The Witch of the Wood

by Michael Aronovitz

  Rudy’s phone rang, and he struggled it out of his pocket.

  “Yes?”

  “Roo?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Pat.”

  “I know.”

  “Oh.”

  He put his palm over the face of the phone.

  “I’m hesitant to leave you on your own, Wolfie.”

  A muffled voice buzzed in Rudy’s palm,

  “Is that my angel? Rudy? Rudy! I want to talk to him!”

  He jerked the phone to his ear.

  “I’ll call you back!”

  He closed the unit and raised his eyebrows. Wolfie shrugged.

  “I’m going to high school tomorrow, Dad. You have to trust me.”

  “But that’s tomorrow,” he insisted. “Even stuck as a teen for a month, your growth pattern within it is exponential day to day. And in high school you know what to expect from my biography, at least to an extent. Out here in the city we don’t know who or what you’ll bump into.”

  His phone rang again, and he ignored it. They talked through the ringing.

  “There’s a spy-link for the father,” Wolfie said. “If you’re going to worry so.”

  “A what?”

  “A spy-link . . . a way to see what’s going on the way I see it, as I see it.”

  The cell went to its silent voicemail, and Rudy briefly pictured the tale full of pain and injury that was being presently recorded in his message center.

  “Do tell.”

  Wolfie kicked at a loose stone and watched it ping off a recycling container that assured in bright white letters that the world was a beautiful place to keep clean.

  “You grab your thumb. The left with your right hand.”

  “Just like that.”

  The phone rang again, and they both grinned.

  “Let me talk to the poor thing,” Wolfie said.

  “A minute,” his father replied. “Explain what happens when I grab my thumb.”

  Wolfie leaned over and spat, kind of a hanger-on he had to hover over for a second before it released itself. Rudy had to talk to him about that, either to teach him to do it better or not at all. Wolfie wiped off the residue with his sleeve.

  “You become a passive passenger in my head,” he said. “Not for sharing thoughts or anything, but like watching a movie.”

  “Passive.”

  “Right.”

  “Can I communicate with you?”

  “No. You can only watch. Go ahead. Check it out. Grab it.”

  The phone had stopped ringing and Rudy put it in his pocket. He grabbed his left thumb.

  There was an instant exchange of vision. While Rudy could still feel himself holding his own thumb and sense the vibration against his thigh as Pat began ringing his cell phone yet again, he was suddenly looking at himself holding his thumb with the other side of the alley as his background.

  I need a haircut, he thought, and this is a great way to find out if I have food in my teeth. He saw himself grin and then heard Wolfie’s voice come from directly beneath where his new vision was.

  “What’s so funny?”

  Rudy let go of his thumb and was instantly switched back to his own perspective.

  “Nothing.” He dug the phone out of his pants and opened it. “What, Pat, for God’s sake?”

  She was weeping.

  Wolfie approached and took over, turning away, saying sweet nothings into the mouthpiece. He returned, forfeiting the phone sadly.

  “Such a sweet spirit,” he said.

  “My ass.”

  “She wants to see me Friday.”

  “Same answer, Wolfie. She’s not a part of our lives. She’s clinging and draining and an absolute nuisance.” He studied the decorator brick for a moment. “And even though we fell apart, I don’t want to be reminded of things. Nice things. The way it started. I’m still letting her go.”

  Wolfie smiled warmly.

  “That’s the first piece of sense I’ve heard from you in hours.”

  “So?”

  “So.”

  Rudy shrugged, a bit annoyed that he’d picked up on a mannerism he would have rather left for Wolfie to enjoy by himself.

  “You have no problem with my ‘popping in’ through the thumb-link whenever I want?”

  “Of course not, Dad. I’ve got nothing to hide from you.”

  “Can you pop in on me?”

  “No.” His eyes narrowed playfully. “Why? You scared I’ll catch your technique jerking off? I’ve already seen it, Dad, in your biography.” He started walking away toward the alley entrance. “We’re going to be late. If there’s something I want you to see, I can send you an indicator by grabbing my own thumb. You’ll get an alarm in your left ear. It’s quite specific, and you’ll know beyond the shadow of a doubt that I’m calling.”

  Rudy chuckled wryly and stepped along the brick cobblestone to catch up. Grabbing thumbs? Spy-links? Indicators? He almost felt cheated, as if he should have been aware of this foreshadowing earlier. Would have helped knowing the baby was all right in the house! It was also rather silly, at least the way it came off with the “code names.”

  But then again, Rudy wouldn’t have been informed of this aspect earlier, because the baby had been more emotionally stable. This was a failsafe built into the growth pattern. While Wolfie was advancing intellectually, he was regressing and “humanizing” in terms of his feelings, and Rudy as protector was informed of his ability to be the watchdog when it had become relevant. And maybe the code-names weren’t so odd after all. They were first to be utilized when Wolfie was a teen, and so the word associations would reflect what one at his socio-cognitive level would naturally come up with based on the image of teens in Rudy’s biography. Even in terms of Wolfie’s language patterns, far more sophisticated at their base than even Rudy’s most decorated superiors, the boy was wired to “fit in” with the age group he’d adopted for this relatively significant period of time.

  And really, when you thought it over, was the thumb-grabbing so silly? What would a space traveler think of men shaking hands . . . actually touching each other in such an otherwise homophobic society? What would he think of air-kisses between casual friends, pledging allegiance to a piece of cloth, crossing oneself and kissing it up it the sky before stepping in a “batter’s box”?

  A bright wail of a sound exploded in Rudy’s left ear. It stopped him dead in his tracks and made him bend over, hand to his head.

  “Jesus Christ!” he said. The actual “sound” had only lasted half a moment, but the memory of it was extreme, still ringing out sharply in his mind.

  “I told you it was ‘specific,’” Wolfie called back with a laugh. “Catch up.” He jogged off around the corner and kept grabbing his thumb, sounding the indicator in Rudy’s left ear. Laughing, Rudy clapped along the pavement after him, palm pressed to his head. Wouldn’t a cell phone suffice here? His own started ringing again, and he frowned, slowed, grabbed it out of his pocket and shut it off.

  No cell phones.

  The last thing Rudy needed was for Patricia to be calling his son every five minutes, expressing her love and devotion, begging for a visit so she could show him her garbage sculptures, her junk jewels, her hat collection, her pottery junkyard.

  He and his son had a world to restructure.

  And the first night without him was difficult.

  Rudy had always been a rather lonely sort of person. It was part of his makeup. When he interacted with people professionally he could always sense that he was considered “the other,” the stranger with the past that was like deep pockets not meant to be turned out to the open. He was the one you didn’t really joke around with too much, the one who had been through rough waters. Rudy seemed like the kind who’d lost a close loved one in some tragic circumstance years back, or the type who had been subject to harsh childhood poverty, something that made him put up shields, build that flat, hardened persona that made him the dark, emotionless figure who handled that small cor
ner of your life (like your English grade), then went to perform his personal functions off the grid, mechanically, silently, effectively, until he was next needed to do a holistic edit of a nursing paper, or focus corrections for a student with a tense issue. In all actuality, it was more like what Ringo had said, “It’s really just me face,” but through the years Rudy had grown into what others had made him, now the hardened border-soldier, showing his age lines but putting on a clinic for the way one would sustain a poker face over time.

  Until April Orr, who treated him like a man.

  Until Wolfie, who in a single day had filled Rudy’s dry world with close and personal humanity: his embrace in the car as an infant, his birth fluids, his incredible intelligence, his magic, his humor, his fear.

  He is my son, Rudy thought. He was sitting at his coffee table, face in his hands. My boy. He couldn’t stop obsessing over Wolfie’s vulnerability, the terror in his eyes when he’d woken from his dream. And though Wolfie was a supernatural being, spring-loaded to woo mere mortals into overwhelming fits of love and attraction, either heterosexually, homosexually, or paternally (take Pat, for example), Rudy had to believe that his own deep wanting to hold and comfort this man-child was genuine.

  He put his hands in the prayer position and rested his nose between his thumbs.

  He had played the role of everyone’s “other” for so many years that he’d forgotten what it was like to feel this way, so personally connected to someone. It felt like starving, like dying.

  His head suddenly burst inside with Wolfie’s indicator, and it made him jump.

  He grabbed his thumb hungrily. He had forced himself not to impose this voyeuristic tool from the start, invitation only, and it had been the most difficult when Wolfie had first gone off by himself in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. One thing was for certain: whatever powers Wolfie did have over others, he had a shut-off switch. No one besides Rudy noticed him leave for the other facility, not even his lacrosse girls.

  Wolfie had been invisible for all intents and purposes. Rudy was aware that the kid was walking the aisles with a cart and taking down books by the foot-pound, but none of his students paid him any attention. Nor did the regular library traffic alter its pattern, and by the time Rudy gathered everyone at the exit Wolfie was long gone.

  Following that, the real worrying started.

  Rudy had driven home aching to pull over and grab his thumb, but resisted with everything he had. That would be cheating, imposing. Still, as he’d said to Wolfie initially, he was almost paralyzed with the fear that his boy would meet up with someone or something not specified in the biography, forcing him to expose himself too early. The kid was mortal, after all. And what of this Dark Guardian? Rudy had a feeling that it was his job as father and protector to watch out for this beast, as it was fate that Rudy aid his son at least in the process of discovery.

  He gripped his thumb so hard it must have turned violet.

  In front of him, he saw a piece of notebook paper on a desk at a slight angle. Wolfie’s handwriting was at the top.

  “Hi Dad. Stop worrying as I know you are. I love you, idiot.”

  Rudy laughed, and felt tears well in his eyes. He could hear the sounds of the science library in the background, a copy machine’s side cover being pushed back into place after an obvious paper jam, an elevator bell, Wolfie’s breathing. The boy’s hands and forearms came into the vision, and he started writing furiously.

  “Look at this, Dad! Three is the third prime and sum of all previous primes. The new space is defined by an L. H. Euclidean 4-tuple consisting of a three space plus time. My birth was the fuse that opened the possibility of this seeming Armageddon, and with the coming death of the last man—besides you and me of course—within the three-year span that has been prophesized, that fuse becomes a trigger, the ensuing nova causing floods of lava on the earth’s surface (a hundred metaphorical golden rivers) and our escape at zero orbital velocity in our life pods, falling directly through the sun at a gravity of 1.175 × 1021 ft/s2. The tornado-like vortex has a R. H. rotation, and is a conducting plasma. The vortex causes a reverse EMF, and it seems the paradox is how we attain the freedom of the witches before the earth that binds them is burnt to bare rock. But they will be released when the sun’s magnetic field begins to collapse. There will be a window, Dad. Hope! The paradox actually is that in this new universe we all will have quantum twins, each the other’s potential savior or destroyer. We will be long rid of the virus of men, and you and I will repopulate a new world reflecting this awesome reproductive duality.”

  Rudy let go of his thumb. Sweat had beaded up on his temples. Most of it he hadn’t understood even a little bit, but he’d gotten enough of the ground floor to be awestruck. A new existence with father and son as the new “Adams” roaming like gods through a world full of “Eves.” And of course, the check and balance, the alternate selves. Rudy had seen enough Star Trek episodes to know that usually those were not happy unions. This whole thing was an exercise in revenge, power, sex, and duality, a saga meant to sustain itself over generations. Whoever it was that said science wasn’t directly linked to the literary arts was a madman.

  And then there was the prequel to all this, the man-to-man holocaust, the bloodbath to come, the cleansing of the earth from its “virus” in the three-year window. This was going to be no dusty, unopened history book, no remote stanza of poetry, no disconnected mathematical formula. It was to be played out, live, right before Rudy’s eyes, at the hands of his son. Any new existence would always be plagued by these horrific stains on Rudy’s conscience, and he didn’t think he could do it. In cold and factual terms, he’d only known Wolfie for a day. He had to destroy him before this went to the next level.

  The alarm sounded in his head again. He jerked to an erect posture and re-affixed his grip.

  The paper before him read:

  “Though we can’t talk to each other directly, I know when you disengage, Dad. I miss you, and I’ll be home by early morning, maybe 2:00 or 3:00. Wait up for me and don’t worry. I’ll walk and use what you call ‘The Blink.’ It will take me five minutes and the muggers won’t even know I’m passing them by.”

  Wolfie’s hands came into view, and he had a pocket mirror, slightly smudged in the right corner, bordered by pink plastic. Clearly, the boy had made a lady friend and borrowed (or stolen) the thing from her purse. His face came into view in the reflective rectangle, and he whispered to his father,

  “Love you dearly but not queerly.”

  “Shh!” someone hissed.

  Wolfie put his hand over his mouth, eyes laughing.

  Rudy signed off and sighed. Though he had trouble picturing himself as anyone’s “Adam,” he was no Dark Guardian either. If anyone was going to stop this beautiful, complicated boy from carrying out his mother’s revenge, it wasn’t going to be Rudy Barnes.

  He tried to read, and couldn’t.

  He tried to eat, and wasn’t hungry.

  Wolfie hit the indicator a few more times through the night, sometimes with new equations and theorems, and others, while he was staring at some slender coed, like the tall one with the low-cut jeans and the dragon tattoo at the edge of her hip, squatting to get to the bottom row of a bookshelf, or the honey blonde at the reading table, casually taking her long hair and flipping it back over her shoulder while she studied (one of Rudy’s favorite maneuvers, even if the breast beneath was fully covered by a high neckline). Rudy got his fair share of high thong straps and tight jeans, cleavage, and eye shadow, believe it, and each time Wolfie provided him these treats, Rudy somehow knew the boy was laughing, at least to himself.

  Kids.

  When he and his son were sharing these moments, Rudy’s more universal concerns blew off to the far corners of his mind, and he felt almost happy.

  Wolfie came in at 2:30, and when they bedded down, Rudy felt at peace with his boy in his arms. When the sun rose, Wolfgang Barnes was going to go off to high school, Franklin H
eights, the institution that graduated Rudy back in 1985.

  The boy had three years to study the system, to infiltrate and learn the infrastructure, to wind up in prison, to call men to arms against one another, to wipe out the virus, and here in the semi-darkness of the apartment it felt nebulous, like a distant dream.

  But Wolfie’s first day of classes was anything but vague and impersonal.

  And Rudy was amazed at how quickly this shit really started to go down.

  Wolfie’s schedule was morning-friendly, as Rudy had been lucky enough yesterday when he got home from Penn to connect with a sweet and sympathetic counselor named Emily Chung, who was cognizant of paving a nice path for such a promising new senior. He had a “free” first block (no class, just go to the library and make a friend or two), homeroom and AP Physics second block, B-lunch, which split third block photography into two forty-five-minute sessions, and AP English for the last hour and a half. He was also supposed to drop off paperwork to the office and the nurse, stop by counseling to say hello, and meet with his mentor teacher (a formality for all new students) a Mr. Bond / Room 129 for the first ten minutes or so of photography, from which he’d need to secure a hall pass and a return note.

  He looked good: dark tan jeans, black designer T-shirt with soft reddish untucked flannel over the top. Casual, but neat. Handsome as hell. He’d slung his new backpack over his shoulder and was muttering something about sneaking in his iodine in an emptied bottle of Snapple, getting his little mentor interview over with during his “free” if the guy had a spare minute, and the fact that he needed an iPad, a pair of iPhones (Dad, your Samsung is simply archaic), and a laptop, pronto.

  “Facebook, Dad. Tweets. Trending. That’s the way the kiddies do it. If I’m going to infiltrate the system, I have to be an integral part of the communication network.”

  Rudy pushed away from the table and put his plate of half-eaten scrambled eggs and catsup in the sink.

  “All true. I just don’t relish your stepmother having a conduit, that’s all.”