The Late Bloomer

by Falkin, Mark;

  Simon.

  Christ.

  Settle down, I thought. Lots of males named Simon in the world. You’re losing it again, seeing patterns and coincidences that aren’t there.

  But Grandma Lucille said there were no coincidences.

  Nausea flourished within and threatened to overtake me as I looked down at Mrs. Fleming. Her face seemed to say, too, that there weren’t any coincidences, and that chaos and chance, like institutionalized gods, were conveniences we the living made up.

  Mrs. Fleming’s face saying: I knew, didn’t I? The reason. That it was close, close, close.

  I even heard her voice saying it to me—her voice coming in that neighborly tone of hers. From across the street while putting away groceries, just as she had the other day when she called out to me about the Macy’s parade. That voice now reciting to me the exact epigraph to my essay in full, a quote culled from the heart of Golding’s novel: You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?

  I was nodding yes to her and she asked it again, louder. This time I saw her standing next to her politically stickered Subaru, hands on her hips, waving at me in a way eerily similar to the way of the bald man after the water rolled by his feet. You knew didn’t you? Incredulity in her voice, almost shock. Cerca, cerca, cerca.

  She was yelling it at me now, the tone this third time flatly accusatory: You knew, didn’t you!? Her voice permeating the awful quiet, its waves funneling down into my mind’s maw.

  That third time, in my vision, she slammed her Subaru door, stood and looked at me, shaking her head in disapproval, as if what has happened was my fault.

  Mr. E had commented on it, writing in the margin: To choose this title for your essay and this quote to tie it together…Well done. You really saw what this book was about, didn’t you?

  I damn near said yes out loud to her as if she had asked me, but kept it in. I was probably nodding yes. Bass asked if I was all right. I had stared at her face not believing, like the boy in the jungle had at the flyblown pig head with the lidded eyes of a Thai Buddha.

  I was locked into her skyward gaze, thinking of the Simons, and the children staring at us with lapidary stillness so that we would go away, so that we wouldn’t see what was to occur atop Doug Sahm Hill.

  The next comment Mr. English had made at the top of the page was: When are you going to let me submit that story of yours for you? And so here’s where it gets weird. It’s something I haven’t told you yet. I dunno, I just haven’t wanted to yet. Besides, this is the proper place in the story to do it.

  So, the other thing Mr. English had said to me in his office when I went to pick up the essay, which was really a ruse to hang out because he could’ve just left it in my cubby—with the door closed, which he never did, this stricken, beset look on his face—was that these sorts of stories are popular right now. That’s not weird. What was weird was his tone which was low and careful like he was talking to a seething school-shooter holding Mommy’s M-16 Bushwacker.

  He had continued, “People in general are fearful of what’s coming next. You can feel it in the air, Kevin. This apocalyptic vision of yours is not only well-written, sounding like something written by a seasoned writer, it’s something people are actually going to want to read, maybe even talk about.” A tight smile broke onto his face. “You could expand this and write a series of stories, which, if this quality were to be maintained…I wouldn’t be surprised if it saw a little serialization. They could even end up being fixed up into a novel.”

  That’s not so weird either. What’s weird is the story’s existence in context. The short story which I called The Late Bloomers is a story about the end of the world. Three thousand words. Not so weird. But in it—here’s the thing—all the adults died leaving only the kids. What killed everyone was a virus like bird flu meets H1N1, and it took a while, more than a morning. But the story wasn’t about the virus and how it all went down or anything like that. The story was a snapshot of the aftermath, how the humans—a specific group of people I placed in Phoenix, who were eighteen, nineteen, who were adults but they weren’t—were dealing with it. The story ended elliptically but it seemed clear that the children and the late bloomers, the young adults who didn’t die because they still had kid in them, were going to rebuild the world together. The late bloomers would take the lead because the world needed the kid in us to remake the world.

  I didn’t see it as good in the way Mr. English did. I mean, I was shooting for Carver realism and got this whacked-out end-of-days story. I guess that’s what happens when you uncork your mind and let the subconscious roam about.

  It’s one story of several I’d shown him, but it was the one about which he gushed.

  So, you get my queasiness now? I just wrote this story over the summer. I had given it to Mr. E in August. Right before my big pot bust was when he’d mentioned it to me. When I dropped by to pick up my No Go essay.

  He was so keen on the story. The way he acted when talking to me about it, treating me like some sort of clairvoyant. He’d handed me the essay but held the story in his hands and he stabbed the paper with his index finger, saying, “There’s something here.” He gave me an accusatory look.

  That’s when he’d moved past me to close the door. When it closed, the room got cottony quiet. I realized just how stuffed with books his office was.

  He sat on the edge of his desk and looked down at me. His eyes said sit. I sat.

  I set my backpack in my lap as a buffer between me and him.

  I wouldn’t say he scared me then, but he wasn’t the flip and comely rake of a teacher with bedhead hair, chunky glasses, and a half-sleeve of tats I was used to. Here sat a man with curiosity, wonder, and, I detected, fear in his eyes. The look in one’s eyes you only see in dreams.

  Like the one I’d had before I wrote that story. I popped up at 3:30 a.m. to write it.

  I’d gotten to know Mr. English this fall, he being both my AP English teacher and my advisor. He’d requested that I be his advisee because he’d been on the Austin library’s poetry contest judging panel last April—National Poetry Month—and he’d read the poem I’d entered. The poems were submitted anonymously. I thought it was just this tiny contest. Well, mine, a not-half-bad free verse thing called My Unstrung Heart, Won’t You Please Be Still?, ended up winning in the high school category. It turned out to be not so tiny a contest. Mr. E read the poem aloud on the radio after Garrison Keillor had finished this especially glum delivery of a Galway Kinnell poem, The Silence of the World, concluding his radio segment The Writer’s Almanac.

  Was Galway Kinnell one of my favorites? Yes, he was. You could even say he was my favorite. Was it neat-o that it was read right before mine, my poem rubbing elbows with his? You bet.

  Given the tenor of this particular tale I’m telling you was the whole thing kissed by kismet in that now the aspect of this new world that makes my balls recede inside my body cavity is its silence and that Kinnell’s poem, coming right after mine, had that as its subject matter, indeed, bore the very title? Uh-huh. Yep. You’re catching on, dear reader.

  Coincidences? Patterns? Early-onset schizophrenia? Psychosis? Grandma Lucille, what say you?

  I know, I know.

  So, anyway, you’re sitting at the edge of your desk, Mr. E, staring me down like I’d done something wrong, holding my story, touching the pad of your index finger to it saying, ‘there’s something here.’ You ‘couldn’t put your finger on’ what it was, yet you kept putting your actual finger on it. Kept making little circles on it with your index finger like a conjurer. My eyes flicked to your desk’s nameplate: Todd English, PhD (with such an education, why were you teaching high-school, Mr. E?), then to the framed black-and-white photograph of you and that smoking-hot wife of yours—Inga? Inger?—sitting on a boulder atop Mount Bonnell. My eyes stayed there.
I hadn’t noticed the picture before. I started to lift my hand to point at it when you said, “Yeah. That’s new. We got engaged at that spot.”

  I kept staring at it, looking at the transect of lake way down below you, and the strip of lawn where the bald man had stood waving up at me with that sickening smile.

  I looked at your wife’s face. Intimidatingly beautiful with her square jaw, all blond Swedish model-looking. Real breasts, clearly. I couldn’t help thinking of her swanning around your house in one of your T-shirts post-coitus sipping on a bottle of water imported from her native Nordic country. I knew you didn’t have any kids. Fetching couple that you still were, I knew you’d probably be too old to conceive. You were the type who wanted kids. I knew it by the way you were, Mr. E. I thought maybe the pain and frustration I sensed in you wasn’t because of the shelved novel but the baby who wouldn’t come.

  “Kevin? About this story. You said you’d had a dream?” you’d asked.

  My eyes shifted from the photograph to your face. “Yes.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking, what was the dream about? I’m not trying to analyze you or anything. I’m fascinated.” Your finger still on the paper.

  “Well, you were in it,” I told you.

  You sat up straight and cleared your throat. “Okay.” You sat back on the edge of your desk and crossed one leg over the other, furrowed your brow and nodded.

  “Not until the end though, and your appearance didn’t connect to the rest. It was basically…what you and I are doing now. You, sitting on the edge of your desk looking as you do now, and me sitting here with my backpack in my lap.”

  You said, “hummm,” and raised your index finger from the paper to your pursed lips.

  “I don’t remember many words passing between us. I remember you there and me here, and right now even I’m feeling…”

  “Déjà vu?” you asked.

  I nodded. “Still feeling it. See, I knew you were going to ask that.”

  The room. It was very still. Time slushed through my ears. Ticks of it rode molecules of my heart-beaten blood.

  In the hall, lockers clacked shut, voices burst out into laughter. You looked startled by the world outside that door. You cleared your throat again. “That’s really something, Kevin. I’m having the same feeling. And I had a dream, too, with you in it. Sitting there with your backpack in your lap.” You nodded to me. “Just like that.”

  “Did you have a dream about the end of the world like in my story?”

  You shook your head. “No. But this, yes.” A beat of pause. “And now it’s gone, that feeling.”

  “Yes,” I’d said, relieved. The room opened and cleared. Like an eclipsing shadow lifting away with a flick.

  You chuckled and shook your head clear. You sat in your chair and said, “Okay. Enough of that. Tell me about your dream and how it fueled this story of yours.”

  “It’s a long time ago now, so the details aren’t there, at least not many. But with dreams it’s the ones that remain that are important, I guess, huh?”

  “Could be. Again, I’m just an interested English teacher. If this is in any way uncomfortable…”

  “No, no it’s fine.” I moved my eyes around in my head to remember and put the backpack on the floor. “I don’t know what happened to the world. Just these few people like in the story. We’re standing at some sort of overlook. Me, this dark-haired girl, and this other guy.”

  “Do you know them? Then, or still?”

  “In real life? Yes, actually. This girl I work with at Dollar Tree and another student here.”

  You nod, your chin muscle flexing and tightening with thought.

  “Below us is a mass of people. All these young kids. Thousands of them in a tight grouping. They’re facing and cheering at something in front of them and we didn’t know what it was. We knew we had to get closer to see but we didn’t want the kids to see us. We were really frightened. I don’t know why that is, but we were.”

  “So what happened? This isn’t in your story. Do the things in the story occur in your dream?”

  “Not really. The dream’s residue gave me the feeling which led to the idea.”

  “In the dream did you go down to see what they were cheering about?”

  “No, we didn’t. We were too scared to move. Didn’t want them to see us.”

  You formed a steeple with your fingers in front of your face. “How did you know it was the end of the world?”

  “I just felt it was. We all did. It was just that scene. There wasn’t any more to it.”

  “In the dream it happened in an arid place? You set the story in Phoenix.”

  I shook my head. “No, in the dream it was here in Austin, though I don’t know where exactly. The location was ambiguous. Just this field. The story grew out of this feeling in the dream, a feeling of—” I struggled for the right word.

  “I understand. You feel something powerful but nebulous and you write to bring it into some focus.”

  I shook my head. “—doom. That’s what I felt. A horrible doom that made my heart race and my stomach sour.”

  “An apocalyptic vision will do that, I suppose. I’m sure it didn’t feel good and I’m sorry you had such a, well, a nightmare. But it fed a story. Something good came out of it.”

  “But is it good?”

  “Yeah, I think you’ve written a fine story here,” you said, brushing it again. Very tactile with my story, Mr. E.

  “No, I mean is that a good thing in general terms? To have a horrible dream and not being able to sleep and feeling forced to get something down on paper?”

  “That’s a hard question to answer. It’s the essential art question, isn’t it? Is the suffering one does, the privation experienced, worth the art it produces?”

  I glanced at the wink of shine off Inga/Inger’s aviator sunglasses and her geometric mandible making her look like an insect. “Must art be the result of suffering?”

  “Not necessarily. But show me any work of art that isn’t in some way tinged with bittersweetness, pain, the unknowable, existential ennui, our lives’ ephemeral nature. I don’t think you’ll find one. Even humorous work is rooted in darkness, sometimes the most dark and fearful. My God, I mean listen to Richard Pryor or David Sedaris, Mel Brooks. Carlin, Bill Hicks. Robin Williams? I mean, gah—dark, despairing stuff under the ha-has.” You traced the outside of the pages of my story with your index finger. I thought you might slice your finger pad open and bleed on it. It was profane, transgressive, what you were doing. Like, who cares if I cut the shit out of my finger on this right now. The way you stared at your sliding finger, meat along a blade . . .

  I audibly gulped. “So, you’re saying it is. Necessary. Suffering for art.”

  “What?” Startled. You put the pages on the desk. You winced and looked at your fingertip. “Oh, yeah. I think so.” You swept your other hand through your hair. “Yeah, time and pressure makes diamonds from coal. Similarly, art is a by-product of life. We’re a carbon life-form. Squeeze some of us just right and you get art.” You chuckled through your nostrils.

  As I say this to you, I think of Mom humming a Crosby, Stills, and Nash tune and singing the refrain while folding laundry dumped on the living room floor—we are stardust, we are golden, we are sixty-billion-year-old carbon . . .

  Goddammit, dear reader, I miss her. I miss you, Mom.

  “And then there you are at the end of the dream, sitting here talking about it, as we are now,” I said.

  You nod curtly once, re-erect your steeple of fingers, that one finger shying from the pressure. Then I saw a droplet of blood roll down your finger. You collapse the steeple and put the finger in your mouth. You wait. There’s more, you know.

  I said, “Then you saying to me what… you said.”

  The steeple was quickly back; collapsed, erected, collapsed lik
e the eensy weensy spider dancing on a mirror. I wanted you to fill it in for me. “You know what you said in my dream, don’t you, Mr. English?”

  You didn’t answer right away, and that’s when my pulse kerthumped in a chaotic time signature.

  You shook your head, cleared your throat with an air of annoyance, bored yourself up and donned a professional demeanor. “All I can say is what I said to you in my dreams. What I said was, sitting there at the end of my desk—you with the backpack—‘they leap from high places with smiles on their faces.’”

  To hear this dream-phrase uttered in the conscious world…I’m sure I looked at you hanging fire and pin-eyed.

  “That line was in your story. Not in dialogue, as I recall. In a passage of narration.” You perfunctorily shuffle my story pages as if seeking the phrase. “This is why I’m fascinated, Kevin.” The look on your face didn’t say fascination. It projected bald fear.

  I hung my head and found myself muttering almost with shame, “You said it to me in my dream too.”

  I mean, Mr. E? The blood fell from your face. You struggled to keep your lips clamped together. You started to say something but your voice was a crack of air. You stood and smoothed out your shirt absentmindedly. “Stranger than fiction, huh Kevin?” Your look just totally haunted, eyes howling and dark against a blanched canvas.

  You were out for the next week, nobody knew why, and then I didn’t see you again until Coach Numbnuts brought me in. You sat behind your desk. The framed photo was gone. You pretended for Coach Numbnuts. I was any other punk on the wrong path.

  Exiting your office and walking down the hall with the coach, I remember looking back at you. Your face fought itself. You attempted to give me the smile you’d wanted to give your unborn child, but your eyes failed you. Your mouth spread out in the mechanics of that smile, but the eyes didn’t follow. They were hollow.