Wired Man and Other Freaks of Nature

by Sashi Kaufman

  “That’s good,” Ilona said. “Because it would be really awkward if you just stuck around Easton next year for me.”

  “Yeah, who wants to be that cliché?”

  Ilona smirked and nodded her head.

  “On the other hand, it’s not so far away that I couldn’t still stalk you from time to time,” he added.

  Applying to UMass seemed to give his parents a lot of relief too. They kept saying things like, “It’s just a starting point,” or “If it doesn’t work out you can always transfer.” He got the feeling they were afraid they had pressured him into something he didn’t want. So when they suggested visiting the school he agreed easily, eager to show them that he actually was an agent in his own life decisions. On the way back home, they stopped at a small, strange school in Western Mass called Hampshire College. On a whim they took the tour and listened to Tony, their green haired, Samoan-American, activist-dance major explain the system of self-designed majors and independent studies.

  “Whoa,” Ben said when they finally got in the car after passing on a lunch of garden burgers and lentil salad at the student cooperative-run kitchen. “That was different.”

  His parents agreed and didn’t pester him too much about only applying to one school. But that night when he couldn’t sleep, he looked up the essay for Hampshire College online. The essay asked him to write about a relationship that had influenced him in becoming who he was. It was easy. He wrote about Tyler.

  When he finished, it was nearly dawn, and after rereading it he thought it was kind of sappy and overdone and probably not at all the kind of thing that Hampshire College was looking for in its students. But he saved it nonetheless in a file on his computer he named “rainy day.” He still had a few weeks to decide if he would complete the rest of the application.

  It rained hard at the end of the following week. It was a Thursday and as gloomy a Thursday as could be imagined for early spring in New England. The flower buds and new leaves sagged on their thin branches as fat cold drops assaulted them from above.

  Ben and Tyler were eating Colucci’s steak bombs in Tyler’s car. They were parked in the student lot—their favorite red booth had been occupied by a couple of cops. “What do you have last period?” Tyler asked as he licked the grease from his fingers, let out a loud burp, and tossed the wax sandwich paper in the backseat of his car.

  “Nasty,” Ben said and opened the window to let the aftersmell from Tyler’s greasy onion-and-cheese burp out of the car. “Uh, Pop Culture, I guess, and a study hall. Why?”

  “Let’s go somewhere.”

  “Like where?”

  “Like the aquarium.” He reached across Ben’s lap and pulled the handle on the glove box. Inside was a small plastic bag tightly packed with weed.

  “Done,” Ben said. Getting high and going to the aquarium was one of the things on their senior list they hadn’t crossed off yet.

  They drove to the top floor of the parking garage at the New England Aquarium and found a corner twenty spaces away from the next car. Tyler rolled a joint and they passed it back and forth, occasionally looking around to make sure they were alone.

  Once they were thoroughly baked, they bought a couple of super-salty pretzels from a guy manning a hot dog cart outside the parking garage. Despite wearing a soft felt hat shaped like a ketchup bottle, the guy had the overly-pinched expression of a school principal, and his obvious annoyance at their fumbling for change and knocking over his condiments gave them both the giggles.

  “Oh!” Ben exclaimed when he finally chomped down on the warm, chewy dough. His belly let out a loud echoing groan, which made Tyler laugh even harder.

  “This pretzel is so good,” Tyler said stupidly. “I just want to eat it forever.”

  “Forever pretzels,” Ben mused. “Those would be incredible.”

  They kept snickering as they waited in line behind a group of Japanese tourists to buy tickets for the aquarium. Tyler turned to Ben and held up his copy of his father’s credit card. “This,” he said, turning suddenly serious, “is for emergencies only.”

  “What is our emergency?” Ben asked.

  “Finding Nemo,” Tyler said, straight-faced except for the tiny upturned corner of his mouth. “Excuse me, ma’am,” Tyler asked the African American woman with the purple fade and silver nose stud working in the ticket booth. “We are looking for Nemo.”

  “Two students?” the woman said. Her tone was hard and her face impassive.

  “No,” Tyler said. Ben kicked him and pointed to the student rate on the board above their heads. “I mean yes.”

  “Twenty-eight fifty, please.” Tyler slid his credit card under the Plexiglas partition. “And no outside food,” the woman added as she pointed to their pretzels and then slid the credit card through the swiper next to her computer screen.

  Matching her seriousness, Tyler began to stuff his entire pretzel in his mouth without chewing. Ben started giggling and several of the Japanese tourists turned to watch. Ben stuck his head down near the opening in the Plexiglas and spoke loudly, his mouth on the metal tray where money was exchanged.

  “But these are forever pretzels,” he said.

  Tyler started to choke-laugh as he tried to chew the mountain of dough that was stuffed between his cheeks. “No outside food,” the woman repeated. She passed the credit card slip through for Tyler to sign.

  “But they last forever,” Ben heard himself say. He was laughing so hard a few tears were even pooling in the corner of his eyes.

  Tyler signed the slip and held up the New England Aquarium pen with its white striped fish logo. “I’m going to take this with me,” he said seriously.

  The woman rolled her eyes and motioned them on with her hand. They staggered out of line over to the large outdoor tank where six or seven seals were swimming past the glass, their speckled bodies undulating underwater. They watched, hypnotized, as the seals made laps in the dark water, their white underbellies almost luminescent in contrast. Their trainer, a woman with a sun-wrinkled face and pink Crocs on her feet, threw fish at the seals when they skittered up to the platform where she stood.

  “They were out in the ocean,” Tyler said. “And now they’re here, in like fifteen feet of water and maybe thirty square feet of space. Do you think they know they’ve been screwed?”

  “The food’s good,” Ben said as two seals pushed and shoved for the trainer’s snacks.

  “Yeah, but they’re prisoners,” Tyler said sadly. Ben wondered about the weed. Was it laced with something? Tyler never got morose when he was high. “Do you think we’re like that?” he asked.

  “No,” Ben said, determined to turn the conversation around. “Those guys trapped in the mine in Chile were like that. People in domestic violence situations are like that. Poor people, like, homeless people without options are like that. We’re just in high school.”

  Tyler cocked his head as one of the seals swam over to where they were standing. “Drama?”

  “A bit,” Ben said.

  “What do you think he’s thinking?”

  “Probably who’s that douche bag who didn’t save me any pretzel?”

  Tyler laughed and started waddling back and forth, waving his arms like flippers and barking like a seal. This sent up a wave of chatter from the Japanese group next to them. They went inside the aquarium.

  It was dark and warm, and the whole place smelled like seaweed and pet food and faintly but not offensively like shit. Ben and Tyler leaned over the railing, staring down into a large tank below them, and watched as a biologist in scuba gear held up a small penguin with bright yellow head feathers. Meanwhile, other penguins slid sleekly through the water and disembarked onto the fake rock islands scattered throughout the pool. They wore tiny metal bands around their feet. Behind the biologist, another guy in a wetsuit pushed an underwater vacuum through the tank, sucking up penguin shit with a long accordion hose.

  “He probably went to college for that,” Tyler said.

 
; “What do you think he majored in? Poop scooping?”

  “They probably called it fecal extraction practices.”

  A group of kids on a field trip came charging up to the tank. Ben and Tyler scooted to the side as the kids threw elbows and shoved to get to the front. One of the very last kids to reach the tank was a chubby kid with a dirty face, crew cut, and a Pokémon backpack. He was accompanied by a tired-looking teacher who kept gently redirecting him to keep up with the group. The kid found a spot at the railing right next to Tyler and Ben. Ben watched as the kid slid his backpack to the floor and, after first checking to see if he was out of sight from the adults, pulled a half-eaten peanut butter and fluff sandwich from his bag. The biologist looked up. Ben saw him eyeing the kid with the sandwich.

  The kid was oblivious, and Ben felt butterflies in his own stomach as he anticipated the ridicule the kid was about to subject himself to. As the biologist kept talking, the penguin adjusted its position in the man’s hand, bent forward slightly, and crapped all over the guy’s arm. The elementary school kids burst into hysterics. The backpack kid laughed so hard he started choking and then shot a chunk of sandwich out of his mouth and into the water below.

  It was gross, but the biologist guy acted like a bomb had been dropped in the tank. He shoved the tiny bird backwards and, with over-exaggerated arm movements, pushed himself through the water and scooped up the sandwich chunk. The other guy pointed his hose at it, and it was sucked up and gone. The hysteria of the group now doubled. The guilty party tried to play it off. He shrugged and took another small bite of his sandwich before shoving it back into the plastic baggie. A tall, thin man with an Aquarium button pinned onto his sweater and glasses on a silver chain took him by the arm to a bench off to one side, while the tired teacher trotted behind. Meanwhile, Biologist Guy flipped his shaggy hair out of his eyes and proceeded to lecture the group about the dangers of “outside food.”

  Ben wasn’t laughing. He could only feel the inner embarrassment of the kid, clearly an outsider, and felt the whole thing crushing his high quite prematurely and unnecessarily. “Let’s get out of here,” he said to Tyler with one backwards glance at the kid who was sitting on the bench kicking his backpack while his teacher looked at something on his phone. They walked around the long spiral that stretched around the main feature of the aquarium, a multistory cylindrical tank in which fish, sharks, and giant sea turtles swam in slow circles as though caught in some eternal slow-motion laundry cycle. They found a viewing station that was empty and sat in the little window alcove, one side of their faces pressed against the glass tank wall. They stared straight ahead for a while, captivated by the slow moving but ever changing parade of scaly creatures.

  “You know that kid isn’t you,” Tyler said.

  Ben didn’t have to ask who he meant.

  “I know,” he said. He watched as a long thin fish with a yellow stripe wiggled past the window. “It’s not you either.” He saw Tyler’s reflection contort slightly in the green tinted glass of the tank wall. The curved glass gave Tyler’s face an even sadder look. Ben had a sudden urge to tell him about the essay he had written—even better would have been to pull out a copy and read it. He wrestled irrationally with the idea of bringing it up on his phone somehow but quickly realized that was impossible—but not because of technology. How could he share the way he truly felt about Tyler if he didn’t have the guts to tell him what he knew about Scott? What kind of friend did that make him? That knowledge felt like a gap that was forming and slowly but unstoppably widening between them. He felt it even more clearly because of the fuzz in his brain from the pot. The way you could sit next to someone having the same high, the same experience, and yet the high created a separation all its own, a divide. Would saying something let him reach across it or just widen it even more?

  An announcement came over the aquarium PA for a sea otter show starting in five minutes. They made their way back down the winding ramp and outside, where bright patches of blue were visible through the patchwork of mottled gray clouds. They took a seat on the metal bleachers and watched as the aquarium trainers put the wriggling brown animals through their tricks and acrobatics. It was nice to have something that took away the need for conversation for a little bit. But by the end, Ben knew he couldn’t put off talking to Tyler any longer.

  After the show they walked out in back of the aquarium and sat on a bench facing the ocean. It was warm when the sun blazed through one of the open patches in the clouds, but the wind was blowing fiercely, stirring up whitecaps in the harbor and snapping the flags of the small boats tucked in their slips next to the pier. Ben stared in the direction of Georges Island. It was a former military fort, now a tourist destination, and the site of his eleventh birthday party. Not really a party, more of an excursion with his dad and Tyler. He never really liked birthday parties once he figured out that most of his guests were just the kids of his parents’ friends. After he put that one together, he usually just asked to do something with his dad and Tyler.

  Ben looked down at his hands. He was mostly straight again—just a little bit of fuzziness from the pot left over. “I don’t think you came up with that game,” he said softly. The wind created a whistling sound in his ears, and it was hard to tune out the flapping of his jacket sleeves as they filled, like sails, with the cold spring air. Tyler was staring out at the water, but Ben knew he had heard him. “And I’m pretty sure I know who did,” he added. He turned his head ever so slightly so he could register Tyler’s expression. There were tears tracing a single, orderly line down his cheeks.

  Ben took a deep breath. He figured this was his one chance. He wanted to say it all. “It was Sco—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Tyler interrupted sharply. “I was old enough to know better. I should have known better. What the fuck?”

  “Wait,” Ben said, “you think this was your fault?”

  “If I didn’t listen to him. You know. If I wasn’t so impressed by him and his stupid car. If I didn’t let myself think it wasn’t that big of a deal. I mean, that’s what he told me. This just feels good. It’s not a big deal. Guys do this all the time, right?” Tyler stopped the torrent of words. He put his head down on his knees and let out a yell, and in it Ben heard all the frustration and all the pain, all the things Tyler never showed anyone. And then Tyler jumped up and ran to the edge of the pier, and for one horrifying moment Ben thought he might throw himself into the frigid water, but he fell to his knees and began heaving against the wooden beam, hacking and coughing and screaming to bring up whatever was inside him that felt like poison.

  Ben walked over and put a cautious hand on his back. He left it there when Tyler didn’t flinch or push him away. He knelt down and stared at the green water. The posts of the pier were wrapped in long ropes of seaweed. There were a few light brown chunks floating in the water. “Forever pretzels,” he said lightly. Tyler’s shoulders started to shake again, but Ben could tell they were the gentle shakes of laughter. Tyler leaned backwards and planted his butt on the pier. Ben sat down next to him. It didn’t matter that the boards were damp and cold. Tyler wiped at his face with a sleeve. “I’m a mess,” he said.

  Ben shrugged. “It’s not that bad,” he said. But wasn’t exactly sure what he was referring to.

  “What am I going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Ben said. “Maybe you should talk to someone. I mean, besides me.”

  “What, like a guidance counselor? Fuck no. I don’t need to talk about it. I need to forget about it, and I certainly don’t need Higginbotham talking to me about it. Wouldn’t that just light him up?” Ben knew that talking about it was the right thing for Tyler to do, and that Tyler needed someone who would know how to deal with this kind of thing. But Tyler was shaking his head and seemed so certain.

  “No, I’m straight with you and that’s what matters.” Tyler looked at him, his eyes dark and serious. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t ever want to talk about this shit
again. Not with you, and not with anybody. Definitely not with some shrink.”

  Ben saw the window closing, the stairs falling out from under him like when the Fellowship was trying to outrun the Balrog in the Mines of Moria, its hot fire-whips threatening to ensnare them and pull them down forever.

  “No,” he said.

  Tyler looked up at him, annoyed.

  “That’s a really terrible idea. This is all coming up for a reason. I don’t know what the reason is, but I don’t think it’s just about me and making things right with me. You were weird all fall and it’s better now but I don’t think it’s gone. I don’t think it will ever be gone until you get rid of it the right way. And—” He paused. “And I’m sorry that I don’t know what the right way is, but I’m pretty sure just burying it somewhere is a terrible idea. This is some poisonous shit, Ty, and it’s going to find its way back to the surface.”

  Ben was sweating, like seriously sweating. He wanted to pull off his jacket and maybe even his sweatshirt but it just didn’t make sense. It wasn’t even warm out. He never told anyone what to do or say. Maybe that was it. I’ve never told you what to do! Ben wanted to shout at him. So listen to me now, dammit.

  Tyler shrugged. “All right,” he said. “But I’m done for now.”

  Chapter 26

  They were quiet on the way home from the aquarium; the buzz had worn off and the words spoken between them felt like an extra passenger squeezed uncomfortably between the two front seats. As soon as Tyler dropped him off and he threw down some dinner, Ben hopped on his bike and rode over to Broadway Gardens. The store was closed, but Ben walked in anyway and pushed past the heavy plastic curtain into the greenhouse. He made his way through the first two buildings without seeing anybody as he followed the faint but ever increasing thumps of music coming from the last of the hoop houses.

  In the last building he found Ilona. She was spraying some plants with bright neon flowers while nodding her head to an old Rage Against the Machine song. The beat was throbbing forth from the ancient paint-spattered boom box set up on a plastic chair near the door. Ben snuck up behind her and tapped her lightly on the shoulder. Ilona whipped around.