“I’m Jack’s Dylan,” says Old Dylan.
“I’m Jack’s one too,” says New.
“Yeah, but actually I was Jack’s first.”
Then Old and New bash each other with corners till a page of New rips and I stop because I’ve ripped a book and Ma will be mad. She’s not here to be mad, she doesn’t even know, I’m crying and crying and I zip away the books in my Dora bag so they don’t get cried on. The two Dylans cuddle up together inside and say sorry.
I find Tooth under the blow-up and suck him till he feels like he’s one of mine.
The windows are making funny noises, it’s drops of rain. I go close, I’m not very scared so long as the glass is between. I put my nose right on it, it’s all blurry from the rain, the drops melt together and turn into long rivers down down down the glass.
• • •
Me and Grandma and Steppa are all three going in the white car on a surprise trip. “But how do you know which way?” I ask Grandma when she’s driving.
She winks at me in the mirror. “It’s only a surprise for you.”
I watch out the window for new things. A girl in a wheelchair with her head back between two padded things. A dog sniffing another dog’s butt, that’s funny. There’s a metal box for mailing mail in. A plastic bag blowing.
I think I sleep a bit but I’m not sure.
We’re stopped in a parking lot that has dusty stuff all over the lines.
“Guess what?” asks Steppa, pointing.
“Sugar?”
“Sand,” he says. “Getting warmer?”
“No, I’m cold.”
“He means, are you figuring out where we are? Someplace me and your Grandpa used to bring your ma and Paul when they were little?” I look a long way. “Mountains?”
“Sand dunes. And in between those two, the blue stuff?”
“Sky.”
“But underneath. The darker blue at the bottom.”
My eyes are hurting even through my shades.
“The sea!” says Grandma.
I go behind them along the wooden path, I carry the bucket. It’s not like I thought, the wind keeps putting tiny stones in my eyes. Grandma spreads out a big flowery rug, it’s going to get all sandy but she says that’s OK, it’s a picnic blanket.
“Where’s the picnic?”
“It’s a bit early in the year for that.”
Steppa says why don’t we go down to the water.
I’ve got sand in my shoes, one of them comes off. “That’s an idea,” says Steppa. He takes his both off and puts his socks in them, he swings them from the laces.
I put my socks in my shoes too. The sand is all damp and strange on my feet, there’s prickly bits. Ma never said the beach was like this.
“Let’s go,” says Steppa, he starts running at the sea.
I stay far back because there’s huge growing bits with white stuff on top, they roar and crash. The sea never stops growling and it’s too big, we’re not meant to be here.
I go back to Grandma on the picnic blanket. She’s wriggling her bare toes, they’re all wrinkly.
We try to build a sand castle but it’s the wrong kind of sand, it keeps crumbling.
Steppa comes back with his pants rolled up and dripping. “Didn’t feel like paddling?”
“There’s all poo.”
“Where?”
“In the sea. Our poos go down the pipes to the sea, I don’t want to walk in it.”
Steppa laughs. “Your mother doesn’t know much about plumbing, does she?”
I want to hit him. “Ma knows about everything.”
“There’s like a big factory where the pipes from all the toilets go.” He’s sitting on the blanket with his feet all sandy. “The guys there scoop out all the poo and scrub every drop of water till it’s good enough to drink, then they put it back in the pipes so it pours out our faucets again.” “When does it go to the sea?”
He shakes his head. “I think the sea’s just rain and salt.”
“Ever taste a tear?” asks Grandma.
“Yeah.”
“Well, that’s the same as the sea.”
I still don’t want to walk in it if it’s tears.
But I go back down near the water with Steppa to look for treasure. We find a white shell like a snail, but when I curl my finger inside, he’s gone out. “Keep it,” says Steppa.
“But what about when he comes home?”
“Well,” says Steppa, “I don’t think he’d leave it lying around if he still needed it.”
Maybe a bird ate him. Or a lion. I put the shell in my pocket, and a pink one, and a black one, and a long dangerous one called a razor shell. I’m allowed take them home because finders keepers, losers weepers.
We have our lunch at a diner which doesn’t mean just have dinner but food anytime at all. I have a BLT that’s a hot sandwich of lettuce and tomato with bacons hidden inside.
Driving home I see the playground but it’s all wrong, the swings are on the opposite side.
“Oh, Jack, that’s a different one,” says Grandma. There’s playgrounds in every town.”
Lots of the world seems to be a repeat.
• • •
“Noreen tells me you’ve had a haircut.” Ma’s voice is tiny on the phone.
“Yeah. But I still have my strong.” I’m sitting under Rug with the phone, all in the dark to pretend Ma’s right here. “I have baths on my own now,” I tell her. “I’ve been on swings and I know money and fire and street persons and I’ve got two Dylan the Diggers and a conscience and spongy shoes.” “Wow.”
“Oh and I’ve seen the sea, there’s no poo in it, you were tricking me.”
“You had so many questions,” says Ma. “And I didn’t have all the answers, so I had to make some up.” I hear her crying breath.
“Ma, can you come get me tonight?”
“Not quite yet.”
“Why not?”
“They’re still fiddling with my dosage, trying to figure out what I need.”
Me, she needs me. Can’t she figure that out?
• • •
I want to eat my pad thai with Meltedy Spoon but Grandma says it’s unhygienic.
Later I’m in the living room channel surfing, that means looking at all the planets as fast as a surfer, and I hear my name, not in real but in TV.
“. . need to listen to Jack.”
“We’re all Jack, in a sense,” says another man sitting at the big table.
“Obviously,” says another one.
Are they called Jack too, are they some of the million?
“The inner child, trapped in our personal Room one oh one,” says another of the men, nodding.
I don’t think I was ever in that room.
“But then perversely, on release, finding ourselves alone in a crowd. .”
“Reeling from the sensory overload of modernity,” says the first one.
“Post-modernity.”
There’s a woman too. “But surely, at a symbolic level, Jack’s the child sacrifice,” she says, “cemented into the foundations to placate the spirits.” Huh?
“I would have thought the more relevant archetype here is Perseus — born to a walled-up virgin, set adrift in a wooden box, the victim who returns as hero,” says one of the men.
“Of course Kaspar Hauser famously claimed he’d been happy in his dungeon, but perhaps he really meant that nineteenth-century German society was just a bigger dungeon.” “At least Jack had TV.”
Another man laughs. “Culture as a shadow on the wall of Plato’s cave.”
Grandma comes in and switches it right off, scowling.
“It was about me,” I tell her.
“Those guys spent too much time at college.”
“Ma says I have to go to college.”
Grandma’s eyes roll. “All in good time. Pj’s and teeth now.”
She reads me The Runaway Bunny but I’m not liking it tonight. I keep thinking what if it was
the mother bunny that ran away and hid and the baby bunny couldn’t find her.
• • •
Grandma’s going to buy me a soccer ball, it’s very exciting. I go look at a plastic man with a black rubber suit and flippers, then I see a big stack of suitcases all colors like pink and green and blue, then an escalator. I just step on for a second but I can’t get back up, it zooms me down down down and it’s the coolest thing and scary as well, coolary, that’s a word sandwich, Ma would like it. At the end I have to jump off, I don’t know to get back up to Grandma again. I count my teeth five times, one time I get nineteen instead of twenty. There’s signs everywhere that all say the same thing, Just Three Weeks to Mother’s Day, Doesn’t She Deserve the Best? I look at plates and stoves and chairs, then I’m all floppy so I lie down on a bed.
A woman says I’m not allowed so I sit up. “Where’s your mom, little guy?”
“She’s in the Clinic because she tried to go to Heaven early.” The woman’s staring at me. “I’m a bonsai.” “You’re a what?”
“We were locked up, now we’re rap stars.”
“Oh my go — you’re that boy! The one — Lorana,” she shouts, “get over here. You’ll never believe it. It’s the boy, Jack, the one on TV from the shed.”
Another person comes over, shaking her head. “The shed one’s smaller with long hair tied back, and all kind of hunched.” “It’s him,” she says, “I swear it’s him.”
“No way,” says the other one.
“Jose,” I say.
She laughs and laughs. “This is unreal. Can I have an autograph?”
“Lorana, he won’t know how to sign his name.”
“Yes I will,” I say, “I can write anything there is.”
“You’re something else,” she tells me. “Isn’t he something else?” she says to the other one.
The only paper is old labels from the clothes, I’m writing JACK on lots for the women to give to their friends when Grandma runs up with a ball under her arm and I’ve never seen her so mad. She shouts at the women about lost child procedures, she tears my autographs into bits. She yanks me by the hand. When we’re rushing out of the store the gate goes aieeee aieee, Grandma drops the soccer ball on the carpet.
In the car she won’t look at me in the mirror. I ask, “Why you threw away my ball?”
“It was setting off the alarm,” says Grandma, “because I hadn’t paid.”
“Were you robbing?”
“No, Jack,” she shouts, “I was running around the building like a lunatic looking for you.” Then she says, more quietly, “Anything could have happened.” “Like an earthquake?”
Grandma stares at me in the little mirror. “A stranger might snatch you, Jack, that’s what I’m talking about.” A stranger’s a not-friend, but the women were my new friends. “Why?”
“Because they might want a little boy of their own, all right?”
It doesn’t sound all right.
“Or to hurt you, even.”
“You mean him?” Old Nick, but I can’t say it.
“No, he can’t get out of jail, but somebody like him,” says Grandma.
I didn’t know there was somebody like him in the world.
“Can you go back and get my ball now?” I ask.
She switches on the engine and drives out of the parking lot fast so the wheels screech.
In the car I get madder and madder.
When we get back to the house I put everything in my Dora bag, except my shoes don’t fit so I throw them in the trash and I roll Rug up and drag her down the stairs behind me.
Grandma comes into the hall. “Did you wash your hands?”
“I’m going back to the Clinic,” I shout at her, “and you can’t stop me because you’re a, you’re a stranger.” “Jack,” she says, “put that stinky rug back where it was.”
“You’re the stinky,” I roar.
She’s pressing on her chest. “Leo,” she says over her shoulder, “I swear, I’ve had just about as much—” Steppa comes up the stairs and picks me up.
I drop Rug. Steppa kicks my Dora bag out of the way. He’s carrying me, I’m screaming and hitting him because it’s allowed, it’s a special case, I can kill him even, I’m killing and killing him—
“Leo,” wails Grandma downstairs, “Leo—”
Fee fie foe fum, he’s going to rip me in pieces, he’s going to wrap me in Rug and bury me and the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out—Steppa drops me on the blow-up, but it doesn’t hurt.
He sits down on the end so it all goes up like a wave. I’m still crying and shaking and my snot’s getting on the sheet.
I stop crying. I feel under the blow-up for Tooth, I put him in my mouth and suck hard. He doesn’t taste like anything anymore.
Steppa’s hand is on the sheet just beside me, it’s got hairs on the fingers.
His eyes are waiting for my eyes. “All fair and square, water under the bridge?”
I move Tooth to my gum. “What?”
“Want to have pie on the couch and watch the game?”
“OK.”
• • •
I pick up branches fallen off the trees, even enormous heavy ones. Me and Grandma tie them into bundles with string for the city to take them. “How does the city—?”
“The guys from the city, I mean, the guys whose job it is.”
When I grow up my job is going to be a giant, not the eating kind, the kind that catches kids that are falling into the sea maybe and puts them back on land.
I shout, “Dandelion alert,” Grandma scoops it out with her trowel so the grass can grow, because there isn’t room for everything.
When we’re tired we go in the hammock, even Grandma. “I used to sit like this with your ma when she was a baby.” “Did you give her some?”
“Some what?”
“From your breast.”
Grandma shakes her head. “She used to bend back my fingers while she had her bottle.”
“Where’s the tummy mommy?”
“The — oh, you know about her? I have no idea, I’m afraid.”
“Did she get another baby?”
Grandma doesn’t say anything. Then she says, “That’s a nice thought.”
• • •
I’m painting at the kitchen table in Grandma’s old apron that has a crocodile and I Ate Gator on the Bayou. I’m not doing proper pictures, just splotches and stripes and spirals, I use all the colors, I even mix them in puddles. I like to make a wet bit then fold the paper over like Grandma showed me, so when I unfold it it’s a butterfly.
There’s Ma in the window.
The red spills. I try and wipe it up but it’s all on my foot and the floor. Ma’s face isn’t there anymore, I run to the window but she’s gone. Was I just imagining? I’ve got red on the window and the sink and the counter. “Grandma?” I shout. “Grandma?”
Then Ma’s right behind me.
I run to nearly at her. She goes to hug me but I say, “No, I’m all painty.”
She laughs, she undoes my apron and drops it on the table. She holds me hard all over but I keep my sticky hands and foot away. “I wouldn’t know you,” she says to my head.
“Why you wouldn’t—?”
“I guess it’s your hair.”
“Look, I have some long in a bracelet, but it keeps getting catched on things.”
“Can I have it?”
“Sure.”
The bracelet gets some paint on it sliding off my wrist. Ma puts it on hers. She looks different but I don’t know how. “Sorry I made you red on your arm.” “It’s all washable,” says Grandma, coming in.
“You didn’t tell him I was coming?” asks Ma, giving her a kiss.
“Ithought it best not,incase of a hitch.”
“There’s no hitches.”
“Good to hear it.” Grandma wipes her eyes and starts cleaning the paint up. “Now, Jack’s been sleeping on a blow-up mattress in our room, but I can make you up a bed on the couch
. .”
“Actually, we better head off.”
Grandma stands still for a minute. “You’ll stay for a bit of supper?”
“Sure,” says Ma.
Steppa makes pork chops with risotto, I don’t like the bone bits but I eat all the rice and scrape the sauce with my fork. Steppa steals a bit of my pork.
“Swiper no swiping.”
He groans, “Oh, man!”
Grandma shows me a heavy book with kids she says were Ma and Paul when they were small. I’m working on believing, then I see one of the girl on a beach, the one Grandma and Steppa took me there, and her face is Ma’s exact face. I show Ma.
“That’s me, all right,” she says, turning the page. There’s one of Paul waving out of a window in a gigantic banana that’s actually a statue, and one of them both eating ice cream in cones with Grandpa but he looks different and Grandma too, she has dark hair in the picture.
“Where’s one of the hammock?”
“We were in it all the time, so probably nobody ever thought of taking a picture,” says Ma.
“It must be terrible to not have any,” Grandma tells her.
“Any what?” says Ma.
“Pictures of Jack when he was a baby and a toddler,” she says. “I mean, just to remember him by.”
Ma’s face is all blank. “I don’t forget a day of it.” She looks at her watch, I didn’t know she had one, it’s got pointy fingers.
“What time are they expecting you at the clinic?” asks Steppa.
She shakes her head. “I’m all done with that.” She takes something out of her pocket and shakes it, it’s a key on a ring. “Guess what, Jack, you and me have our own apartment.”
Room: A Novel Page 27