Webern had been suffering ever since he started first grade, some weeks earlier. He’d gone in eagerly, with a new bow tie and an apple for the teacher, and he’d come out, bedraggled and speechless, the victim of a violent funhouse. Webern didn’t like the loud jangling bells, the dark catacombs of the coatroom, or the grime that collected under his nails by the day’s end—crayon wax and eraser dust. He hated the little boys, who sharpened their pencils into spears and threw them at his neck, and the little girls, who snared him in their jump ropes and tittered behind the backs of their hands. He hated story time because, sitting in a circle with the other children, he couldn’t get up close to the picture book illustrations the way he could at home with his mother, and he hated lunch—cold tater tots and limp green beans and sloppy joes that seemed to bleed when he bit into them. But, above all else, he hated recess. That first day on the playground, he fell down and scraped his knee on the rough asphalt. When, much to his surprise, no one rushed to pick him up, he wiped his eyes and looked into his stinging wound. In it, little grains of sand, stone, and glass sparkled, and for a terrifying moment, Webern imagined that he’d exposed a second skin, inhuman, metallic, and glittering, just beneath his own.
Webern missed waking up in his empty house and padding through hallways already warm with late morning light. He missed wearing his red robe and slippers, and napping in the afternoons. Most of all, he missed sitting in the kitchen and telling his mother about his dreams. But he couldn’t find a way to bring them up at now-crowded breakfasts, with his father rustling through the newspaper, his mother swaying at the sizzling stove, and his sisters, holding hands, cackling at private jokes, and smashing their knees into the table’s underside whenever anything displeased them.
So Webern tried to hold onto his dreams all day long. But it wasn’t easy. Despite his best efforts, the dreams grew thin and brittle with little holes in them, like peppermints sucked for too long, and most days, by mid-afternoon, Webern had begun to wonder if he’d ever dreamed at all. The sandcastle cities, the marshmallow pillows, the smiling man in the moon—these dreamscapes dissolved and melted into one another till they left nothing but shiny rainbow puddles, pooled on the floor of his mind. So Webern started keeping his dreams to himself, though he could already see the sadness growing in his mother’s eyes.
Webern had seen the magician advertised on a poster tacked to the wall of the grocery store. Amidst a flurry of business cards and clipped coupons for haircuts and shoe repair stores, the blood red letters of his sign stood out. “WOTAN THE IRASCIBLE,” it screamed. “ILLUSIONIST FOR HIRE.” In smaller letters, the poster alluded to the magician’s dark powers, and his availability for weddings, birthdays, and other family gatherings. But Webern, who was just learning to read, didn’t trouble himself with these superfluous details. His eyes lingered on the portrait that gazed out of the glossy paper with hooded eyes. The magician, a tall gaunt man with hair black as ink, held a thin black wand with an inch of white at its tip like ash on a cigarette. On his head, he wore a top hat, so tall and black it seemed to be concealing something. Webern stared at this picture for a long time, puzzling over a feeling he couldn’t quite articulate. Somehow, this somber, mustachioed gentleman seemed to know the answers to lonesome questions Webern was just starting to ask himself.
When Webern begged for the magician to perform at his birthday party, his mother enthusiastically agreed, and not just because her love for Webern was big enough to burst a smaller heart. No; she knew that Webern didn’t want to have a party in the first place, and she hoped that Wotan could sweeten the bitter medicine, at least a little.
Shirley understood her son’s dislike of parties. When she had been a child herself, she had also preferred afternoons alone, reading fairy tales or helping her mother out in the kitchen, and it seemed to her that much of what had happened since those peaceful days ended had been a very big mistake. One part of her wanted to shelter Webern forever, to hide him away from the world like a little prince in a tower. But the other part of her suspected that it was her duty to nudge him along. It was this part of Shirley that guided her hand as she addressed the small, bright invitations, as she squeezed ribbons of frosting from a tube, and as she bought bunches of balloons that tugged and bumped at the ends of their strings, trying to float away.
Webern had gone along with all of this, grudgingly but without complaint, until the day of the party when Shirley, arranging candles on his cake, had looked out of the kitchen window to see the rope ladder of her son’s new treehouse slither up into the high branches of the backyard oak and disappear.
The treehouse was a gift from Webern’s father, Raymond, who’d built it loudly and stubbornly, without consulting anyone. A couple of weeks earlier, on a Saturday afternoon, he had declared that he was heading out to run a few errands, and Webern and Shirley had both looked up in surprise. Raymond never ran errands. He was a burly, slouching man, with skin leathery-rough as a catcher’s mitt, and a pugnacious underbite; except for his timid, darting eyes, he looked like a retired prizefighter. Raymond needed his solitude, so he stayed at home, preferably by himself, whenever possible. He spent most weekends stretched out on the couch with a gin and tonic in his red lumberjack’s hand, staring at a spot on the wallpaper just to the left of the picture window. Sometimes he let out a short, wild cry, like the unexpected squawk of a seagull. On weekends, if Webern ran out into the living room to look for a lost toy or a storybook, his mother always cautioned, “Don’t disturb your father. He’s thinking.”
“Thinking about what?” Webern once asked. His mother hesitated.
“The war, I suppose.”
Perhaps that afternoon in the hardware store, Raymond was thinking of the war again, because he returned home with enough planks, nails, and shingles to build a fortress.
“The boy needs some place to go,” he explained over dinner, “to get away from this house full of women.”
Willow and Billow smashed their knees into the table’s underside. The mashed potatoes jumped. The Jell-O salad trembled.
The first week after the treehouse was finished, Webern only climbed up in it once, to hang the gingham curtains that his mother had picked out for the windows. His father seemed disgusted, but Webern didn’t care. The treehouse scared him. Webern had expected it to look more like a bird’s nest, with soft feathered walls that would hold him gently in the air, like a cupped hand. This treehouse, square and heavy with a hole in the floor, more closely resembled a cardboard box, which might unceremoniously dump him out at any moment. On the morning of the party, though, it seemed to be his only refuge.
Up in the treehouse, yellow, orange, and green light streamed in the open windows, filtered through changing leaves. Webern sat Indian-style on the floor, carefully peeling the wrapper from one of his birthday cupcakes. He took a bite and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to savour it, before he swallowed. He put the rest of the cupcake back in its paper skin. He might have to stay up here a long time—better ration out supplies.
Webern licked pink icing off his fingers, then dared himself to peek out one of the windows. Although he knew he could fall, he could also imagine climbing out the window and walking around at this height, as if on a pair of enormous stilts. He was bracing himself for the wobbly bliss of vertigo when he looked up from his cupcake and realized that he wasn’t alone. A little boy with golden hair sat opposite him, smiling impishly. He wore lederhosen, knee socks, and heavy German shoes. Although Webern hadn’t seen him for exactly two years, he recognized him right away.
“Wags Verder!” Webern gasped.
“At your service,” said the intruder. He tipped his leather cap. “Happy birthday, by the way.” He sized Webern up. “You’re growing up fast.”
“But you’re almost as big as me,” said Webern. Wags was; looking at him was like looking into a magic mirror. His gold hair glinted in the sunshine. “How did you get so big?”
“Trick of the light, pal, trick of the light.” Wags winked. “Look out that window and you’ll see what I mean.”
Webern reached for the curtain, then hesitated. “Oh, I don’t know.”
“Don’t be a ’fraidy cat.”
Sucking in his breath, Webern pulled back the gingham curtain and peered outside. Down below, Mom had finished setting up the card tables. Party favours—paper hats, kazoos, and Chinese finger traps—waited on each folding chair for the guests. A glass pitcher of pink lemonade glistened in the centre of one tabletop; on another, a lone red tulip drooped in a vase. From Webern’s perch in the treehouse, it all looked tiny—a world in miniature. The brightly coloured paper plates resembled bingo chips, and, squinting his eyes a little, Webern could see confetti sprinkled here and there on the tablecloths, as finely ground as fairy dust.
“See?” said Wags. “I didn’t get big. The world got small.”
“Oh.” Webern stared down. He couldn’t tear his eyes away. It looked like the backyard of a dollhouse, and for the first time, it occurred to him that maybe God wasn’t an old man with a beard, but just a spoiled child.
Before Webern could finish his thought, the screen door banged shut. Willow and Billow had burst through, and they now moved across the lawn jerkily. Willow’s long stringy hair veiled her face, even as her bony hands smoothed it back. Billow licked her sausage fingers; chocolate smeared around her mouth. Their white nightshirts looked even dirtier than usual: in addition to the amorphous patches of brown, fresh splatters of black and green soiled the pale cotton. The girls seemed purposeful, excited. About halfway across the lawn, they stopped, clasped hands, and looked up at Webern.
“Bernie Bee, Bernie Bee!”
“Way up in the honey tree!”
“We’re locked out, where is the key?”
“Open up your door for me!”
They gazed up at him expectantly, as if they wanted him to finish their nursery rhyme. Standing there in the yard, draped in fluttery white cloth, they seemed like a pair of ghosts that Webern could dispel with the right incantation. But he didn’t know what it was. He glanced at Wags, who only shrugged.
“No girls allowed,” Webern finally called down. He knew immediately that it was the wrong thing to say, but it was too late. Smugly nodding to each other, the girls produced, seemingly from midair, a pair of monster masks.
When he saw the masks, made of construction paper and paint and dirt and glue, a shock of terror surged through Webern—the same shock he felt when, during a nightmare, he saw a little boy with glass doll eyes or a lunchbox with teeth—the shock of something familiar, yet horribly wrong. Webern had made masks plenty of times, for Halloween and for little plays he performed for his mother in the afternoons. But he’d never made masks like these.
Willow’s mask, assembled from branches and mud and dead leaves, was a tree come to life—a tree with a knobby, jutting nose, hooked in like a finger beckoning. Billow’s, a perfect circle of white, had a single grotesque feature: a mouth like a crater, a hole, a wound, with ragged edges and inside, only blackness. Webern had to close his eyes. A child’s face, eclipsed by ugliness, is a most terrible thing.
“Presto chango,” Wags observed. “Your sisters aren’t very pretty girls. ’Course, they never were.”
“Why’re you here, Wags?” Webern asked, with his eyes still closed. “How come you were gone so long, and then you came back?” The insides of his lids throbbed neon red from the sunshine.
“Bernie Bee, Bernie Bee!”
“Nowhere to hide, nowhere to flee!”
“Just a little show-n-tell session, pal. The world is very small,” said Wags. “It breaks easy, no two ways about that. Thought you should be prepared.”
“Mommy said you were my guardian angel,” said Webern. “She said you might not come back ’til I needed you. Is that why you’re here? Because I need you? What should I do, Wags?”
“You’ll come down, just wait and see!”
“You’ll meet ol’ Mr. Gravity!”
“What should I do?”
“What can you do?
“What can I do?”
“Jump.”
“Wags? Wags?”
Webern opened his eyes. Wags was gone. Down below, his sisters had started to climb the tree. As they swung through the lower branches, their rhymes dissolved into sounds, not doggerel, not even words, but speeded-up gibberish, like the nonsense that rushed through Webern’s mind when he woke from nightmares and even the darkness seemed to move.
“Wags!” Webern yelled again. “Mommy!”
Once, Webern went to a movie matinee with his mother, and on the wide silver screen, he saw a man jump off a bridge. As the man fell, images from his life flashed before his eyes—his wife kissing him at the altar, his first day on the job, the SOLD sign on his little white house—each one more nostalgic than the last. Webern sat in the theatre, legs dangling above the sticky floor, teeth aching from the box of Sugar Daddies he’d just consumed, and wondered what a kid would think of, falling like that; if a kid would have enough memories to fill a slow-motion descent.
But Webern needn’t have worried. As he fell toward the leaves that lay like crumpled orange and red construction paper on the ground, his memories rose up to meet him, and they were enough for a lifetime of regret. Webern remembered the baby blue sky outside his bedroom window, with clouds still pink from dawn floating in it; he remembered bath time and the beards he made from bubbles. He remembered walking through the park with his mother, swinging on the swing as she pushed him, her hands light and swift against his back. He remembered Christmas, a symphony of red paper tearing, of tissue crinkling in boxes. And Easter: the hollow eggs, green and pink and yellow, fragile as living things in his cupped hands. He remembered marbles, like tiny shiny planets, and little wax bottles with rainbow elixirs in them, and the tongue of a kitten who’d kissed him once—pink and rough, like a piece of chewing gum dropped in a sandbox. He remembered lying on his back and pretending to walk on the ceiling; he remembered the loneliness, scary as any bad dream, of nights when he couldn’t sleep, when the dark house whispered secrets and his parents snored loudly, like a king and a queen under an enchanter’s evil spell. Webern remembered snow angels and snow suits, sunshowers and galoshes, jack-o-lanterns and costumes—one year, he had been a bumblebee. He remembered storybooks and building blocks and funny jokes and cartoons and the doll hospital. But most of all, he remembered learning how to swim, how he’d tilted his head back trustingly and felt the water holding him up. As he fell, he did the same thing—he tilted backward into the air and trusted it to hold him up. But when for some reason, it didn’t, when it dropped him, sank him like a stone, his one hope was that, somewhere down there at the bottom, mermaids would be waiting to welcome him.
CHAPTER NINE
In the weeks that followed their escape from Lynchville, Webern and Nepenthe took their first hesitant steps toward becoming lovers. It started as soon as they crossed state lines and found a place to camp for the night. Nepenthe and Webern sat side by side during dinner, drinking whiskey from the same toy trumpet as the other players stirred their lukewarm plates of tinned spaghetti. When she rose to go afterwards, Nepenthe took Webern’s hand, and almost without thinking, he followed her. In her tent he felt shy for the first time in days: as a silhouette against green canvas still dimly lit with firelight, Nepenthe could have been any young girl. He couldn’t say the same for his own misshapen form. He stared at her until he could see, dimly, the ridges of her scales.
“Do you want me to stay here tonight?”
“You’d like that, huh?” There was a laugh in her voice that Webern couldn’t stand. He grabbed her hands and tugged on them. He could never kiss her standing up—she was too tall. She would always have to bend down to kiss him. Nepenthe pulled her hands away and moved toward her trunk on the other side of the tent.
She lit a citronella candle, then sat down on the floor. She crossed her long legs at the ankles.
“I usually read for awhile before I go to bed,” she said. “Have you got a book?”
Webern stretched out atop the sleeping bag with all his clothes still on, even his shoes, and Nepenthe lay next to him, smoking, the red tip of her clove glowing in the darkness. When he woke up, sometime in the early hours of the morning, he saw that she’d gotten into her kiddy pool where she curled in her pyjamas, a waterlogged blanket pulled up to her chin. He reached into the water to pull it back, but Nepenthe, asleep or pretending to be, rolled over with a splash.
In the mornings, Nepenthe made Webern turn his back while she changed into her clothes; in the evenings, she made him turn his back while she changed into her pyjamas. And at night, she lay awake until he finally, unwillingly dropped off, at which point she climbed into her tub and slept. Sometimes they kissed passionately, rolling around the floor as they had at Beer Can Creek, but Nepenthe pushed Webern away when he fumbled with her buttons or the zipper at the back of her dress. Then it was even more terrible for him to stretch out beside her, still in his clothes, feverish, the taste of peach pit burning on his lips. One night when she pushed him away, Webern couldn’t get himself to lie still. He sat up, his glasses still fogged with her breath, his hands shaking.
“Jeez, Nepenthe.” He rubbed his hump. “Am I really so bad? You knew what I looked like when you met me.”
Nepenthe gazed up through a haze of clove smoke. She crossed her legs at the ankles. “Bernie, don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m not.” Webern tugged at his knotted shoelaces. He thought of the clown from his dream, the laughing girl, the wind-up key freezing him in place. “I want to touch you.”
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