Nowhere Near You

by Leah Thomas

  P.P.S. Okay, this officially feels deliberate. You don’t want me contacting Owen about finding Blunderkids?

  chapter eight

  THE LIBRARY CARDS

  Ollie,

  Ninety-nine problems, but loneliness ain’t one. Yes?

  I could lash out bitterly at this latest rejection. Could throw a fit as I once did. Proclaim to the miscellaneous deities of all galaxies that I will no longer speak to you.

  But you helped me evolve beyond that sort of cowardice.

  We’ve agreed to stand our ground.

  I am not offended, but know that I still love you. Ich liebe dich.

  Certainly, I won’t stop saying this. Not after it took so long to find the words in the first place. I refuse to push our relationship backward. Do not presume to counsel me further on this. Or counsel me about my treatment of Owen. I haven’t misled him. He knows about you. He understands that adolescent relationships are temporary. He is clever enough.

  Ollie, can’t you see? You are being hypocritical. You cannot demand honesty from those closest to you and then deny me my single greatest truth.

  And so, I love you. Even if you are bald. Even if you cringe at the thought. If you wish to challenge me on this again, you had best clamber into your ludicrous, fictional amphibicar. Drive here. Say it to me in person.

  This brooks no further conversation.

  On the first day of my last week at Bernholdt-Regen, I stepped into my past. Upon entering the noisy courtyard, I thought I’d returned to who I was before you. Students hardly spared me a second glance. They were busy kicking dirt in the yard.

  I felt only one pair of sharp eyes.

  Not Lenz. Fieke. Perched atop the staircase where first I met her. This time she threw nothing. Only a weighty stare when she heard my cane on the steps.

  “I really, really hope,” she said, “you realize how lucky you are.”

  “Quite the luckiest boy who’s ever lived.”

  She raised her legs to horizontal. I stopped before my knees could bump against them.

  “I mean it.” She twisted a piercing in her nose. “If anyone ever blew me off like that, I’d give them a fluffing boot, not a potted plant. And if they showed up on my doorstep later, they’d get the other boot. Not whatever you got.”

  Which emotion emanated from me?

  Her posture slackened. “So, when will you be leaving us, Brille?”

  “I haven’t decided that I will necessarily—”

  “Oh, you’d better necessarily. Don’t think for a second I want you here for the rest of the year, waxing mopey.” She coughed into a bangled wrist. “Spare us your terrible dress sense.”

  “Fieke . . .”

  “Green corduroys and an orange silk shirt?”

  “I liked the textures.”

  She wiped her nose on her hand. Stood up straight on the ledge, held her arms wide. Would she fall? Fieke is precarious, Ollie.

  “The air smells like shit here.” She hopped down to stand beside me. Squeezed my shoulder. Bracelets chimed, revealed a studded face that would not cry.

  I heard Owen’s fingers tapping his satchel, heard the quiet of the rest of him behind me. Felt him like he was part of me, another heartbeat. Those new branches. I gave him my hand. It was already his.

  There on the steps, I killed a secret. Told the Abends about meeting the girl who drowned me. Spoke of her dual smiles. Owen frowned. Fieke cracked her knuckles.

  I think, Oliver, you won’t need to electroshock anyone. The Abend siblings are near me.

  “Whatever happens”—Fieke cleared her throat—“don’t flinch.”

  I am here, Owen’s arms told me.

  We answered the summons of the bell.

  I handed Frau Pruwitt my acceptance letter. I’m unused to her smile. I shivered.

  We began peeling checkout cards from the backs of books. Cataloging digitally now. I felt sorry, tearing those chronicles from jackets. Until then, you could pick up a book and discover who read it in 1997. The last person to check out a waterlogged copy of Watership Down: Rachelle Honnell. Who was she?

  Frau Pruwitt exhaled. “Stop stinging me. Say whatever it is you mean to, young man.”

  “I have to stop volunteering here,” I blurted in a single burst.

  “Nonsense.”

  “I need a job. To help Father pay for Myriad. I can’t justify going if I don’t contribute.”

  “You could quit. See who wants to hire a boy with the social graces of a pincushion.” She tore out another card. “Or you could just keep working here.”

  “I don’t get paid for working here.”

  “Of course you do. More than you deserve. Direct deposit to your bank account.”

  “Whose bank account?”

  “Why, the czar’s!” She put her hands on her hips. “Yours. The one I opened for you.”

  “But—you’ve always maintained that this was volunteer work!”

  “I’ve maintained your finances so that you couldn’t blow your savings at noisy Diskotheks. You’ve earned a decent sum here. Put that sum toward Myriad.”

  “That money could go to better use.”

  “Employees get paid.”

  I doubted I was a legal employee. Frau Pruwitt was offering charity she knew I’d not otherwise accept. Perhaps I should have protested. But I looked at the ceilings, so dingy and decrepit. Galaxies away from auditoriums.

  “Thank you very much,” I whispered.

  “What else can an old place spend money on?” She stared hard at the binding of the book she held. “An old place with few visitors.”

  We continued tearing paper from pages in silence.

  Who’d have thought I’d ever have reasons to stay at Bernholdt-Regen?

  Yet if you must leave your doorstep, so must I.

  The holiday break has begun. Owen and I have gone out often since your last letter. We have gone to bookstores. Walked out of Ostzig to brighter places. Visited a museum. I appreciate sculptures. Owen appreciates places where people are as quiet as he. Do not think I am mistreating him.

  It is only: whatever Owen is to me does not lessen what you are to me.

  December 16 marked Owen’s seventeenth birthday. He and Fieke joined Father, Frau Pruwitt, and me for dinner in our little apartment. Warm Glühwein, goose with apple stuffing. Fieke did not put her boots on the table. Owen told us, through his phone, that he wanted to toast my Myriad acceptance. I only wanted to toast him. And when I felt that warm, perhaps the whole room warmed with me.

  I am the luckiest boy in the world. Quite.

  Ollie, wondrous as Arthur seems, I’ve never written to him. I’ve heard of him in passing. How I once heard of you. In passing. Yes, nearly fictional. Unlike you, I did not want to know.

  Recall that not all of us lived alone in the woods, Oliver. With me, Auburn-Stache could never deny the existence of the laboratory. It’s a place that made and raised me. Perhaps I knew Arthur as a child. He would not have spoken to me. He would have glared across a cold room. He would have hated me.

  Meeting people is less wondrous for the son of their tormentor. I need not dig into the lives of those who would rather I not. I am trying to move forward.

  Let me be adamant: I am loath to search for the Blunderkinder.

  So, Ollie, I will not give you Owen’s contact information. Nor encourage this flight of fancy.

  You are Blunderkind enough for me.

  M

  P.S. It is almost Christmas. Soon I will start attending Myriad. Yet you are writing about events that took place an entire month ago. Is this deliberate, Ollie? Surely this can’t be in the service of story. Your handwriting has become spindly. I can scarce hear it. When last it looked this way, you were hiding a trauma. A body in the woods. Where are you, Ollie?

  How are you?

  Truly?

  chapter nine

  THE SNOWFALL

  Okay, okay. Not okay.

  First off, you’re being paranoid. I mean, wh
ere did that P.S. come from?

  Have you been talking to Auburn-Stache? I haven’t seen him in weeks. If you’re only getting his side of the story about how everything went to shit, well, you’re not getting the whole truth! And now I sound paranoid, too!

  I’m fine, Moritz! Really. I’m just determined to tell these stories right.

  It’s not a flight of fancy, thanks. It’s my life.

  Second off: I’m annoyed about this not-exactly-minor disagreement we seem to be having. And bullshit you’re too mature to get upset! Not trying to be a dick. But your response was worse than awkward, Moritz. You spent a bunch of time worrying that your emotions may be corrupting people and then purposely ignored my emotions and dropped yours on top of them.

  I told you something felt wrong, and you said, “Okay, I disagree. What else?”

  Honestly, truly, I tried to be tactful and it didn’t work, but you can’t treat Owen like some casual pastime while you wait for “one true love” to show up. Didn’t you have sex with him? I mean, I’ve read some people are polyamorous, and they can love lots of people at once, and that’s not necessarily unhealthy for them. But that’s not me. It’s probably not Owen, either.

  It took me longer than usual to write you back this time, Moritz. Maybe I had to figure out what to say and how to say it, and the last thing I want to be is mean at Christmas. One time you told me you’re trying to be friendly snowfall when you scold me, not cruel ice. That’s what I’m doing. I’m being tough on you because this disagreement isn’t worth ruining our friendship over. Got it?

  Third off: Who cares if I’m still writing about November? Good stories are linear, remember? When we first started writing, I told you about my childhood. Moritz, I told you about things that happened years ago. Why does time matter to you all of a sudden?

  I know why it matters to me.

  She’s been dead for almost two months. But in our letters, she’s only been gone for two weeks.

  God. How can I explain why that matters? I know it’s crazy, Mo. But it matters.

  Arthur and I entered a building guarded by green lions: the art institute, with its basement full of photographs and tiny dollhouse displays of lavish homes from around the world (none of them A-frames in Michigan forests), with these halls full of furniture and Egyptian pillars older than anything America has ever seen and pottery and so many canvases that I didn’t even know what to look at, and there was this one awful room—this deafening room that was just ceiling-to-floor television screens on three sides, an exhibit by some modern artist who filmed a bunch of people screaming and laughing at different pitches.

  (That’s one monstrous sentence, and no way to tell a story. That room got to me, Moritz.)

  The installation was called Tearslaughter.

  The name doesn’t even capture how bad it felt, and didn’t explain how the artist got footage of children and adults and old people screaming. Is there stuff in movies you can’t explain, Moritz? Are actors that good at pretending? I have no idea. I still had my beanie and bodysuit on, and I could barely see the screens through the electric blur, but that meant I could just barely see the outlines of real people and one of the blurred faces might belong to a middle-aged woman alone in the woods—

  Moritz, I wanted it to stop.

  I didn’t even think about what I was doing, but every instinct told me to just pull my hat off, just do it, pull my hat off and make the noise stop, and before I could realize how insanely stupid that thought was, those open, wailing mouths had filled all my bleary vision, and my fingertips were already underneath the wool of the beanie, working themselves under the duct tape—

  A brittle grip took hold of my wrist, and Arthur’s unusual face replaced the others. He met my eyes through magnifying lenses. “Hey, guy, not a great plan.”

  I wanted to laugh it off—usually that’s what I’d do—but I couldn’t budge.

  Arthur kept hold of my frozen wrist, playing it cool, ignoring the salt water streaming suddenly down my stupid face. “How about let’s check out the Magritte exhibit. This room is shit.”

  I swear I didn’t want to hurt him—it’s just that when Arthur grabbed my wrist bones (carpi) to pull my arm away from my hat, I still couldn’t seem to let it go, and the force of me not moving?

  That pressure fractured three of Arthur’s chalky finger bones.

  There came this crackling sound like a line of Bubble Wrap getting popped and his grip vanished along with my paralysis. I let go of my beanie, but Arthur just looked at his hand and sighed under the noise. Just sighed at the sight of his mangled fingers.

  Did I say fingers? I meant twigs. His forefinger bent backward just above the second joint, his middle finger off-kilter, skewed left in almost the same place. And his thumb, Moritz—it looked almost flattened at the top, where he’d put pressure on my inner arm.

  “Aw, shit. What a buzzkill.”

  “What—Arthur? Holy—”

  “Let’s go. This shit’s hurting my ears.”

  A lady in a business suit hushed us. Arthur waved his former fingers at her, and the hush went back down her throat. “If you’re the artist, watching reactions incognito, I want you to know your art is shit.”

  Arthur didn’t need his arms to get me out of there. He kicked the exhibit door open and held it for me with his boot, and after we were out, he turned to me and asked: “You all right, man?”

  “Arthur, I just broke your fingers.”

  Arthur shrugged. “Shit happens. But shit art doesn’t have to. Man oh man.”

  I laughed like shouting, wiping my eyes. “Arthur. Thank you.”

  He showed me every tooth.

  I followed Arthur’s giraffish gait down a museum thoroughfare full of centuries-old Tibetan altars. (Moritz, I’d never seen anything older than trees before!) Arthur held his right hand close, folded both arms against his chest. The universe snickered, because Arthur stopped right in front of a Sri Lankan cross-armed statue of Ananda that matched his pose. “Shoulda known better. You went human statue. Ahuh. Now, let’s get to the armory.”

  I flinched at his attempted fist bump.

  “Guy, don’t get spooked. Could be worse. I don’t have to dress like a porn star. Ahuhuh. This happens when you’ve got basically the shittiest case of brittle bone disease.”

  “Osteogenesis imperfecta?” Me, wannabe anatomy expert, learning to unlearn everything I learned here, Moritz. “I thought that was something that babies had. Not something that turned fingers into Twix bars.”

  “Now I want a Twix, damn it.”

  “Eat it on the way to the nearest doctor? Or Beau?”

  That off-kilter laughter rattled his shrunken chest. “Ugh, Beau. Once I came back with a backward knee and she virtually strapped me to my bed. Here’s hoping she doesn’t find out.”

  We passed a group of fanny-packed tourists speaking curling languages I never thought I’d hear, found a high-ceilinged gallery full of ivory Grecian statues. Ancient Greeks must have gotten some nasty sunburns, going naked everywhere like that.

  “Aha! Stairs!” Up we went, Arthur taking the steps three at a time.

  “How could Beau not find out? You gonna wear mittens for months?”

  Guffaw. “You gonna knit them for me, beanie guy?”

  “Mom knitted the beanie, not me.” I bit my tongue. How did her name escape the woods of me like that?

  “Your mom gonna knit them for—?” He stared right at me. “Sorry. Not cool.”

  I looked past him. To the right of us on the marble landing stood an urn deep enough to move furniture into and live inside. But to the left—

  Moritz, the room gleamed silver from top to bottom. Medieval spears, once held by people I could never meet. (No one could, because those people are kaput.) Suits of armor posed like ghosts stood inside them.

  My legs almost buckled.

  “Swords,” I whispered.

  Arthur walked right past them to the far corner of the room and sat on a bench dir
ectly across from a huge display case. Inside the case? A trebuchet replica, Genghis Khan era. (Holy shit. People like Genghis Khan existed, people like Joan of Arc and Salvador Dalí and the Wright brothers all existed beyond fiction, Moritz, and there’s real, actual evidence of them in the world, so how are people not constantly trying to move into museums?)

  “I freaking love shit like this. Before people had, like, real flying machines, this was the closest they got. Good effort, past people. Keep trying. Eventually, you’ll throw something up and it’ll stay there.”

  Arthur wasn’t taller than me once I sat by him; his crazy height is all limbs.

  “What are you going to do?” I looked at his fingers, twitching in his lap—

  Here’s where it gets Blunderweird, Mo.

  I used to pore over anatomy books. Usually, when someone breaks a bone, there’s bruising, swelling, and obstruction of blood flow. But these fingers had none of that. They were crooked but whole, like they’d been broken years ago.

  “Rapid regeneration. You cut me, that shit closes up in seconds.”

  Cue my shameless ogling. “Does that mean you’ve never had skinned knees?”

  “Can’t be a skateboarder. No one takes you seriously unless you got scars. Ahuh. Sucks, ’cause I’d have some real cred. One time I broke my neck. Did well on a geometry test, skipped outta the classroom, hit my head on the door frame. Stupid shit.”

  “Stop. The. Phone.”

  “Ahuh. You mean ‘hold the phone.’ Or ‘stop the presses.’”

  “I don’t know. I don’t do phones. You’ve broken your spine before and you didn’t end up paralyzed or super dead? What about your nerves?” You probably know this, Moritz, but when bones break near nerve centers, they sever the connections that let us feel things, that keep body parts moving properly. Uncle Joe’s not in a wheelchair just because he broke his spine. He severed spinal nerves.

  “My bones are brittle shits, but Ass says my nerves are steely strong. Good thing, because I don’t really feel pain.”

  “Actual nerves of steel? Arthur, it’s too . . . punny to be real.” Moritz, would it be okay to get hurt over and over again, if you knew you’d always recover?