by E. R. Frank
I have different tricks. Sometimes I write one whole number all in one color. Sometimes I use a different color for each number. Sometimes I do all the sevens one color, and all the threes one color. Brooklyn steals me glitter glue in squeeze tubes, and I make some numbers glitter. When I run out of room in our apartment I start in the hallways. I write my numbers on the floor and the walls. I write them as big as my whole self and as small as my fingernail. I write them on people’s doors and on the Plexiglas in the building entranceway that wouldn’t break from my brick. I write my numbers for days and days and days. Brooklyn and Lyle like it some but then get bored. When they try to knock me I knock them back. Lyle cries, and Brooklyn stomps away. I’m badder than both of them now.
* * *
I run out of room in the hallway. I start on the first elevator. I press the red button that Brooklyn says stops the elevator, so nobody will bother me. I write my numbers as high as I can reach, then I make Lyle get on his hands and knees so I can stand on his back and write higher. Brooklyn asks me to use all green for the second elevator, so I use all green. Brooklyn likes it. He has to steal a lot of boxes of markers three times in one day. There’s only one green in each box. The greens run out fast.
* * *
You can be bad by saying bad words and stealing and not going to school and wrecking things and beating on people. Plus also, you can just be bad because that’s what you are, anyway.
“He crying,” Lyle goes. When you’re bad nobody much wants you and they send you away.
“So?” Brooklyn goes.
“So, Chucklehead be crying.” Now I’m even badder than I ever was at home.
“You best leave his ass alone, or we both going to beat you down good,” Brooklyn goes.
Now I’m so so so bad, Mrs. Harper won’t ever want me back.
* * *
Me and Brooklyn have been having us a good time with my numbers all morning in the third elevator.
“Sshhhh,” Brooklyn says, because of footsteps. They’re loud. Usually we have to stay quiet while we hear curses or somebody kicking at the door before they bang away. But this time we don’t hear that. Instead, there’s clicking and rattling, and then there’s a sliding sound, and a skinny piece of metal sticks through the elevator doors.
“Shit,” Brooklyn whispers. We watch the skinny piece of metal move back and forth and back and forth, until the doors slide open. A man in a uniform holds the doors open with that skinny piece of metal. He stares at us, and we stare at him. I think he will kill us.
“Well, goddamn,” he says. “Goddamn.”
Now
I’M MENTAL, BUT I’m not that mental. It’s Brooklyn in here, serving up their nasty food, for real. He’s got an apron and some old-lady hair net, and he’s bigger than me. He’s a man already, but it’s him. I stand in the back of the line, and I watch him.
* * *
“How do you get to serve food?” I ask Dr. B.
“What makes you ask?”
“Can you just answer one stupid question?”
“Food serving here is an earned activity. It’s reserved for residents in our drug rehabilitation program.”
“No shit?”
“No.”
“So what drugs are those server dudes on?”
“Nothing, if they’re here.”
“You know what I mean, man.”
“What do you think they’re on?”
“How should I know?”
“All right. Cocaine, crack, heroin, ecstasy, special-K, marijuana, alcohol, and other pill, tab, liquid, and inhalant versions of stimulants, depressants, and hallucinogens.”
“Which building are they in? And don’t ask me what building I think they’re in, or I swear—”
“All right,” Dr. B. says. “J building.”
J building.
“You want to play War?” I go.
“Aren’t you tired of War?” he goes.
Sometimes, he’s funny.
* * *
Brooklyn’s serving breakfast, and I keep my head down over my tray. I don’t want him to see me yet.
* * *
“You got a brother?”
“Do you?”
“I asked first.”
“Hmm,” Dr. B. says. He looks like he’s thinking. “What would you guess?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking,” I tell him.
“I didn’t ask if you knew,” he goes. “I asked what you’d guess.”
“Yeah,” I tell him. “You got a brother.”
“You think?”
“You and him talk on the phone, right?” Dr. B. stays still. “You talk on the phone and drink beers and all that on the weekends.”
“You think we spend time together and get along well.”
“Yeah, but when you were small, I bet he beat the shit out of you.”
“Really?” Dr. B. goes.
“Yup,” I tell him.
* * *
He’s serving dinner. He’s got some kind of mark, some scar near his mouth. I hold my head up and look at him straight on, but he’s staring at the damn creamed corn, and he doesn’t see me. That’s my brother.
* * *
I skip group and watch Ping-Pong, and I get in my bed, and I get back out and sit in front of the TV, the real one, and then I walk circles around the rec room and squash a Ping-Pong ball that gets in the way of my foot and ignore those guys yelling at me, and I walk up and down the main hall with the yellow and red trees out the windows, and I remember about it.
Those gray and black squares and that air shaft and I Declare War. The smell of regular cigarettes and the way I got badder and badder and badder and that time he had his nightmare.
* * *
“Aren’t you going to say something?” I go.
“I was waiting for you to begin.”
“You always wait for me. Why don’t you start, for a change?
“Well, what would you like me to say?” Dr. B. asks.
“You know what?” I tell him.
“What?”
“You are some big mystery.”
He smiles. “And so are you.”
I don’t remember his ass smiling before. I was feeling all right, but I don’t like smiling. I don’t want him smiling.
* * *
Brooklyn never looks up. He just wears that old-lady hair net, and that white apron, and those stupid plastic gloves, and he never looks up.
* * *
“I asked you to stop staring at me.”
“What’s going on, America?”
“Nothing’s going on. What’s your problem?”
“I’m not aware of having a problem.”
“You’ve got so many goddamn problems, doc, I wouldn’t even know where all to start.”
“Is that right?”
“That’s right. So get out of my face.”
Then
I’M IN A room with no windows. A wrinkled lady asks me to write my name. I don’t know how.
“Eat shit, bitch.”
“Do you know what eat shit, bitch means?” she asks. I’m so surprised to hear some wrinkled lady in a room with no windows say bad words that I forget to figure out if I know what they mean. She asks me to draw a picture of my family.
I draw my numbers first. I draw them all over the paper, everywhere. It takes a long time, but the wrinkled lady doesn’t tell me to hurry up. When the numbers are done, I draw the picture part over them. A cement rectangle flat to the ground at an open front door, flower-filled clay plots, and shelves lined with angels. I draw Mrs. Harper looking out an upstairs window into the backyard with me and Browning playing ball. I draw butterflies flying around and a footprint in one corner of the cement rectangle. Then I get confused. “Where do Brooklyn and Lyle go?” I ask.
“They’ll go to people who will take care of them,” the lady says. “Maybe to the Wheets.” I don’t get it. I look at my drawing, trying to figure it out. “Tell me about your picture,” the lady says.<
br />
“Eat shit, bitch,” I say.
* * *
I’m in another room. The wrinkled lady walked me here through lots of elevators and hallways and doors and steps. She told me to sit in this chair, and then she left. I swing my legs for a while, then I take a pen off the table next to me. I get out of my chair and lean down over it to write my numbers on the seat. The pen is slippery, harder to hold than a Magic Marker or even a crayon, but the ink is blue and comes out good.
“Jesus,” I hear, and there’s a man with no hair and a newspaper in his hand. He’s looking at me. “You’re him.” He shakes the paper a little bit, holding it out. It’s got a lot of pictures of Brooklyn and Lyle’s building. The inside of the apartment, the hallways, the elevators. You can see my numbers everywhere, all over. I did a good job. “Jesus,” the man says. He’s looking at my numbers on the chair seat. He looks back and forth at me, at my numbers, at the newspaper. A phone rings on a desk. The phone makes me real nervous, but I don’t know why. I want it, and I want to get away, too. It rings again, and the man picks it up. A white woman with a girl my size walks in.
“Is that boy Chinese?” the girl says.
* * *
I’m in a bed all to myself. A real bed. It smells clean. There’s three beds lined up next to mine. I’m full with chicken and noodles and Jell-O salad. I’m clean from a shower and a fresh towel that I didn’t have to share.
“She don’t get mad if you pee yourself,” somebody tells me.
There’s a night-light on the floor by the door. I watch my fingers spread apart in front of me. I make them wiggle and bend. I bring both my hands together, like the way you pray. Then I open them again, like a book. I start to draw my numbers in the air, but then I stop.
* * *
There’s stairs. I’m sitting on the top of one. In the middle. People have to ask me to move so they can get by. They ask polite, not like Brooklyn or Lyle. They don’t say, Get out my way. They say, Excuse me, please.
“You want mine?” a boy says. He’s handing me an oatmeal-raisin cookie. “I only eat chocolate chip.”
I take his cookie, but I don’t eat it. I pick out the raisins and smush them on the top stair.
Mrs. Harper said it about raisins. And chocolate chips and nuts.
Real meaning is in the smaller things, she’d say. She said it about the buckle part of her favorite belt. The smell of the air after Browning mowed the lawn. She said it the time the lights went out and the flashlight batteries were dead, and we had to use candles, and the flames were like winking stars all over the house. Real meaning is in the smaller things, she would tell me. She said it when Clark Poignant brought little paper-wrapped soaps from the hotel where he’d stayed on a trip; she said it every time she filled up her tulip vases with fresh water.
* * *
There’s a playground. The grandmother makes me go on it after too many days on the stairs. I stand there and watch the other kids playing tag. My throat gets a headache. I try to go back inside, but the grandmother won’t let me. She makes me stay out.
“Come on, America,” someone yells. “Come on.”
I stand still, but they chase me, anyway. Someone taps my shoulder and jumps away. His hand is hard and warm on my back. Something swims around in my blood, making it so I can’t move.
“Got you! You’re it!” he yells. He tags me again. It’s not a knock-you-down, beat-you-down hand, but a tag-game hand. A find-you hand. Find. You.
“Got you!”
I scream. My hide-and-seek scream. My tag-and-tickle and you-can’t-catch-me scream. I scream and scream and scream.
They try to make me stop, but I can’t. They get the grandmother, and she tries to make me stop, but I can’t.
I can’t stop screaming.
* * *
I try to wake up. But the covers are too heavy, and when I’m in a chair or walking somewhere, the air is too heavy. Sometimes I want to write my numbers, and sometimes I want to change the channel on the TV, but it’s all too heavy. I want to remember something, but it’s too far away. Everything tastes like ravioli.
* * *
I’m in a room with Mike. He’s a man, but he sits on the floor and has a lot of toys. Toys good for seven-year-olds like me. A garage with trucks. Play-Doh. Puppets. A mushy ball you can squeeze or throw through its own hoop. Crayons and Magic Markers and paper. I’ve been here with him before. Maybe a lot of times. I know the dump truck and table and the ripped part on the chair and Mike. I know his front tooth that sticks out over the one next to it. I don’t feel so tired anymore. The air isn’t so heavy. I remember how I’m bad. There’s a reason it is good to be bad. I’ll throw the toys, or break them, or write my numbers on the walls, but I’m too tired.
“What would you like to do?” Mike asks me. I’m too tired. I want to tell him, eat shit, but I’m too tired. “Maybe the next time we meet, you’ll feel like playing something,” Mike says. “You won’t be taking any medicine anymore, and the medicine makes you feel sort of slow. So the next time, maybe you won’t feel so slow.” Next time.
* * *
It’s not so heavy anymore, and I remember leaving places and going places and getting places. There was the bus from Mrs. Harper’s with the lady and then a taxi with the lady to an office. There was my mother and me on a train underground and then walking to a building with an elevator that took us high to Brooklyn’s apartment. There was the sofa bed and the green towel and War and dead Kyle. There was me and Brooklyn and Lyle in an ambulance to a hospital and a wheelchair in a hospital with a nurse wheeling me away from Brooklyn and Lyle to a place where she gave me a shower to another place where they poked me and stuck needles in me and another wheelchair to a place where they put me in a bed and gave me soup. Then there was leaving the hospital with a whole different lady in a car to a building and a different, different lady in the building walking me through halls and steps and doors and then another car with a man to the place where the grandmother didn’t get mad if you peed your bed, and then my bed here and my own feet walking me to Mike’s room.
* * *
“Is this a hospital?” I ask Mike.
“I see you’re feeling better,” he says.
“Do I live here now?”
“This is one kind of hospital,” Mike says. “And you’ll stay here for a while longer, probably. Do you remember me telling you what happened?”
“No.”
“What happened was, you got out of control a few days after you arrived at a foster home. You got so out of control that it was like you got very sick, and we’re helping you get better, and you’ve been here for a lot of weeks.”
There’s a phone on the floor. But it’s plastic and not attached to anything. Also, it’s pink, which is pussy. Mike hands me a piece of paper and a can full of crayons and Magic Markers.
“You want to draw?” he says. I’m not tired anymore. I rip up the paper and throw the can and the crayons and the markers across the room. It’s good to be bad. Mike stays quiet and doesn’t hit me or send me away.
We sit for a long time, and I want to write my numbers. There’s a pencil on the table. I pick it up and start writing. I write straight on the table. You’re not supposed to write on tables, but Mike doesn’t care. It’s hard to get the pencil to show, but I do a lot of layers and make it show, anyway. I write my numbers. I write and write and write. I’m covering the table.
“That’s a lot of numbers,” Mike says. “A whole lot of numbers.” I keep writing. “What do they mean?” Mike says after a while. I keep writing. “Who taught you those numbers?” Mike says. Who taught you those numbers? I stop writing. I look at the pink phone. Mike sees me looking. “Would you like to make a call?”
“I need to make a collect call,” I tell him.
“A collect call?” he says. I nod.
“Okay.” He points to the phone.
“It’s not real,” I tell him.
“That’s right,” he says.
�
��I need to make a real collect call.” Mike looks at me for a long time. Maybe he has a phone. Maybe he has a phone somewhere else. I’m thinking there are phones in hospitals. Maybe I’ve even seen one, but everything was too heavy. “I need to make a collect call,” I say. “Please.”
Mike is still looking at me. He looks for a long time again. Then he looks at the phone. Then he looks at my numbers. He looks hard at the numbers. He looks hard at me. “Is there someone at the other end of the numbers?” he finally asks, quiet.
Mrs. Harper and Clark Poignant and Browning. Mrs. Harper and Clark Poignant and Browning. Mrs. Harper.
Mrs. Harper. MrsHarperMrsHarperMrsHarper. I see you!
“Mrs. Harper,” I say. Mike clears his throat. He clears it again.
“Mrs. Harper,” Mike says.
“Please,” I say. “Please.”
Now
YOU SIT IN here long enough and you get to floating. You throw down your cards and scoop them up, and you do the chant when you get War, and you float. Dr. B. talks some and stays quiet some, and you hear him some, but then you don’t, and flashes squeeze through, and you get sick of trying to make them stop. You just give up after a while, and let them come.
* * *
“Don’t do that,” I go. “Game’s not over.”
“Our time is up for today,” Dr. B. goes.
“I know what time we’re done here, doc,” I go. “I’m just saying, keep our piles straight, and put them somewhere safe so we can finish the game right next session.”
“Where would be safe?”
“Put my pile in that top drawer and your pile in the bottom one.”
“All right.”
“No messing with them when I’m not here, man.”
“You don’t want me to cheat.”
“You better not.”
“I won’t.”
“And if any of your other chuckleheads need to play Go Fish or some shit, you just buy some other deck.”
“I won’t let anyone else interfere with our game.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“Okay.”
* * *
They change the group room, so I can’t watch the TV in the wall. I don’t care because now I’m listening. They don’t know I’m listening, but I am. It’s the only way to know what all is going on.