I don’t know why I order by the third of a pound.
Want some more? Eat, eat.
I want to thank you for letting me order your pistachio cannoli and macchiato for you. A big guy like you letting little me talk for you. Thank you. I know I’ll need to hear your voice before we’re home. Until then—.
Moaning is definitely acceptable. See? Incredible.
You already know more than you did half an hour ago.
I wasn’t very far from home, a mile and change, but I had never been to Geno’s. Already, my world had expanded; I did know more, and this embarrassed me a bit. I felt less like I was seventeen than seven, with my big sister showing me a world totally new to me. Sometimes, though, this is the feeling we have when talking to someone whose brain and imagination are a little wilder than ours. We have the feeling there’s a whole lot we haven’t learned or thought or seen. We feel we haven’t explored the world. We feel a bit behind. It’s hard to remember the person who’s wilder might actually be the person who’s in trouble.
I was happy to eat a little, since I didn’t know when I would eat again. My fate was tied to Nest’s, my comfort to her comfort.
The cannoli was incredible. Go to Geno’s.
I brought a couple books, Q. That’s why you’re carrying the backpack. That, and to hold whatever we find. You’re a beast of burden. Not that you have a ring through your nose—.
I never pick up anything I can’t carry a long way. No. That’s not true. I once carried home a café chair left on the curb. I just sat down whenever I needed to rest. Ridiculous. It’s in my room. And I carried a mirror—a crazy wood frame, all carved, with gold leaf—I carried that a long time before I got tired and hid it. Every day, every other day, I’d lug it, hide it, lug it, hide it. I did this, I don’t know, ten days, two weeks, but I never got it home. The last day: gone. Someone found my hiding place. Took my mirror. I dragged that thing around and.
I brought home a nest once, a real nest. It had feathers and pieces of newspaper and tinfoil, or maybe it was a gum wrapper, and all the woven twigs. I brought it home because it had a fortune from a fortune cookie stitched, I guess, into the bottom. You are endowed with strength of purpose and energy of will. It must have kept that bird going for days. So motivational. So inspiring.
Sometimes, I don’t even want to carry a water bottle. A little aluminum bottle can feel like an anchor. Or like the whole ship.
The books.
Wait. Want my last half muffin?
No, I’ll give it to that man. I wish I had more. My father taught me to carry food to give away. But today I was thinking about you, and I forgot—.
Half a muffin.
Did you hear him, Q, when he took the muffin? You kind of drifted off, backed away. Maybe you were too far to hear.
Only half a muffin, but—.
He said, “‘For now I ask no more than the justice of eating.’”
He pushed the muffin into his mouth.
“Wait,” I said. “Did you just come up with that?”
He shook his head: “Pafflo Neroofa.”
“Pablo Neruda?”
He nodded and I waited for him to swallow. “Neruda, yeah.” Then: “Have a good day, Supergirl.”
I like running into people who like poetry almost as much as I like running into poets. You never know when it’ll happen.
Who do you think is more ashamed, Q, the guy living in his parents’ basement or the guy living on the curb? Who knows how much shame anybody feels inside? But who does the world think should be more ashamed? The guy who doesn’t do anything with himself, doesn’t work or—but lives off his parents and doesn’t have to worry about how to survive, doesn’t worry about success or failure? Is that man more of a loser, more shameful than the homeless man or beggar who really has no one and may be sick or very unlucky, maybe starving to death?
I don’t know. The thing is, we don’t even think about the guy in the basement, unless we personally know the guy in the basement. But when we see a homeless man on the street, a stranger kicked in the teeth by life, we probably don’t know him, but we think about him. Automatically. We think about him, at least for a second, and we feel something for him. We feel sorry for him, or we get angry, or we laugh, or run away. The guy in the street, like that guy with half my muffin, shames me, shames us, shames society more than the guy in the basement. Maybe that’s why you backed off: shame.
The homeless man’s out in the open. He’s our nightmare, our mistake, and he’s a lot like us, but not. Who makes us feel worse, the guy in the basement or the guy in the gutter?
I can’t seem to get to the books. I keep starting. But hunger and quotes and stories and starving men and salami. Have I told you what my favorite food is—?
I nearly went off the tracks again.
Books. Books, books, books.
I found The Origin of Species—Darwin, you know?—in the basement. My mother’s name so neat at the top right of the title page over the year: Martha Lind 1983, when she was seventeen. Seventeen, so I thought I’d.
Yeah.
Do you put your name in books?
Isaac Kew. I. Kew. Or the letters, I. K.? That would look strong; I can see it, strong and tall, like you.
Strong and tall, and not too smart for your own good. No, I mean, you have half a chance to live life without too much sadness and crippling self-doubt. People with excess intelligence, high IQs over 120, 125? Screwed. The higher you go, the worse off you are. These people often fail at life and end up—ha!—living in the basement. Or walking the streets at all hours, talking nonstop, unable to sleep—.
Oops.
Whatever.
You’re bedrock, Q.
Maybe my mother had a reason. To write her name in books. But what could that reason be? My mom’s the youngest of six, four girls, two boys. I think she received so many hand-me-downs that when she got something for herself, for her and no one else, not read, worn, or discarded by someone before her, it mattered. It had real value. A key chain, a handbag, a book, a boyfriend. A teacher gave the Origin to Martha, a prize for being the best student in eighth-grade science. She was thirteen, but she didn’t put her name in the book for four years. Coincidentally, my mom gave up science and even college when she met my father. And when did she meet him? When she was seventeen.
So maybe Martha Lind, who fell in love with Vladimir Fitzgerald, a graduate student in physics and fully seven years older—they met, Martha and Fitz and. Mm-hmm. Fitz had to wait for my mother to turn eighteen before they could get married. My grandmother’s rules, apparently, my mother’s mother. Violet, or Dye as my mother calls her, told her youngest baby, “You’ve got to graduate high school. He can wait for that, can’t he?”
Maybe Martha gathered up the few things she called her own and wrote her name as she’d always known it before she went off with the love of her life and never looked back. Martha wasn’t beautiful, but she had that high forehead, filled with brains, and her voice, and her teeth. Have you seen my mother’s teeth? Her smile? You could find your way through the darkest hell. Fitz might have been considered out of her league in the looks department, sort of like you’re out of mine.
Do you think we should let ourselves fall in love with someone from a different—stratum? Dangerous. I don’t need to tell you why. If you’re from Earth but you love someone from the moon, you might try to make it work, but one of you might always be short of breath or a little light-headed, a wee bit homesick.
I’m babbling again.
Martha wanted very much to marry Fitz and take his name. But she’d barely ever owned anything, including her own name, she was so young. She packed up her room—it was her room finally after her sister, my aunt Lu, left for college a couple years earlier; Martha packed and put everything to one side. She wanted to move as soon as possible into her grown-up life, no jok
e. She wanted privacy with Fitz. She wanted her own home.
You can see her right now, packing up her belongings, maybe a bit early, since she wouldn’t turn eighteen for three months and, as it happened, Fitz the Physicist wouldn’t propose for two more years. He was midway through the dissertation that would settle his life when he had a crisis of confidence. He thought, I’m not going to get through this thing; I hate physics, and decided that would be a good time to ask Martha to marry him: who knows why? Martha was a month shy of twenty when they eloped.
But I’m thinking of my mother at seventeen, in love and restless.
Martha wrote her name in Darwin—neat, so neat—and the date underneath. Then she put him in a box and waited.
I’ve made myself hot and sad thinking about Martha and her books.
My mother—.
The time has come for me to take off the flannel. Excited? I know you. Every part of me is in motion when I walk. That’s what you say. It makes me sound like I have no control over my limbs. Like with every step, my foot touches off a land mine. I think you mean I wiggle. My dad used to tell me I didn’t so much walk as sashay.
You like it.
I’m not entirely sure why my mother read the Origin. She told me she read it all the time, took it around with her. Tons of marginalia back to front, her little notes and doodles and underlinings and. You’ve got it on your back right now.
I brought two, though, two books. Darwin and one other for your pleasure. Here were the choices.
Wind, Sand and Stars, which you know about already.
Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, by A. S. Neill, foreword by Erich Fromm. I found it on Darwin’s left. Another of my mom’s: same inscription, same date, lots of notes, but I don’t know how she got it or why. Everything was about child rearing back in the day. Dr. Spock, heard of him? My parents have him on the shelf, too, on Darwin’s right. Summerhill’s a trip, though. It’s all about the balance in the child-parent relationship. “Freedom without license.” That’s a quote. There’s a whole section about sex, which, curiously, my mother left unmarked. None of her usual notes, drawings, exclamation points. Silence. Maybe she found it in her parents’ basement. It’s old: 1960.
Remember that line about rabbits and dogs? Seems like ages ago. Where there are rabbits, there shall be dogs. That’s from Flush. It’s a biography from the dog’s point of view. Seriously. And not just any dog. Oh no. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s. Do you know her? Poet? “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” She wrote that, but she didn’t write Flush. Virginia Woolf did, and then she drowned herself. Not immediately after. As if she got to the end of that funky book about Flush and said, “What have I done?” and decided life wasn’t worth living. I mean, sometime later, she committed suicide.
Flush the dog talks about all sorts of things: city life, love, mind. Stream of consciousness, a brain uninterrupted, sort of like what you get to enjoy right now, on this walk, but an animal’s, a cocker spaniel’s. Crazy smart book and crazy weird.
Those were the choices. Adventure, education and child rearing, or weirdness? Or something altogether different?
I can hear you quietly asking yourself in a tiny voice inside your head, a tiny, tinkling voice, totally surprising for someone so big: What did she bring? What did she bring?
MILE THREE
The voice inside my head sounds nothing like a wee fairy. It doesn’t tinkle.
Or?
Maybe by the time my thoughts made it through bone, skin, and air, all the way to Nest’s ear, they chimed like a fairy. I have no doubt Nest could hear me thinking. She gave the impression of being more than a little superhuman. And by superhuman, I mean mad. Mad as in lunatic.
Lunatic or not, I didn’t care.
What did she bring? What did she bring?
That moment, that morning, full sun and warming up, I listened to Nest’s every word.
What did she bring?
I’d have to wait to find out. First things first: a labyrinth.
My father isn’t always human. He has his Angers. And his Angers make him terrible. He rages and storms. He mutters under his breath. He curses and judges and grinds his teeth and. On his best days, my dad terrifies you, his voice and scowl. You haven’t seen him as the Minotaur.
I don’t find it easy to talk about this. I’ve watched my father froth at the mouth and gouge his own eyes.
My father, the Minotaur. Man with a bull’s head: horns and giant nostrils. What breed of head? If I had to pick, I’d go with Scottish Highland. I looked it up in a book of breeds once, what my father looks like. Wide, curving horns; mop of ginger bangs; ginger beard; trapezoidal white nose: very handsome cattle. But he’s a Minotaur, a monster, walking back and forth, around and around, at the center of his labyrinth, waiting to kill.
I don’t know what starts the Angers. My mother won’t say, if she even knows herself. She tells me my father’s a haunted man.
“Haunted?” I say. “By what?”
She shrugs.
“You love him,” I say. “You’ve known him for so long. You married him. How can you not know?”
My mother furrows a little. Still puzzling it out, right?
“It’s some kind of torture,” she says, “but I don’t know for what. He frightens me. What he feels, Nest, the strength of it, frightens me. His agony.”
“He scares me, too, sometimes.”
“I know he does,” she says and kisses my forehead. “He’s a passionate man.”
“It’s like you always tell me. No one kinder than Dad, and no one rougher.”
Watch it, Q. Didn’t you see that car? Pay attention. Don’t get killed while we’re walking. What sense would that make? Listen and think, but watch, too. In this city, traffic lights and stop signs are only suggestions.
This city. It’s pretty much frustrated chaos. Like a Minotaur.
The Minotaur rarely shows up during the day. But the transformations: I would watch my father transform in full light. The Angers come over him. His eyes turn black. He shudders and snorts and sighs. His horns break out of his head, and his skull grows new bone. His big, long, heavy bull jaw. He grinds his teeth.
My poor dad. He’d work so hard all day to keep himself under control in front of me. He’d try not to scare us, my mom and me. And Julius? One hundred and eighteen pounds of Rottweiler—my beautiful, gentle puppy—hides under the dining table when my father starts grunting and mumbling.
My father drops his head and waves it back and forth, shaking invisible flies, and he heaves. Exhausted or overcome. The sighing. The transformation must be so painful. Getting less and less human over hours. His blood all thick and hot. His headaches—from the horns breaking his head. Imagine if you grew horns, and your mind turned into a furnace, and your heart compressed into a diamond the size of a fingernail.
His voice deepens even more, but he barely speaks. He looks at me from under his bull’s eyebrows, no smile. Death. I’m his enemy. My mother’s his enemy. My father, monster, has no friend left in the world. No love.
Late at night, when my father’s fully Minotaur, he’ll leave the house for hours.
“He walks,” my mother says. I’m lying in bed next to her. I’m six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and on those nights my father hasn’t said good night or anything at all to me. He looked at me like.
All murder and anger.
Then he left, gone. So I got into bed with my mother.
“Doesn’t he get scared?” I say. I’m little, you know? I say something like: “It’s dark. Mean people are out at night.”
“Your dad can take care of himself just fine,” my mother tells me. “He’s—intimidating. But he—. When he’s away from us, he doesn’t have anything holding him back.”
“Will he hurt us?”
“Never,” my mother says, but she
holds me anyway, against the fear.
Night. Not too many people on the street. The city’s a labyrinth. The Minotaur hides his head and horns in the shadows. He punches brick and concrete. He punches trees. He sharpens his horns against granite.
He knocks over trash cans, kicks them down alleys—thunder and cymbals; he bellows now and then. No one dares go to the window. Something awful is tearing up the skinny space between buildings. Better to let it go, stay in bed. The riot has to end soon.
At some point toward morning, the Minotaur dies. Or falls asleep. The Angers disappear, and my dad gets back to himself. When he’s human again, he limps out of the labyrinth into the real world and home. Hunched over and. Like he’s been beaten up all night, from the inside. He’s in real pain, wincing, checking the bones in his face, his cheeks and eyebrows. He’s touching his head all over, delicately. Every inch is a bruise. Tiny fractures. From the transformation. He sits at the dining room table, exhausted, embarrassed, ashamed, and so sad. But he’s a man again. Quiet, quiet, quiet.
The Angers defeat him. They make him into a broken boy.
I’ll hear him pull out a chair, and I’ll go to him. He’s a mess. I’ll pour him something to drink. I’ll give him a hug, and that’s when I notice his hands. Huge and swollen and cut and bruised, torn up and bloody from all the punching. I want to tell him he’ll break his hand someday. I love my father. I want to tell him I love him. But I’m afraid even the smallest word will cut the skin around his eyes or ears and make him bleed.
What does this have to do with me?
My father, I think I told you, used to take me on walks at night. Not on his Minotaur walks. Not ever. Gentle walks, the two of us. I was pretty young when we started walking together: seven. I remember. I had a terrible night, the first real terrible night when I couldn’t sleep.
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