Madagascar

by Steven Schwartz

  I had a thought: Lester. Then a gun fired. The thought and the sound happened at the same moment and they were indistinguishable. Only when I saw Jeff run into Lester’s room did I know something was wrong.

  Lester was lying on his bed, his big body spread across the mattress, his arm over the side, the gun hanging from his finger with the barrel touching the floor. His eyes were wide open, a dead stare up at the ceiling.

  “No!” Jeff shouted and began touching Lester all over, looking for the wound.

  “Don’t do that!” Lester said, giggling. “I’m so ticklish. It drives me crazy!”

  I stared at Lester. Jeff backed away from him, then shouted, “You stupid schmuck! This isn’t funny!”

  Lester sat up on the bed. “I wanted to experience my death.”

  Jeff sunk to the floor, shaking his head back and forth. “No, no, no, no, no, this is all wrong!”

  “It was just a blank,” Lester said. He emptied the gun and showed us. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone.” The skin over his face tightened—as though someone were turning a handle on the side of his head. I could see the outline of his skull, what it was going to look like.

  I checked behind me. Maida hadn’t come into the room. I went back to where she had been sitting and she wasn’t there. “Maida?” My voice echoed through the rooms—like the rooms of houses in dreams.

  “Ivan, help me,” Maida said, and I followed her voice into the bathroom. She was standing at the sink washing her face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t see. I keep washing my eyes but I can’t see anything.”

  The chef rushed Maida to the hospital. He had come up to the recreation hall because of the noise. Jeff and I went along, while Lester stayed behind. The chef kept asking me what happened, how did she suddenly go blind? I held Maida’s head against my chest and told him I didn’t know. Not until we got to the hospital did I admit to the doctor that we had taken acid.

  He immediately gave Maida a shot and she fell asleep. He said he was almost positive she would have her sight back in the morning when she woke, but what had happened? How much LSD had we taken? How long ago? And, finally, he asked, Why? That’s when I began crying. I had blinded her as surely as if I’d taken a red-hot poker to her eyes. I’d made her do this to prove she loved me. The doctor gave me a Thorazine capsule to bring me down. He said I could stay in Maida’s room with her overnight.

  The Thorazine helped, but I couldn’t fall asleep. I thought I had to make sure Maida was all right, and that by staying awake and watching over her I’d protect her. The chef had gone back to the hotel. I had asked him to wait until morning to tell Letty what had happened. I would call Letty then and take a cab back with Maida. Jeff slept on the couch in the waiting room, half talking to me when I wandered back and forth from there to Maida’s room, watching her sleep—her still body, her unseeing eyes, her quiet breathing. I apologized over and over to her. I said I loved her. I bent down to kiss her, but Jeff s face superimposed itself over mine as I did, and I withdrew my lips.

  Aunt Letty asked us all to leave the hotel after the incident. I remember the shame I felt in facing her, her few but deliberate words: “I think you should go home, Ivan.” She would call an agency and find replacements for us. Lester had already gone by the time I returned that next evening. He had left Maida a letter explaining he didn’t realize the prank would scare her so much. He also admitted that he wasn’t in West Point. He wasn’t even in college, or the army. He’d been rejected from the service for a history of arrhythmia. The uniform belonged to his brother, who was at West Point. He’d signed his letter to Maida, Sorry, and enclosed a card for a free pizza if she was ever in Long Island.

  Maida didn’t get out of the hospital that next day, or the next, or the next. It was six weeks before she got her sight back. She had to work with a psychiatrist, who said the incident had been a flashback to her father’s death and that her mind had shut down at the sound of the gun. I thought it was true: parts of the mind are so fragile they are thrown into a self-protective darkness at such times, the self hiding from the self.

  It was three years before I saw Maida again. The episode had deeply disturbed our family, and it was generally agreed that it would be a good idea if I didn’t contact her. One day she called me at college in Ohio and said that Letty had died.

  I sat in the back of the funeral home while the rabbi talked privately, one by one, with each immediate family member in the front row. I could see Maida’s head moving as the rabbi spoke softly to her. She was wearing a simple black dress and her hair was full and long on her back, not in a braid as she had worn it most of that summer. I felt my heart jump when I saw her and I was aware how much I had missed her.

  After the funeral we gathered at her mother’s house. In all the grief, no one noticed me at first. Then Maida’s older sister welcomed me and said how nice it was I could come. Letty had cared a great deal for me, she said. I was thrilled at her words, this forgiveness implied not just from Letty but from her. I had carried around the blame for Maida’s blindness for so long I never thought I’d be released from it. “I’m sorry about everything,” I said, and Maida’s sister squeezed my hand and went over to sit with her mother.

  I was standing at the table putting some cheese on a cracker, not because I was hungry but because I felt I should eat. I’d been too nervous on the plane, and now that I was here the excitement had persisted. Maida came up beside me. She took my arm and said to come with her a moment. She was wearing heels and perfume and seemed older than me, as though more time had passed for her.

  We went outside to the patio and sat on a glider that creaked. Maida held her hands in her lap, formally. There was a distance between us, an affectionate distance, but still a distance. We were cousins now.

  “Thanks for calling me,” I said.

  “I’m glad you came, Ivan.”

  Her sister shouted from the house. One of Maida’s elderly aunts wanted to see her inside.

  “In a minute,” Maida said.

  “Is this hard for you?”

  “Yes. Although it’s different than his was.”

  Her father’s death was never far from her thoughts.

  “That was more tense,” she said. “Here, people are sad in an accepting way.”

  “What do you think was behind the tenseness exactly?”

  “Bitterness,” Maida said. “And I guess this is finally the sweet side of that bitterness. About time. Everybody loved Letty. You always asked me such good questions, Ivan. I really miss you.”

  I nodded. I was afraid to say much more.

  “Are you still going to be a psychologist?”

  “Trying,” I said.

  “I need to tell you something, Ivan. It’s about Jeff. We saw each other a few times when he came down to the city.”

  “I know,” I said. “He told me. It was one of the last letters I got from him before he went over.”

  “I just thought I had to tell you, in case you didn’t know. I liked the honesty we had, that’s rare I’ve been finding out. Have you heard from Jeff recently?”

  “No.”

  “I haven’t either. It didn’t work out, by the way—no surprise, I guess. I think I was attracted to his flamboyance.”

  “Your father,” I said.

  Maida smiled at me. “You’re such a psychologist.”

  Maida’s elderly aunt came to the door. “Maida, darling! Maida, come here, sweetheart.”

  “I’ve got to go, that’s Aunt Cissy. She wants to rave about my beautiful hair for a while. It’s what she does every time she comes to visit. You’ll be okay?”

  “Sure,” I said. Maida stood up. She took my hand and then kissed me on the cheek. Her hand rested on the back of my neck for a few seconds. I watched her walk over to her aunt and heard the old woman say, “Oh, my goodness, who has such hair!”

  That afternoon I took the train into Manhattan. The sun was bright and the New Yorkers friendly, i
f I said hello first. I bought a pretzel and got lost on the subway. A man with a Russian accent who sat down next to me wanted to sell me a watch; I said no. He followed me up the steps asking if I needed a toaster, a radio, or a TV. I walked to Central Park and watched a troupe of mimes performing an antiwar skit; “Nixon” stood on his hands and talked the whole time with his feet. It was 1970, and Cambodia had just been invaded. In a month I would hear that Jeff was killed in Vietnam when his jeep rode over a land mine. It seemed that for being so young I’d loved a lot of people who had died.

  I didn’t know what to do with myself for the rest of the day. I’d told Maida I had some friends to see in New York, but I’d actually come only to attend the funeral and to see her. There was nowhere else to go now but home.

  Absolute Zero

  Every morning before school, Connor ran four miles in the desert with the Marines. They did push-ups and bear crawls on the lawn in front of the recruiting center and shouted Oorah! at the top of their lungs. He’d shaved his head, his scalp as smooth as his mother’s, only she was going in one direction and he…well, he didn’t know where he was going. Since he was only seventeen, a year younger than most of his graduating high school classmates because he’d skipped eighth grade, he’d have to have his mother’s consent to join up. So far she’d been lucid enough when it came to this particular matter to shake her head no and vigorously refuse. “Over my dead body,” she said, not without irony. “I will stay alive as long as it takes to see that you don’t throw away your life.”

  She wanted him to go to college at Arizona State and live with his Aunt Lyla and Uncle Sebert in Scottsdale. His sister, meanwhile, pregnant and single, would inherit the house until Connor turned twenty-eight, when he would receive his part of a trust fund. Connor figured by that time he might be dead himself. He was philosophical about it. When Sergeant Kenner, the Marine recruiter, tried to reassure him that he wouldn’t automatically be sent to a war zone like Iraq or Afghanistan—after all, Marines were stationed across the globe—Connor said he would volunteer. Sergeant Kenner studied him for a long moment. “You, my friend, are exactly the kind of person that makes a leader.” He further explained that the Marines didn’t go after people like the Army. “Proud men come to us,” he said. “They want to be Marines, and we’re here to help them meet that challenge.”

  Connor had to admit no one had ever called him a leader, and he was flattered, manipulated he knew, but nevertheless enamored. He started showing up at the recruiting station and hanging out with the other potential recruits, called poolees, and the occasional soldier home from active duty. These were infantry grunts who had come back from Iraq and would soon be heading out again to Afghanistan. They made room for Connor at the card table—penny ante—in the rec area with its chin-up bar and free weights. They nicknamed him “Con,” such an obvious diminutive yet no one had ever called him this. They included him in their touch football games, more like touch with hockey checking, and swarmed him when he caught a stretched-out, fingertip touchdown pass. They even pimped his ride, the Geo, sort of: buying him a chrome license plate holder with a placard that said THE CON. He put it on the front of the Geo and felt ridiculously proud of it and their acceptance.

  Eventually, when they took his presence for granted—he was spending more and more time here—they told stories about Iraq, of dead bodies rotting in the sun and bursting apart before it was safe enough to clear them; of children missing limbs and spitting at them when they tried to help; of attacks by hajis—what they called all Arabs—dressed in military uniforms only to blow your head off in the span of a handshake; of Iraqi houses with trip wires in their front yards that wiped out whole patrols; and the comparatively mundane complaints: three weeks in the field without a shower, blistering sandstorms, scorpions and sand fleas. Did that mean they hated what they did? No, they hated those people who didn’t support them, the anti-war scum. It didn’t matter if the protestors said they were on their side but against the war. They were traitors.

  Connor’s mother, meanwhile, was one of these traitors. She’d made sure his name was taken off the list of eligible high school students so military recruiters wouldn’t call. She had regularly covered the back of the Geo with anti-war bumper stickers—OLD HIPPIES FOR PEACE, WAR IS NOT PRO-LIFE—before Connor scraped them off. And until she became too weak to do so, she’d gone every Wednesday to Patriot Park at the corner of Central Avenue and Washington Street and joined a peace vigil. If there was one thing that drove her crazy, it was his wish to become a Marine.

  “It’s your father, isn’t it?” she asked him. “Is that what this is all about? You’re looking for acceptance from other men because you never got it from him. I’m right, aren’t I?” She rarely spoke about Connor’s father, who had left the family when Connor was five. He hardly remembered. He’d last heard from his father when he wrote from Florida on Connor’s eighth birthday, some big land deal he was working on there—he’d bring Connor down soon and they’d go deep sea fishing. Connor sent him back his first poem: Moo moo goes the sad cow. Neigh neigh goes the pretty horse. Heh heh goes the zoo daddy.

  His intention to become a soldier was the only subject that got his mother revved up and focused. Whereas she might ask him to go to the store and get her more…and here she’d brush her finger against her front teeth, finally coming up with the word, or so she believed—cleanser!—her brain cells worked with furious intact precision at trying to stop him from enlisting. “You have to promise me,” she told him. “You have to promise right now that you won’t do this to me.”

  “I can’t promise,” he said. “You know I can’t.”

  “Why not? I’m your mother. Doesn’t a condemned person get a last wish?”

  “Jesus, Mom. Stop already.”

  “Just do it,” his fat and pregnant sister said. “You owe it to Mom.” They were all sitting in the living room. His mother’s wig, this one a reddish copper color, was askew at a rakish angle.

  “Stay out of this,” Connor had warned. “You can’t talk.” That is, talk about making mistakes. His sister’s one-night stand in a club had resulted in a child she insisted on keeping. He was going to be an uncle, his mother was dying, his sister was unmarried, and all he wanted was to make his mother sign the papers on the coffee table in front of her.

  The seer had not been in school for weeks, and Connor wondered if he had died. Even in school, you didn’t so much see him as sight him, drifting from the music room like a gossamer silver thread to another part of the building. He never carried books and was rumored to read by passing his hand over a page. He usually sat inconspicuously in the back of the class. One girl had claimed she’d literally seen him fade into the wall.

  Wingard thought the seer had potential. “Maybe he’s just sick again. Let’s visit him after school.”

  “You know where he lives?” Connor asked.

  “I’ll find out,” Wingard said.

  Connor slammed his locker closed. His last class of the day was senior English, and he had to sit next to Heather Ward. She was always asking him how-do-you-feel-do-you-want-to-talk-is-there-anything-I-can-do-for-you? “I’m fine,” Connor would say. His little secret. He couldn’t be mean to people. Inside, however, he was un-nice, hateful, murderous, hacking bodies in the hallway, a bloody ax held high through a wild strangulated scream of carnage. “Thanks for asking, Heather.” Like a choir boy or a priest or a sage. The seer. Let him figure this out. Everyone said he could read the future as fast as a comic strip.

  Wingard was waiting for him in the parking lot with an address he’d wheedled out of a friendly student aide in the office. They drove two miles to the east side of town and pulled up to a cheery looking bungalow on a quiet street. The seer’s mom was delighted they’d come by. She’d never met them, but that didn’t seem to matter. “It’s so wonderful of you to visit! Sandy will be so thrilled.” Mrs. Seer—they didn’t know the seer’s last name; in fact they hadn’t even known his name was the androg
ynous “Sandy”—led them down a narrow hallway with pictures of the family on vacations. “Sandy, you have two friends here to see you.” She turned and spoke to them. “He hasn’t been feeling much like talking the last couple days, so you’ll have to keep the visit short. But I know it will cheer him up to have you here.”

  She left.

  There in the bed, with railings on the side, hooked up to a war room of beeping monitors and wearing an oxygen mask, lay the seer. His eyes shifted to them, then returned to the ceiling. A scruff of his dirty blond hair fanned out in back from the strap of the oxygen mask. Connor could hear him taking deep gurgly breaths. Sometimes his mother breathed like this too, but without such desperate rattling. This was the sound of a single hoof tapping out time on a dark cobblestone street. Connor was speechless in its presence.

  Wingard elbowed him. Say something. Tell him why you’re here.

  The seer couldn’t have weighed more than seventy-five pounds, and that was being generous. He wore plaid pajamas with thick wool socks. He looked cold, but this was Phoenix, the desert, the happy sunshine state of Arizona, where Connor’s mother was dying too and this person in front of him had wasted away, his pajama sleeve rolled up to display a pale veined arm no wider at the bicep than the wrist.

  The seer’s mother appeared again. She was carrying a tray of sodas and cookies. “I thought you two might be hungry,” she said. “We have milk also, but I’m guessing you want the good stuff.” She smiled. She was the least sad person in the room, Connor was sure of it. She put the tray of cookies and soda cans—choice of Mountain Dew, Dr. Pepper, Sierra Mist—on a small wooden desk, and then left.

  A voice delicate as a straw wrapper floating to earth came from behind Connor. “I’m sorry, but do I know you?” The oxygen mask was off. The seer’s lips had sores with shiny ointment spread over them. Wingard took a step toward the door, his horror showing.