Because You'll Never Meet Me

by Leah Thomas

  Focus, Ollie.

  The Linear Autobiography of

  Oliver Paulot, the Powerless Boy

  PART TWO: EARLY DAYS, IN THREE ACCIDENTS

  1. The Fire

  Mom used the money from my father’s life insurance to buy our cabin in the woods. The cabin is shaped like a triangle; apparently it’s part of some sort of ancient worldwide tradition to let your rooftop trail all the way down to the grass. The almighty A-frame! There’s moss and ivy creeping up the roof from the ground, and sometimes it gets mildewy in the peak of the house, where my bedroom makes up the top floor, and it starts to smell a little like pond scum and cedar. Downstairs, there’s Mom’s bedroom, the kitchen, the living room, and the bathroom, all paneled in dark wood that Mom calls “too seventies to abide.” Maybe that’s why she hangs tapestries and quilts and paintings on every surface. There’s a porch in the back, and one in the front with an awning that doesn’t really offer enough shade in the summertime.

  The cabin is on the outskirts of Rochdale, Michigan, hours away from where Auburn-Stache lives. My whole life long, he’s come to check up on me at least twice a month. He’s a kook, but I suppose I love him or something.

  Anyhow, one of my weirdest memories begins with one of those checkups.

  I’ve never seen Dr. Auburn-Stache drive. He’s too careful about my allergies. So he parks the brown smudge of his latest Impala at the end of the two-mile-long driveway. (That’s some nonsense number of kilometers. I’m just saying that our driveway is more like a long, thin dirt road.) Then he buzzes and flits to the house with a suitcase in hand. He doesn’t wear a lab coat, which is kind of disappointing. He wears paisley dress shirts and corduroy pants. For a long time I thought this was how men dressed, but Mom smirks and says Auburn-Stache is “quirky.”

  Usually I get a standard physical check from him, but he has to be creative about some things. For years I’ve had this sort of awkward, deflated Mohawk haircut. Not by choice. By the hand of Auburn-Stache! Whenever he gives me a physical, he has to look into my ears and nose and mouth without a penlight. (You remember how penlights and I don’t get along.)

  So he has this wacky old apparatus that’s like a small adjustable gas lantern with a pane of magnifying glass in front of it, and a funnel attached to that. He holds that against the side of my head whenever he wants to check my ears for infections. (It’s his makeshift otoscope.) He says having hair on the sides of my head is a fire hazard, but I think he just likes to make me look like a rooster.

  He used to sit me on his knee out on the front porch, where the light is better. One time when I was pretty little, Dr. Auburn-Stache pressed his otoscope against the side of my head and I didn’t feel like sitting still anymore. So I wriggled away and somehow knocked the otoscope onto the wooden porch, and the lantern shattered. There was a sudden burst of heat as the doormat went up in flames, and then the nearest potted plant, and then the wreath on the open door, and then the carpet in the breezeway. I remember feeling like the fire had a mind of its own, sort of like electricity—like it was out to get me.

  Good thing Dr. Auburn-Stache is always so twitchy, because he bundled me up and flitted and buzzed away from the porch. He deposited me on a stump pretty far away from the cabin and told me to “Stay!” like I was the drooling puppy you compared me to.

  I think he was going back to rescue Mom, who’d been inside making tea. She needed no rescuing. She strode right out through the fiery doorway and onto the porch with Dorian Gray pinched under her arm, both of them looking more annoyed than anything else. He was clawing her up pretty good. Out on the lawn, she thrust the cat into Auburn-Stache’s arms before sprinting to the garage to call the fire department.

  I sat there on the stump, just blinking, watching the flames lick the brick chimney. The roof was catching fire by the time we heard the sirens. I wish I could describe what it looked like. The fire engine, I mean. I thought Mom’s car was gritty, but that was before that diesel engine. I could feel the humming electricity even in the soles of my feet, even when it wasn’t within sight. I could feel that thing coming like an electric stampede of red weight and light at my temples, and that must have shown on my face because Auburn-Stache lifted me up into his arms and jogged me away from it as it pulled up. Dorian Gray was meowing like nobody’s business, and Auburn-Stache’s chest rose and fell like running was the last thing Englishmen in paisley were used to.

  There was Mom, staring at our house going up in flames, watching smoke and ash pour from the haven she’d set up for herself and her kid, and she still looked at least halfway exasperated about it all. And I only had eyes for the flashing lights and bleeding black smog that smothered the fire truck. It’s what I imagine an old locomotive might look like, if that locomotive came roaring out of hell. Like some massive battering ram, all black and red smoke and bursts of white light that churned and spat into oblivion before my watering eyes. Grond! Grond! (Read Tolkien!)

  I remember seeing some other amazing things. I saw policemen with walkie-talkies that left trails of saffron dust in the air whenever they buzzed with noise. I remember the blue light atop cars piercing through the clouds around the fire truck, but they didn’t look only blue to me. They were spinning fronds of multicolor, fanning streaks of chartreuse and aquamarine that stabbed through puffs of burgundy and umber.

  I should have looked away. My skull hummed against my brain. My nose was running, my eyes poured, and it had less to do with the fire than it did with the electrical auras buzzing in the air, making me itch from head to toe like I had some sort of volcanic sun rash.

  But I saw so many colors that night, so many that maybe even you should be a little jealous.

  Mom wouldn’t let anyone near me. She couldn’t be sure they weren’t stashing phones or Tasers in their utility belts. Auburn-Stache chuckled when he saw I’d singed the side of my pants, but his eyes were shining. When Mom stomped back over to us, I rounded my shoulders in preparation for an almighty reaming.

  Mom flew right past me and had Auburn-Stache by the shoulders, shaking him.

  “What did you do? Another harmless digital watch?”

  “Of course not!” he protested. “It was an accident! Electromagnetism wouldn’t simply light a fire!”

  “Don’t say ‘of course not,’ as if you’ve never pushed him before. Oliver is not one of your experiments!”

  “You don’t need to tell me that.” The fire in his eyes was only halfway due to the reflection of the flames behind us.

  “He isn’t your son.”

  I was gaping at the pair of them because this was a bigger spectacle than the fire, even. Mom and Auburn-Stache never fought. They sipped beers on the porch some evenings, got teary eyed and red faced when they thought I wasn’t peeking down with binoculars.

  Now Mom was looking at Auburn-Stache like he’d been beating me.

  “Meredith,” he said slowly, eyes reflecting the firelight, “I would never harm him. You have to know that.”

  Mom let out a laugh like a bark. “I think I can cut Ollie’s hair from now on.”

  “Please.” The blood left his cheeks, Moritz.

  I rushed forward and grabbed her elbow. “Mom! He didn’t do anything!”

  She slumped. “Not this time, he didn’t.”

  Mom, covered in black ash, let go of Dr. Auburn-Stache, wrapped her arms around me, and squeezed too tightly.

  I could see Dr. Auburn-Stache over her shoulder, white against the red-black.

  We stayed in a tent for a month, which the police thought was weird. But camping out and cooking hot dogs was an adventure while we waited for the cabin to be repaired. When we finally moved back in, Mom set our suitcases down in the untouched living room and sighed.

  “Tch. Even hellfire couldn’t kill the seventies?”

  I threw myself across the orange tartan couch, burying myself in cushions. “Nope!”

  Mom sat down beside me. “Ollie. Look at me.”

  She was so quiet tha
t I did.

  “You’re too young to remember the digital watch. But if Greg—Dr. Auburn-Stache—ever tries to show you something electric, you have to tell me right away.”

  “But … he’s my doctor.”

  “I’m your mother.”

  I think I was just relieved to hear he’d keep visiting. That I’d get to see color in his face again.

  We’ve got a living room covered in bookshelves, Moritz, and one shelf is entirely stacks of encyclopedias. A couple years after Auburn-Stache and Mom argued, I read the word electromagnetism.

  Basically, electromagnetism is as strong a force in the world as gravity. I mean, if you can count on anything, you can count on things falling when you drop them and the air being full of electricity. Subatomically, electric particles are attracting and repelling each other all the dang time.

  But if I’m allergic to electricity, how come static doesn’t kill me? I’ve had a few shocks in my socks on the wooden kitchen floor, and those didn’t give me seizures. And I know about anatomy. There’s electricity in our brains, Moritz. Walt Whitman doesn’t need to sing any body electric. We’re all a little electric already, with or without pacemakers.

  So how come I’m not permanently dead yet?

  This is my working theory: my epilepsy isn’t due to allergies. It goes beyond that.

  I don’t get along with electricity. I repel it and it repels me. Nobody’s just born that different. It defies science and logic, Moritz.

  It’s just easier to say I’m sick. Easier for Mom to coop me up like an invalid.

  So you have to tell me about the laboratory, Moritz. Even if it bores you. I’m not needling you now. I’m asking you. If you were created in a lab, was I created there, too? I mean, how else are you and I connected?

  What else can explain the mess I’m in? If I’m an experiment like you, I need to explain that to Liz. I need her to know that there were bigger issues than me being a walking disaster to excuse—well, not excuse—but to explain that I couldn’t help what happened when we went camping. I couldn’t help her and I couldn’t—

  Focus.

  I’m puffing on my bubble pipe, Watson.

  2. Junkyard Joe

  Mom put up “No Trespassing” signs everywhere around our property. You know. The kind that said, “VIOLATORS will be SHOT.” Which I don’t think is legal, but made for a decent threat. The reason that signs like these were even necessary had a lot to do with open season.

  Do people hunt in Germany, Moritz? When I try to imagine it, I think of men in pantaloons prancing around chasing stags, like on Mom’s tapestries.

  Anyhow, open season here is a big deal. There are a lot of white-tailed deer in the forests, and every November people travel here with beer bottles and rifles and tarps in tow. They say they’re after ten-point bucks, but it’s really more about getting drunk with your buddies and sitting in trees, Auburn-Stache says. He’s not the hunting type. Too British or something.

  The last thing Mom wanted was a hunter stumbling near our cabin. Most moms would be worried about drunks carrying guns. She was more worried about drunks carrying flashlights.

  Well, sure enough, when I was seven or so, some man wearing camouflage walked onto our property with a rifle over his shoulder.

  Mom was teaching me how to bike-ride. I still had training wheels on the back, but I was getting really into pedaling as fast as I could and then braking hard enough to leave deep gouges of tire tracks in the dirt driveway. Mom jogged along behind me, always watchful.

  On an autumn day, when the leaves smelled wet and rich and they were browning in the driveway, I pedaled slowly to put her at ease.

  “I hear a woodpecker, Mom.”

  She kicked at the leaves. “Really? I don’t hear a thing.”

  “Listen!”

  “Nah, I’d rather smell. Smell that air.” She closed her eyes.

  And when she opened them, I was pedaling away as fast as possible. She shouted my name. I hadn’t gotten all that far ahead when the hunter in orange appeared right in front of me, stepping out from between the pines. His eyes widened. I could see that something electric was glowing limelike in his pockets, so I slammed on the brakes and spun out, and the next thing I knew I was being carried and my head hurt, and I’d scraped my face along the dirt.

  “This ain’t your property,” said the man who held me. Not the hunter, but someone else. I was too spaced out to recognize him. “Go on, before I report you. Police in this town are always lookin’ to fine idiot flatlanders, you know.”

  I could see the treetops and a scraggly chin overhead. I don’t know if the hunter—the flatlander—vamoosed or not.

  “Waf gongan?” I said. It could have been right then, or it could have been minutes later. Sparks were in my eyes, rattling my teeth in my ears.

  “Got yourself a nice concussion. And here comes your mom, lookin’ likely to give you another one.”

  I heard her call my name, and the next thing I knew, I was in her arms instead, out on the porch and woozy still. And leaning over her shoulder was all the rest of the scraggle-chin: Junkyard Joe.

  Joe, a bearded mechanic who perpetually wore a baseball cap, was our only “neighbor,” although his trailer and junkyard are a mile away. He didn’t mind Mom’s signs. Last thing he wanted was more hunters on his turf. As far as he was concerned, all that deer meat was his. He used to stop by to drop off Tupperware containers full of chewy venison stew.

  “Rise and shine, sonny jim,” he said, showing off his missing teeth.

  I blinked.

  “Can you hear me?” Mom’s voice was so loud, this close to me.

  I nodded, but it felt like half my face had been torn to shreds.

  “Just look at you. Now people’ll think we’re abusing you.” She pulled me closer. “If you ever run away like that again, I don’t know what I’ll do. So don’t. Never again.”

  This might have been when Mom started putting padlocks on the door, Mo.

  Eventually Mom tucked me into bed, but it was early afternoon and I wasn’t sleepy. Mom and Joe were on the back porch. My window was open. It was a warm day and the wind was blowing leaves against the screen and Mom was right—they smelled pretty great.

  “Thanks for your help, Joe.”

  “Just lookin’ out for my neighbors. Keep an eye on your boy.”

  “I’m trying. If I don’t, he’ll vanish. Gone before I know him.”

  “Aw, it won’ happen like that. He gettin’ any better?”

  Mom must have shaken her head. I shied away from the window.

  “Maybe I’ll have him meet my niece sometime. She’s around his age. Name’s Elizabeth.”

  “Yes,” said Mom, after a second. “Maybe.”

  Okay, so next I was going to tell you a story about the one time I had a babysitter and it was a big disaster, but I’ve changed my mind. Because the Elizabeth who Joe mentioned was the Liz I’m always going on about, so jumping right ahead to the day I met her is still more or less being linear. And I have to clear her name! I have to tell you what she means to me. I have to tell you why I wait at the end of the driveway every Wednesday.

  3. The Girl

  Playing huntsman in the woods is a lot less fun when your mother’s sneaking along behind you, lurking beneath trees with all the grace of a drunken amputee. But if I was in my bedroom, Mom checked on me almost every seven minutes. Sometimes she brought warm macaroni from the woodstove or cold milk from the garage.

  I told you she has hobbies. She’s got a brain like mine, a brain that wants to be busy all the time. She knits, sews, paints, crafts model train layouts, collects flowers and presses them, makes mobiles and pottery, and binds books. But her favorite hobby is watching me, I think.

  She watched me from my bed while I studied or folded or drew at my desk. Occasionally she spoke. More often, she only peered at me with fingers on her lips, that expression (you know which one) on her face.

  “Can you go do something else?”
<
br />   “Can is a fun word,” she answered. “But if I can put up with you, you can put up with me.”

  She told me once, when I asked about Dad, that she’d promised not to trap me. Whether my dad wanted what was best or worst for me, I don’t know. He died and left us enough money to live on, but with one condition: if I ever decided to go, Mom must let me. He put it in his will. Mom can’t just keep me here forever.

  She promised him.

  But the way Mom looked at me, I didn’t think she could keep that promise.

  Maybe that’s why I was always trying to leave.

  I was almost eleven when Mom finally let me take the training wheels off my bicycle.

  She and I played mechanic. Mom used to be a lot more playful. She lay down on her back on the grass with the bike frame over her nose while I watched, suck-chewing a banana.

  “Screwdriver!” she cried.

  “Don’t you need a wrench first?” I passed her my banana peel and she didn’t flinch. Just dropped it and held her hand out again.

  “Scalpel!”

  “But you’re not a doctor.” I held out the socket wrench. “Doctors have goatees. ’Staches of auburn.”

  Her fingertips were cold when she took it, because even in those days her circulation wasn’t great. The rusty bolts ground when she twisted them.

  “Ollie, does Dr. Auburn-Stache talk to you about the past?”

  “I wish. He’s too scared of you to answer my ‘lab!’ attacks.”

  “Tch. He’d better be.” It was a murmur, but I could hear it under the clicking of the tool in her hand.

  “Isn’t he your friend, Mom?”

  “Not exactly, Ollie.”