by Ned Vizzini
“Hey, Bobby,” I interrupt. “Any way I can get yours and Johnny’s phone numbers to talk to you after you leave?”
Johnny starts to say something, but Bobby leans in and stops him: “It’s not a good idea, Craig.”
“What? Why?”
He sighs. “I’ve been in and out of this place a lot, right?”
“Yeah.”
“There are good things about this place; I mean, the food is the best around; there are good people here . . . but it’s still not a place to meet people.”
“Why not? I met you guys and you’re really cool!”
“Yeah, well, all the worse, then, when you try to call me or Johnny up and find out that we’ve OD’ed, or been shot, or come back here even worse, or just disappeared.”
“That’s a pretty negative view.”
“I’ve seen it before. You just remember us, okay? We meet in the outside world, it just ruins it. You’ll be embarrassed of me and I . . .” He smiles. “… I might be embarrassed of me, too. And I might be embarrassed of you, if you don’t keep your stuff together.”
“Thanks. You sure no numbers?”
Bobby shakes my hand. “If we need to, we’ll meet.”
Johnny shakes my hand. “What he said.”
The last guy in line is Jimmy.
“I tell you, what’d I say? You play those numbers—”
“It’ll come to ya!” I answer.
“It the truth!” He grins.
Ah, Jimmy. What’s in Jimmy’s brain? Chaos. I do up his nearly bald head and shoulders and then start putting the most complicated, unnecessary, wild highways through him from ear to ear. I connect them in intricate spaghetti ramps. In one nexus, five highways meet; I have to erase and redraw the ramps a few times. Then I put in the grid—a grid laid out by a hyperactive designer, with blocks going in all different directions. When Jimmy’s brain map is done it might look the best—a catalog of a schizophrenic mind, but one that works somehow.
“Here you go,” I tell him. He’s sitting in a seat that he took next to me to watch me work.
“It’ll come to ya!” he says, and takes the map. I want him to finally open up, to call me Craig, to tell me that we came in together, but he’s still Jimmy— his vocabulary is still limited.
We sit back in our respective chairs; I doze off a bit. Making art on demand is tiring. But the last thing I see before I go to sleep is Jimmy unfolding his brain map next to me and comparing with Ebony, who says of course hers is a lot prettier. That’s not a bad thing to go to sleep to.
forty-seven
“Craig, are you okay?” Mom asks. I jolt up and I have a momentary seizure that it was all a dream, all of it—the whole Sixth North bit—but then I wonder, where would the dream start? If it were a nightmare, it would have to have started somewhere before I got bad; it would be like a yearlong dream. You don’t have those. And if it were a good dream, that would mean I was still back where it started, leaning over my parents’toilet or lying in bed listening to my heart. I didn’t need that.
“Yeah! I’m—whoa.” I sit up. They’re all there— Dad, Mom, Sarah.
“Are you forcing yourself to sleep?” Mom asks. “Are you depressed?”
“Are you on drugs?” Sarah asks. “Can you hear me?”
“I was taking a nap! Jeez!”
“Oh, okay. It’s six o’clock.”
“Wow, I was asleep for a while. I was drawing my brain maps for people.”
“Oh, boy,” says Dad. “This doesn’t sound good.”
“What are brain maps?” Sarah asks.
“That’s his art,” says Mom. “This is why he wants to change schools. Making this art makes you happy, right Craig?”
“Yeah, wanna see?”
“Absolutely.”
I take the stack from beside me and pass it around. This is really what I was creating the stack for, I think; to show my parents.
“Some of the best were the ones I just did, for the patients.”
“Very original,” Dad says.
“I like this one,” says Sarah, pointing at the pig with quasi-St. Louis inside him.
“You put a lot of time into these, I see,” Mom says.
“Right, that’s the thing: they don’t actually take me much time,” I explain. “I’m starting to get a little bored of them, actually; I want to move to something else.”
“So how are you feeling, Craig?” Dad puts the stack back on the floor.
“You look a lot better,” Mom says.
“I do?”
“Yeah,” Sarah says. “You don’t look all freaky as much.”
“I used to look freaky?”
“She doesn’t mean freaky,’” Mom tells us both. “She just means that when you were down, you looked a little under the weather. Isn’t that right, Sarah?”
“No, he looked freaky.”
“A flat affect, that’s what the doctors call it.” I smile.
“Right, well you don’t have that as much anymore,” Sarah says.
“So you want to quit school?” Dad brings us back to the real-deal stuff.
“I don’t want to quit.” I turn to him. “I want to transfer.”
“But that means quitting the school you’re currently at—”
“He can’t handle the other school!” Sarah says. “Look at—”
“Hold on a second. I can talk,” I say. “Guys.” I look at all three of them in turn. “One thing that they do in here is give you a lot of time to think. I can’t explain it; once you come in, time just slows down—”
“Well, you don’t have any interruptions, that’s probably it—”
“Also I think the clocks are a little off—”
I wave my hand. “Point is, you have time to think about how you got here. Because obviously, nobody wants to come back. I don’t want come back—”
“Good. Me neither,” says Dad. “What I said last time, about actually wanting to be here; that was a joke.”
“Right. Hey, did you bring the movie?”
“Of course. I can watch some of it with you, right?”
“Absolutely. So anyway, I’ve been thinking about when things started getting bad for me. I realized: it started after I got into high school.”
“Uh-huh,” Mom says.
“That was the happiest moment of my life. The happiest day. And from there on it was all downhill.”
“Right, this happens to a lot of adults,” Dad says.
“Will you stop interrupting him?” Sarah interrupts. Dad folds his hands behind him and straightens his back.
“It’s okay, Sarah. I just… I think I was concentrated on getting into Executive Pre-Professional because it was like, a challenge. I wanted to have that feeling of triumph. I never really thought about the fact that I’d have to, you know, go to the school.”
“So you want to do art,” Mom says.
“Well, let’s consider. I never really liked math. I was good at it, but only because I liked having basic information in front of me to get through, to reach that feeling of accomplishment. I never really liked English. This"—I point at the brain maps—"this is something different. This is something I love. So I’d better do it.”
“You’d better love it,” Dad says. “Because it’s a hard life. It’s mostly the artists who end up in places like this.”
“Well, then he has to be an artist; that’s where he is!” Sarah says.
“Heh. It’s pretty simple.” I stand up. “Take a look around. I tried to go to the best high school in the city. And this is where I ended up.”
“True.” Mom looks behind her. Solomon rushes across our field of view.
“If I don’t make some kind of big change, I’m going to come out of here wondering how anything is different from before, and I’m going to end up right back here.”
“Right,” says Mom. “I’m with you, Craig.”
“What art school are you going to go to?” Dad asks.
“Manhattan Arts Academy?
It’s easy to transfer to with my grades—”
“Oh, but Craig, that’s the school for kids who are all screwed up,” Dad says.
I look at him. “Yeah? Dad?” I raise my wrist, show him the bracelets. I have pride in them now. They’re true, and people can’t screw with them. And when you say the truth you get stronger.
Dad stands still for a minute, looks down at his feet, and then looks up.
“Okay,” he says. “We’ll do whatever we have to do. You have to stay in school until you transfer, though. That’s going to be . . . until the end of the year at least, I think.”
“I’ll handle it,” I say.
“I know you will. We’ll help.”
“Dinner, get ready for dinner!” President Armelio walks toward us. “Craig and his family, dinner is almost here!”
“How’ve you been eating?” Mom asks as I stretch my legs.
“I have been. That’s good.”
“It’s wonderful, Craig.”
“Okay, so I’m leaving the DVD here with you.” Dad hands it to me. “And I’m going to be back to watch it when you’re done with dinner. When will that be?”
“Seven is good. But visiting hours end at eight. You won’t get to watch the whole thing.”
“We’ll see how long I can stay. You might be surprised.”
I swallow. I actually don’t want him sticking around that long. I’ll make sure Smitty gets him out.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Mom says. “The staff tells us we’re picking you up early in the morning, before I go to work.”
“I’ll be ready.”
“We’ve got lots of good food at home.”
“I’ll see you when I come home from school.” Sarah hugs my waist. “I’m so happy you’re back.”
I pat her head. “Are you embarrassed by this place?”
“Yeah, but whatever.”
“I am too,” I say. “It’s just a good type of embarrassment.”
forty-eight
Blade II… well, you have to like action movies to like it. I myself am a big fan of action movies. They’re like the blues; there’s a certain formula. You have the hero and the villain and the girl. The hero is going to almost die but not quite, and if there’s a dog it’ll be the same story with him. There’s going to be one sub-villain with a distinguishing facial characteristic, and he’s going to get killed in a printing press or a pool.
The plot of Blade II is that Blade is a guy who runs around killing vampires. He wears a leather coat with a sword stuck in the back of it; he regularly just walks around with this thing. I guess it’s possible that you could walk around a city with a sword and not have people notice, but the chances of your not cutting your butt open seem close to nil, especially if you’re running or doing jump flips.
Now, the real kicker is the way the vampires die. They digitally dissolve into multicolored ash—in slow motion. I could watch these vampires die all day. It’s so clean the way they go; they don’t leave a body or anything.
I explain all this to Humble as we help Monica roll out the TV from the activity center and plug it in. Monica has no idea how to use a DVD—the whole metal shiny disc concept scares her. We pop it in and have to hit the TV a few times to get it going, but then it’s blasting into our eyes: Blade killing his first swath of vampires in Prague by skidding down fire escapes, jumping over motorcycles, and stabbing dudes with his sword.
The audience is a good cross-section of Six North—Humble, Bobby, and Johnny; the Professor; Ebony; the new guy Human Being; Becca; and Dad. He came in right at seven and sat down in the corner, staying very quiet, blending in. Jimmy came by as soon as he heard the noise of the film and took a seat beside him.
“Hello,” Dad said.
“Your son?” Jimmy asked, pointing at me.
“Yes.”
“How sweet it is!”
Dad nodded and said, “Yes, yes it is.”
On the screen, Blade slices a vampire right through from his groin up to his skull.
“Whoa, this is wild,” says Humble. “Did you see that? That’s worse than gonorrhea, man.”
“Did you ever have gonorrhea?”
“Please. I’ve had everything. You know what they say: the Jews cut ‘em off, the Irish wear ‘em off.”
“Ewwww,” I say. “You’re Irish?”
“Half,” says Humble.
“Could you be quiet? I’m trying to watch the film,” the Professor says.
“Oh, don’t start. You don’t care about this movie; Cary Grant’s not in it,” says Humble.
“Cary Grant was a real man. Don’t you say anything about him.”
“I can say whatever—”
“What’s that guy doing?” Bobby asks.
“He’s sucking that girl’s blood, can’t you see?”
“I thought she was a vampire, though.”
“So? Vampires have blood.”
“Vampires ain’t got no blood,” says Human Being. “Vampires ain’t got nothing but green running in their veins, and green means money.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Humble says. “If you drink blood, how are you not going to have blood?”
“I met a lotta vampires in my time, and their blood was always green. Been sucking me dry in their little temples.”
“What temples?” Becca asks. “I go to temple. You better not be talking about the Jewish people.”
“I’m Jewish too,” says the Professor. “That’s why they tried to insecticide my house.”
Noelle walks toward the TV from down the hall, wearing a long black skirt and a white top with little frills around the shoulders, locking eyes with me. I look around; no seat for her.
Dad notices as soon as she becomes visible. He leans over and gives me a look:
So is this why you’ve been feeling better, son?
I shrug.
She comes up to me. “There’s nowhere to sit.”
“Here!” I stand up and point at my armrest.
She sits down right in the middle of the chair. “Ooh, you warmed it! Thank you.”
“No, I meant—where am I going to sit?”
She pats the armrest.
“Darn, girl.”
I sit down and we watch Blade slice up some more vampires. Topics discussed among the audience include surgery, the moon, chicken, prostitution, and jobs in the Sanitation Department. Dad leans back and lets his eyes fall; I had a feeling that would happen. As soon as I see him breathing heavy and steady I get up, go to Smitty, and I tell him that it’s after eight o’clock.
“You want me to kick out your own Dad?” he asks.
“I need to be independent,” I say.
“All right.” Smitty walks down the hall with me. “Mr. Gilner—I’m sorry; visiting hours are over.”
“Oh, hm!” He gets up. “Right. So, Craig, you’ll bring this back tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” I tell him. “Thanks.”
“Thank you for getting here and getting help.” He hugs me. Smitty backs away. It’s a big hug, and long, and right in front of the television, but no one says anything.
“I love you,” I mumble. “Even though I’m a teenager and I’m not supposed to.”
“I love you too,” Dad says. “Even though … eh . . . No. I don’t have any jokes about it. I just do.”
We separate and shake hands and he makes his way down the hall, waving without looking back.
“Good-bye Mister Gilner!” a chorus of those paying attention calls out.
I dip down next to Noelle, whisper in her ear. “That’s one; I gotta settle one more thing, and then I’ll see you in my room.”
“Okay.”
I walk down the hall and pop into my room, where Muqtada is putting his distinctive shape in the bed, turned toward the window, in his continuous dead reverie.
“Muqtada?”
“Yes.”
“You remember how you wanted Egyptian music?”
“Yes, Craig.”
“You did?” He pulls his top sheet aside. “Where?”
“I got a record over,” I say. “You know we’re watching a movie, right?”
“Yes, I hear. This sounds very violent, no good for me.”
“Right, well, in the other hall, by where the smoking area is, I asked Smitty to put the Egyptian music.”
“And he did this thing?”
“It’s ready to go on right now. You want to hear?”
“Yes.” Muqtada pushes the sheets aside in a gesture of hope and strength and determination. It’s tough to get out of bed; I know that myself. You can lie there for an hour and a half without thinking anything, just worrying about what the day holds and knowing that you won’t be able to deal with it. And Muqtada did that for years. He did that until he needed to be hospitalized. And now he’s getting up. Not for good, but for real.
I walk with him out of the room, passing Smitty at the nurses’station and nodding at him. He opens a door behind his desk and goes in to turn on the turntables, changing the PA music from the normal funky lite FM to the sounds of deep plucked strings, and rolling over it, a voice of dangerous clarity and yearning, hitting three ascending notes and then bending one beyond where I thought you couldn’t bend a human voice, sounding like a man drawn out and smacked to vibrate around a little.
“Umm Kulthum!” Muqtada says.
“Yeah! Uh . . . Who’s that?”
“This is Egypt’s greatest singer!” he yells. “How you find this?”
“I have a friend whose dad has some records.”
“This I have not heard in so long!” He’s grinning so much I think his glasses are going to fall off.
Armelio is playing solitaire in the back of the hall, by the smoking lounge. “You’re out of your room, buddy? What’s going on? Is there a fire?”
“This music!” Muqtada points up to it. “This is Egyptian!”
“You Egyptian, buddy?”
“Yes.”
“I’m from Greece.”
“The Greeks, they took all our music.”
“This?” Armelio looks up. “This ain’t nothing like Greek music, buddy.”
“You want to sit, Muqtada?” I ask him.
He looks around, then up at the music.