by BRIAN HALL
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• • •
For fun, Mark assigned a constellation to each key on the piano, going up alphabetically, so that Andromeda was the lowest note, and Vulpecula the highest. “Golden” notes—a term he made up—were the ones where the note name corresponded to the first letter of the constellation name. Only the white keys counted for this test, because if you allowed, say, G sharp, then why couldn’t you also call it A flat, and once you opened that can of worms then why couldn’t F be E sharp any time it suited your purposes, and for that matter why couldn’t G be A double flat, and so on?
There were only three golden notes on the piano: the lowest A, Andromeda; the C two octaves below middle C, Capricorn; and the C above that, Corvus. Middle C, the fulcrum, was Hercules, and A 440, the tuning note, was Libra, the scales. Mark knew these were just coincidences, but still, there was something magical about it, wasn’t there?
* * *
• • •
On the second day of junior high school, Mark was crossing the street in front of the building when a kid came up behind him, hooked a finger into the notebooks under his arm, yanked them to the asphalt, and kicked them. The bookstrap snapped and the binders disintegrated, fanning pocket folders across two lanes of traffic. “I’m in serious school now,” Mark thought.
He was in the Advanced Program, and on Thursday in the first week, his seventh-grade English teacher assigned The Yearling, which they were supposed to read in its entirety by Monday. Mark accepted the challenge. It rained all weekend, and he spent both days lying in bed with the book. This was the first novel he had read that didn’t involve a mystery (when he’d outgrown Enid Blyton, his mother gave him Dick Francis and Andrew Garve) and for a while he didn’t see the point. Where was the puzzle you were supposed to figure out if you were smart enough? Jody’s life was just a boy’s life, and Mark had his own life, so why read about Jody’s?
But as the hours wore on, he started to get interested. He started to like Jody’s small, kindhearted father, Penny. The rough, big Forresters were scary. The hunt for Ol’ Slewfoot was exciting. By Sunday afternoon, Mark was 90 percent done, cruising along with all these people he knew pretty well, and thinking, “This is literature; this is serious reading,” and suddenly Penny got badly hurt hauling on a tree stump, and he didn’t recover in the next chapter. In fact, he seemed to be kind of permanently damaged. Which was a little shocking. And then there was Flag, the motherless fawn Jody had found 200 pages back and had been taking care of. Ma hadn’t liked him, but she was grumpy in general, and Penny had always supported Jody—but now, with only forty pages to go, Mark started to feel unease. Flag trampled the tobacco crop, then ate the corn seedlings, and the family couldn’t afford to lose the food. Jody emphatically proved he deserved to keep Flag by working hard for a week planting a new corn crop and building a higher fence, winning the respect of stern Ma, but Flag—and this was really shocking—jumped over the higher fence as though it were nothing, as though all Jody’s work and all Jody’s deserving counted for nothing, and ate the second corn crop.
Flag had no idea what a huge problem this was.
When Penny told Jody to shoot Flag, Mark couldn’t believe what he was reading. Jody walked into the woods with Flag and Penny’s shotgun, but he wasn’t able do it, of course, some other solution would appear, and he snuck back home after dark. Mark turned the page to find the solution to the puzzle, but Ma discovered Flag alive, eating the peas, and she shot and wounded him, and Penny handed Jody the shotgun again, and he had to follow Flag, who ran from him in terror, not understanding, bleeding and floundering, to where he collapsed by a pool and looked up at Jody with “great liquid eyes glazed with wonder” and Jody had to put the gun against his neck and kill him, and Mark put the book down and stared at the bedroom ceiling for a long time.
Why? Why would Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings want to do this to him, to anyone? Some old lady he’d never met who’d lured him into this place by himself, who made it inviting, then blew out the lights and locked the door.
He struggled on toward the end, trying to get over it. Characters offered hard-earned wisdom. He half bought it, only because not buying it made him feel terrible. Jody ran away, and almost starved, and had to come home, where Penny was still bedridden and showed no sign of ever getting better, not “scarcely wuth shootin’,” as he said, which if you thought about it, was a tactless thing to say to Jody. “Boy, life goes back on you,” he said.
So was that the comfort?
“You’ve seed how things goes in the world o’ men.”
So growing up was the consolation?
Mark reached the last page: “He did not believe he should ever again love anything, man or woman or his own child, as he had loved the yearling. He would be lonely all his life. But a man took it for his share and went on. In the beginning of his sleep, he cried out, ‘Flag!’ It was not his own voice that called. It was a boy’s voice. Somewhere beyond the sink-hole, past the magnolia, under the live oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever.”
Mark burst into tears. She’d tricked him again! She’d held out a little scrap, and in the last line she’d stabbed him in the heart. Gone forever. In the dank gray September light, Mark lay in bed, outraged at Rawlings and the irreversibility of time.
* * *
• • •
Serious school: now there were psychopaths to contend with. There was one enormous kid in particular who was coming down the stairs one day just as Mark was opening the fire door in the first-floor hallway. “Hey!” he barked, his voice low and gravelly. Mark whirled, alarmed. “You don’t—ehv-ver—go through a door before me.” He tossed Mark sideways and proceeded. Mark was happy to oblige him, and to hang far enough back that their paths might diverge forever.
No such luck. In the following weeks, the mere sight of Mark seemed to frenzy the kid. He would fight upstream through a dense hallway crowd, pummeling innocent bystanders, in order to reach Mark and punch him. When he was in too much of an apeshit hurry to divert his course, he would turn as he flashed past, his face contorted, groaning with rage, helplessly shaking his fist.
Mark pondered this. He also pondered, come winter, the snowballs that hit him in the back of the head. There were other kids who would intentionally attract his eye, then make exaggerated expressions of imbecility and moan, “Fag!” The injured hatred they managed to pack into that one syllable was hair-raising. It was lucky that Mark was big for his age. They didn’t ever try to really beat him up. No doubt they could have—Mark hadn’t the tiniest conception how to fight—but they didn’t know that, and just as episodes of My Three Sons had it, bullies seemed, beneath all the bravado, to be cowards. Mark was grateful. But he never stopped feeling a plunge into sick dread at the sound, behind him, of that furious, indignant “Fag!”
What was it? Maybe his glasses? Different lenses, but the same sturdy frames he’d picked when he was seven. It was possible they were out of style, but so what? He liked familiar things. His trumpet case? The thick wedge of books under his arm? The bookstrap holding them together?
Everyone had had bookstraps when Mark was eight. Maybe they were popular only among eight-year-olds. Mark neither knew nor cared. They worked. Mark liked how strong the rubber was. He liked drawing patterns with his Bic pen on the strap when it was stretched and watching how the shapes contracted and solidified when he let the rubber relax. Hand-drawn serif fonts compressed themselves into convincing professional type. Stretched again, waiting on his desk in a boring class (math, puerile; history, pointless), the strap tempted him to poke holes in it, using the same pen, and he’d watch the pinholes deform into ellipses that lengthened day by day until finally, after he’d grouped several in a Pleiades-like cluster, the strap would break and he’d have to stop at Woolworth’s on his way home to buy another. In the aisle with the eight-year-olds.
* * *
• • •
Or maybe (thinking of keyboards and constellations) it was the coincidence itself that was magical. If it were actually magic—some wizard’s intentional scheme—it wouldn’t be magical, but kind of dumb. How cheaply symbolic to decide that middle C should be Hercules, and make it so. But how wonderful that it was random.
* * *
• • •
In the summer of 1972, when he was almost thirteen, Mark had strange dreams. Some of them involved human bodies that fell apart or changed into bloody pot roast on the kitchen table. Sometimes there were terrible bodily smells. One night a grown woman in sheer black leggings climbed on his shoulders and pressed her undulating crotch against his face and he had his first “nocturnal emission,” as they called it in Health class.
One night he dreamed that Susan was helping him set up his electric train. He was arranging the buildings, and he turned to say something to her just as she was aligning two pieces of track, holding one in each fist, and as he looked on helplessly she shoved them together and her eyes flew open and her face lit up red as a buzzing filled the room and she was electrocuted. He woke to the buzz of his alarm clock, his heart thudding.
He frequently had a dream that was much different, that filled him with peaceful euphoria. It varied in detail, but always began with him walking along an unfamiliar path through a darkened landscape. It might be in the woods, or it was twilight—“penumbral,” a word he’d recently learned. Coming to the bottom of a hill, he looked up and saw, at the crown, his own house. The path wound up to the front door. The house was always exactly like his real house, except that, as he came closer, he saw that it hadn’t been lived in for many years. The front door was ajar. He went in, and all the rooms were the same, all the furniture was the same, but there were cobwebs and dust and small items scattered on the floor, as though wind had blown them there, or some animal had come in at night. Mark was never surprised that the house was empty. He had already known somehow, in the dream, that his family had gone away, or were all dead. That part didn’t matter. It had happened in the normal course of things and Mark didn’t mourn; instead he felt an overpowering love for the house that had stood empty all these years, waiting for someone to come and take care of the things inside. Now Mark was here, and all his family’s things were here: letters, bills, toys, games, his dad’s LP collection, his mother’s mysteries, his sister’s secrets. Mark now had all the time in the world to go through it, bit by bit, drawer by drawer, lavishing his attention on every detail, with no one to interrupt him. And although the specifics of the dream varied, the words that occurred to him as he stood in one of the silent rooms contemplating the soul-satisfying job before him, those words were always the same: It’s all over now.
* * *
• • •
That summer his mother tried a music camp. “Maybe the kids won’t be so mean,” she said. It was on the shore of a lake in Maine. On the first day, as Mark and his parents parked on the grounds and walked toward registration, boys were running around boisterously, catcalls were flying. Mark cringed, waiting for the first ball accidentally thrown straight at his head. But in the registration office he met short, round Rudy, a fellow camper, who said, “Everyone has to take a swim test; you want to take it with me?” A pulse of relief and gratitude shot through Mark that was so strong, Rudy would become his best friend for the remainder of his adolescence, even though Rudy lived in the Bronx and Mark lived in a Boston suburb.
It turned out that Mark’s mother, at last, was right. There were a few rough kids but hardly any mean ones, and having girls on the sports teams in the afternoons seemed to restrain the cheerful thoughtless violence, and everyone sang a hymn before each meal and a girl told Mark that he had a beautiful voice, and the counselor in his cabin wasn’t a neck-pinching moron but a French horn player who marveled at Mark’s hospital corners before Sunday inspections and bounced a quarter on his blanket, and although it was beginning to be clear that Mark was a lousy trumpet player, his piano was coming along, and he performed Debussy’s The Sunken Cathedral at one of the evening recitals and was praised for it by his fellow campers rather than pummeled and ostracized, and he even turned out to be good at one sport—not a sport, really, but at least it was physical—namely tetherball, where his height allowed him, once he got the ball, to keep pounding it around the pole past the outstretched arms of his opponent more or less indefinitely.
Most momentously, Rudy introduced Mark to science fiction. It might seem strange that, after Lost in Space, he hadn’t found sci-fi on his own, but he had always read what his mother gave him. From now on, Mark read whatever Rudy recommended—Asimov’s Foundation series, Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Herbert’s Dune, Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar.
Mark returned to the same music camp every summer for the next five years. It constituted the happiest part of his life. He paid for the second month in the last three of those years from money he’d earned on a paper route years ago and had never spent. He quit the trumpet, took up bassoon, continued with piano. He sang at meals and in the chorus. He became infatuated with a series of girls—Mendelssohn Violin Concerto; Poulenc Flute Sonata; Brahms E-minor Cello Sonata—but never told them (could they hear his applause?). After concerts, before curfew, he sometimes lay out in the big field, looking for shooting stars, imagining heartfelt conversations. Rudy recommended Niven’s Ringworld, Clarke’s Childhood’s End. Mark performed the Beethoven Opus 10 number 3. Most days he could hold the tetherball court against all comers, and he thought of Susan, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, who could hold a pool table all night at the various bars she hung out in, getting free drinks. Mark got nothing, but who cared, he liked it, the rhythm, the mesmerizing orbit of the ball. At the ends of the summers, in the camp yearbook, Sharps and Flats, girls wrote that he was sweet and funny and should never change. One girl he had a suffocating crush on (Mozart Bassoon Concerto) wrote, “It’s been really great playing next to someone who wasn’t boring.” Actual love notes he had to write himself, and did so, in the margins of his own yearbook, thinking he was being lighthearted: “I’ll miss you so, dearest Mark, please come back, I cannot live without you. Rachel.” (Rachel had been the Poulenc.)
In other seasons he lay on his bed on the weekends and read about time travel, galactic empires, teleportation, aliens benign and malign. He visited Rudy in the Bronx and half-conquered his fear of the subway. Whenever he smelled fresh-cut grass on a hot day the unbidden mental image was so strong it was almost like teleportation, back to the big field in Maine between the dining hall and the concert hall. On many nights when the moon was down, he lay out in the side yard and stargazed. (When he came out early, the twilit sky was the deep melting blue of his Matchbox Iso Grifo.) Boston’s light pollution was worse than Maine’s, but it was on these suburban nights that he learned how to recognize the constellations as they appeared in the sky, rather than on a chart. Of all of them, Cygnus aroused most powerfully the emotion he now thought of, complete with quotation marks, as “the nameless feeling” or, when he was in the mood to wryly self-dramatize, “wordless longing.” Of course he was aware that he had thus named the nameless feeling and found words for the wordless longing. Susan called this “effing the ineffable.”
Why Cygnus? Mark pondered this, lying out in the yard in the aluminum lounge chair with the hollow rubber straps that thunked like bullfrogs when you plucked them. Cygnus was the Swan, but it was also called the Northern Cross, and maybe he liked the balance, or maybe the rivalry, with the Aussies’ Southern Cross. (Theirs was flashier, but ours was more beautiful.) He liked the fact that the Northern Cross was almost but not quite regular: a form flexed as though by motion. Motion implied migration, and many species of Cygnus migrated. Unlike most constellations, Cygnus actually looked like what it was supposed to represent, a long-necked bird with a bright tail, its two wings curving slightly backward. There was something poignant about that long neck, Mark c
ouldn’t put his finger on it, but you could see how it was stretched forward, reaching toward its destination, maybe with “wordless longing,” which reminded him of that other migration he still dreamed of, namely his own to a lunar colony, or to a domed city on Mars. Or one that science fiction novels had taught him to yearn for: when a good boy’s lonely contemplation of the night sky was rewarded with one of the stars brightening, lowering, proving to be an alien spaceship, landing, opening, welcoming.
* * *
• • •
Thinking of the magic of randomness—how amazing it was that as soon as you got twenty-three people together in a room, the probability that two of them shared a birthday was over 50 percent. But maybe the really interesting question was, why did the 50.73 percent probability, which was provable, strike everyone, including Mark, as counterintuitive? Why would our intuition, evolved over millions of years, be wrong about the incidence of coincidences?
* * *
• • •
Susan was living with friends but occasionally came by to see him, mainly to slaughter him at pool down in the basement. He understood the math of her bank shots, the accumulated spins, the transferable momentum of rigid objects colliding. What he couldn’t quite believe, no matter how many times he witnessed it, was how she could communicate so much mathematical information in the tiny fraction of a second during which her stick was in contact with the cue ball.
He didn’t mind losing. (One reason he was not good at any sport was that, in fact, he preferred losing. Like waiting, losing gave him the pleasurable sense that somebody else had to worry.) He particularly loved a certain shot that even Susan could get right only about half the time. When a ball intervened between the cue and object balls, she would raise the back of the stick and punch down on the side of the cue. The ball would spurt sideways, spinning, and would describe an arc around the intervening ball.