. Don't move the hand. It had turned a grayish color and was oozing blood.

The man shook the hair from his face. His mouth was open, and his eyes were open wide. Tom wanted to cradle his hand in his chest, but he didn't.

“No. He's really not here. And I'm going to close this door now, whether your hand is in the way or not.”

Tom barely got his hand out of the way before the door slammed again.

Tom walked away, holding his hand upright against his chest.

The throbbing in his hand beat in time with his heart. He was all one piece now, his hand and his heart. His whole body hurt. He licked his hand as he walked. It cooled it.