by Kyp Harness
The audience was more perplexed than amused by the sight of the child in whiteface floundering around in the midst of an otherwise standard display of gymnastics. Unlike the laughter that had greeted Tim’s antics in the classroom, the reaction in the auditorium was one of uncomfortable silence. Even Tim’s greatest success, his struggling with his legs akimbo in mid-backwards somersault, yielded nothing as he grunted and strained with his buttocks high in the air, despite his best efforts to play up his discomfort.
After he cried “Merry Christmas, everyone!” and brought the pyramid down, he retreated to the wings, fearful of the reaction of his parents on the way home. Backstage, the other kids avoided his gaze. He looked into a mirror and saw the white paint had begun flaking off. Tim may have been anticipating his parents’ angry disapproval, but their reaction was graver. In the front seat of the car, as the red tips of their lit cigarettes glowed in the night, they made no mention of his class’s presentation or of his role in it. They talked of other affairs in quiet voices.
But as he spoke to Sherrie on the bus, his words hypnotizing himself as they came in a flurry, he looked into her eyes and saw understanding and appreciation. Looking around, he saw the other people on the bus, strangers, looking over at him with interest and amusement; people turning around in their seats to watch him, looking over their shoulders, laughing with surprised delight. His heart raced as he hungrily absorbed their appreciation, and like a dynamo, inspiration surged within him to further feed their interest, exploding his creativity in all directions. The air was suddenly alive in the back of the bus as it made its way through the snow-clogged streets—the silver metal of its interior, its smeared, salt-stained windows and floors were freshly invested with a new significance, a new life. No one experienced this ecstasy of the incomprehensible more than Tim, who had no idea what was going on or what he was saying, but merely experienced it all like a great glowing light.
A young woman passed by the window of Dirk’s barbershop, and as was customary, Dirk paused in snipping his customer’s hair, his hands poised holding the scissors and the comb as he stood in demonstrative assessment, watching the woman as she walked down the pavement. He shook his head, making a smacking noise with his lips as he turned with an almost pained expression to the rest of the men in the shop. “She’s built, that one, eh?”
The other men voicing their approval, he returned to his barbering, noting to his co-worker, “Bet you’d like to get on that, eh Howard?”
Howard clipped at his customer’s hair, stating quietly, “Yeah, but I’d rather get off on it.” A wave of laughter greeted this remark and even Dirk had to shake his head in surprised amusement.
The door opened and a woman came in with her young son. By unspoken agreement the men stopped their racy banter, and as Tim’s father finished with his customer he welcomed the young boy, placing the upholstered cushion he used to elevate children in the chair, snapping his apron and calling out, “You’re next, partner!” The boy came fearfully, but Dirk amused him throwing his brush into the air and catching it behind his back. The woman hovered by the chair to calm her child but Dirk soon had him comforted and amused, keeping the boy distracted with funny remarks and questions.
Tim got up from the waiting chair and left, walking down to begin his shift at the variety store. That night, Tim and the customary middle-aged woman he would work his shift with were graced with the presence of one of the sisters who owned the store and her husband who came in periodically to attend to matters. The owner of the variety was a small bird-like woman, her white skin stretched like tissue paper over her angular bones. Her scalp was visible beneath the mesh of her thin, straggly hair, which deposited sprinkles of dandruff on the shoulders of the raggedy sweater she wore. She would frown as she examined the displays of chocolate bars and knick-knacks, her eyes squinting behind the oversized glasses perched on her pointy nose, or she sat in the back doing the books, counting the money.
Once, she asked Tim to make up labels for the bags of jujubes. He added a flourish to the labels, underlining the numbers after the decimal point, which he rendered with a small o. “Do these again,” she grunted, bringing back the labels. “These are too fancy. Make ’em so people can read ’em.”
Her husband was a bald, pot-bellied man who’d sit in the back paging through magazines while she attended to business. His beak-like nose, as porous and nearly as red as a strawberry, protruded from between the yellow-tinged lenses of his glasses. “C’mere!” he said to Tim when the boy had gone back to the stock room on an errand. The man sat at a desk in the tiny office. Before him was a magazine opened to a centrefold of a naked woman with her legs wide apart. “You like that?” the man asked with a smile, jerking his head in the direction of the magazine. “Whattaya think of that?”
Tim made some uncomfortable, vaguely approving sounds. He acted a bit more embarrassed than he actually was, chuckling as he got out of the stock room, away from the man’s keenly searching gaze. The man came up front and took over the cash register for a while, something he did every so often as a lark. When Tim bent down to dole out the penny candy, or when he perched on a stepladder to replenish the cigarettes, the man would often take the opportunity to goose Tim, quickly diving his index finger between Tim’s buttocks.
Tim’s reaction would be to leap suddenly, with exaggerated surprise in the manner of the slapstick comedians from old films, in the manner he used to entertain his friends in the schoolyard. When Tim would jerk around in faux puzzlement he would see the man grinning and laughing with a keen expression in his eyes. “Gotcha that time, didn’t I?” the man would say.
Tim’s thoughts were not on these actions, but still vibrated with his encounter with Sherrie on the bus. It was in her eyes and her manner that had so heartened and transformed him. For she was one like him—who drew, who created art—and what he saw was a true knowing of his spirit and an acceptance of it like he had never known before. This had inspired him to be more himself than ever before. He felt he had scored a triumph. As he stacked the milk crates at the back of the variety store he played and replayed their conversation on the bus in his mind. He could hardly believe that the loneliness which had been with him for so long would soon be a thing of the past.
He walked home at the end of his shift, past the giant hydro lines. The skeletal towers holding them aloft seemed bleak and Eiffel-like in the chill night air silhouetted by a silver and icy moon. In his bed that night, Tim refrained from masturbating and prayed, giving thanks for the occurrence on the bus. He offered up some words pleading God for help with Sherrie. He recited again and again in his mind the words he would say to her when they next met, at times diddling as he imagined them. He gritted his teeth especially hard as he put forth to God his desperate appeal. Dropping back from this intensity, he concentrated again on the possible scenarios that might occur the next day, his thoughts growing fainter and further apart as he sank into unknowing.
Tim moved through the crowds in the hallway, his head craning to see beyond the shoulders and heads, searching for Sherrie’s form: she told him she’d be coming out of Chemistry at this time. For a moment he grew anxious, fearing maybe that she was absent that day, or had left early. He needed to see her now, when their encounter on the bus was so fresh she wouldn’t have forgotten him, now when he had the courage to approach her. Anytime other than now would be too late, he feared, his panic causing his heart to be beat faster, when suddenly she emerged from class. She turned and walked up the hall, her binder under her arm. This caught his attention: all the girls usually carried their binders in front of their chests.
Catching his breath with excitement, he jogged ahead, swerving from side to side to make his way around the other students blocking his way. He came up alongside her and called her name. She looked over, surprised and pleased to see him there. They walked beside each other down the hall. He made some witty remarks and she laughed, the light twinkling in
her eyes until she closed them in her mirth, shaking her head in her amusement. They came up to her locker, and as she got out her books for her next class, he chuckled in the wake of a joke and offered, seemingly as an afterthought, an invitation to go see a movie some night.
She turned, her face suddenly serious.
“Oh no,” she said quietly, shaking her head. “I have a boyfriend.”
He continued to smile and to converse with her. He accompanied her down the hall to her next classroom, still trading observations on their classes, on their art. But as he looked at her face while she spoke, it seemed as though he was watching it recede like the light at the end of a tunnel, or the far-off sky viewed from far within a deep well down which he was falling, falling. He felt his stomach floating as one does when falling, and he tried mightily to pretend he was still in the land of the living as he joked with her, as he said a goodbye to her at the door of her class.
She turned from him and his face fell into an expressionless mask. He walked down the hall like a robot. He was stunned. The floor was swallowing him. Tim moved through crowds of students who were phantoms to him. As he got his coat from his locker and left the school, his eyes smarted and his throat itched. He didn’t cry as he walked through the brisk afternoon, for more than sadness he felt dread—the dread of misfortune stalking him like a horde of black clouds moving in from the horizon across a field, throwing down their blankets of darkness as they settled in. He felt the wry twinge within him that answered the clouds and their low rumble: the rueful admission that once again doom had asserted itself, and it was only to be expected.
Tim felt as though he were suffocating. He found himself at home without any memory of walking there, yet every moment weighed as heavy as iron on his heart. Lying down on the couch his father slept on at night, he stared out through the picture window to where cars motored by on the road, and beyond that to the snow-covered, weed-filled vacant lot, and beyond that to the freight trains idling on their tracks in front of the distantly visible towers of the oil refinery. Tim laid on the couch for the several hours leading up to supper. He made a slight attempt to eat with his family, then slouched to his bedroom. “What’s the matter with him?” he heard Dirk say.
In the morning he was granted a brief respite: the first second after awaking, in which he was unaware of his situation. The respite then became bitterness when the full force of the realization fell on him, smothering him. He heard the alarm clock buzz in his parents’ room, heard Dirk get up and walk into the bathroom and, as he did every morning, cough shreds of mucous for several minutes into the toilet bowl.
Tim walked through the grey morning to school. The day passed in a dull river of sameness. He sat bent over his desk as he had so any times over the past twelve years, crushed by the oppressive monotony that was most of his education. His notebook was opened to a page that had existed in all the notebooks he had possessed through school: one on which he had scribbled over and over with pencil and pen, forming a large black shape, indenting the page with his repeated scribbling until the shape was shiny and the paper was nearly worn through. The shape came to an impossibly sharp point at one end which he imagined to be gouging into his heart, creating the fierce pain he felt there. He sat at his desk, grinding his pencil further and further into the large black shape as his teacher droned on.
After, Tim went to where he knew Sherrie would be as she exited her chemistry class again. He sidled up to her and she was happy to see him once more. He apologized for how he may have come off as weird yesterday. She shrugged, smiling, seeming not to know what he was talking about. “I hope, though, that we can be friends,” Tim offered.
“Sure—that would be great,” she said.
“Well, I’m not being totally altruistic,” he noted, gamely trying to keep up his jocular manner. “Because I like talking with you.”
She frowned. “What does altruistic mean?” she asked.
Tim often used words he had read in books that people didn’t know the meaning of. Sometimes he didn’t know the meanings himself. He’d use them according to what he thought they meant, from the way they sounded, from where they appeared in books he’d read. Sometimes he didn’t even know how they were pronounced, since he’d only read them and hadn’t heard them spoken. But this time he knew what the word meant. “Just means charity… that I’m not… just being charitable by being friends with you,” he explained embarrassedly.
“Oh—great,” she said, smiling.
As he parted from her, he walked through the mass of students scrambling to get to their classes. There were the pubescent jocks striding with exaggerated masculinity, their faces besieged by pink welts of acne, their foreheads shining with grease—some of them sporting the preliminary shadows of moustaches on their upper lips. There were the girls in pastel-coloured sweaters, with carefully blow-dried hair curtaining their painstakingly made-up faces like the spumes of an arrested fountain.
There were the others held in contempt by these, the blue-jeaned or leather-jacketed ones called burnouts and stoners, always rushing past to make it to the smoking area. Then there were the ones who were the most disdained—the bespectacled lonely ones, that fat ones and the ugly ones who were accepted neither by the browners or the stoners. They were solitary particles that floated meekly around the periphery of the others, trying not to attract attention.
Tim passed through these crowds dully unaware that he moved unnoticed by the faces around him—even as Ran Hutchison approached him, his slit-like eyes half-hidden by his shoulder-length hair, and hissed furiously, “Fuckin’ faggot!” At other times, the feral intensity of Ran Hutchison’s anger would cause his heart to race, and he would feel a spiralling, sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. Even seeing the boy from a distance caused him to fill with anxiety. But now he was removed even from the boy he had dreaded ever since their fight in the park six years before.
Still, he knew the clashing, violent energy could never be completely relegated to the past. It was fresh, ever renewing itself. There was something primitive and deep-rooted in the hatred in Ran Hutchison’s eyes, and was all the more unsettling to Tim because it seemed as though Ran knew something about him, something he himself did not know—or rather did know but didn’t dare admit to himself. Behind Ran Hutchison’s contempt was a barely restrained, crazed ferocity like that of an animal that can never be trusted not to leap suddenly at your throat.
3. Sherrie
Tim remained a friend to Sherrie over the coming month, contriving to run into her in the halls between classes, or in the library. She always seemed as involved as he was when they would talk together. He became more aware of his appearance, too, noticing that the other students at the school had nicer hairstyles than he did. He came to realize that they showered daily rather than once a week. He began to get up an hour earlier in the morning so he could shower, then blow dry and style his hair. Soon he had a similar hairstyle to the other boys: bangs parted in the middle and feathered to each side.
Sherrie remained mysterious to him. Her silence, and her few and quiet words when she did speak continued to make him lean toward her. He felt an otherworldly quality in the calm, innocent beauty of her face and in the dark pools of her eyes, which sometimes flashed with deep meaning then shyly danced away. She never spoke of her boyfriend, and Tim never brought him up. If he never mentioned the boyfriend, she might come to realize how irrelevant he had become to her.
On his own, Tim found out that Bruce Ferguson was twenty years old and worked at the Radio Shack in the mall. He was a man, not a teenager in high school. Tim scoped him out one day and saw that he was tall and stocky, and that to Tim’s disgust and dismay, he had a thick black moustache far beyond the dim fuzz that Tim could cultivate. Tim imagined Sherrie kissing that moustache—and eventually imagined scenarios in which Bruce Ferguson died suddenly in a tragic mishap. Each night he would check the obituaries in the local pap
er to look for Bruce Ferguson’s name. If Tim ever heard a friend of Sherrie’s mention Bruce Ferguson’s name, or even make mention of the fact she had a boyfriend, Tim would stiffen, his stomach would tighten and his smile would freeze on his face. So consumed was Tim with his obsession with Sherrie, he was driven again to seek the advice of Dave Finestone—
“That’s always a heart-stopper,” Dave remarked after hearing of Sherrie’s boyfriend. “Not much you can do about that. It’s up to her. You should just do what you’re doin’, staying a friend, being there for her. If the connection is as close as you say it is, she must feel it too,” he continued. “If you like her as a friend, you can always see her at school. And who knows? Maybe someday things will work out.” They parted, Dave heading across the vacant lot to the townhouse he lived in. “Hey,” Dave called out across the field, “you should think about giving Russ a call. I think you two would really hit it off.”
Russ had been transferred to Tim’s art class some weeks before and Tim had avoided him since he was perilously close to resembling the outcasts and social pariahs of the school, with his glasses, thin arms, and flaring acne on his forehead and along his jawline. It was only after Tim knew Russ for a while that he began to see a certain noble handsomeness in his features. Russ’s high cheekbones and strong chin made his face as angular as his body, and he moved with quick, bird-like grace. Although he was always alone, he possessed a dignity in his solitude; he did not feel ashamed of it, of his otherness, as Tim did. One day Tim saw some students playing with a faucet in the art studio. They put their fingers in the end of it and turned it on so that a stream of water sprayed in Russ’s direction. Russ leapt to his feet and turned around to see them suppressing their laughter. “Well,” he said quietly, staring them down, “everybody has to have one day in their life that they act like an asshole. I guess this is that day for you guys.”