by John McManus
In 1985, when Victor was seven, a friend of his mother’s came to visit Yazoo City. This spice-scented, easy-mannered fellow, who had the mellifluous name of Micah, said to Victor, “You’re trouble.”
“Don’t,” said Victor’s mother, but Micah went on: “It’s true. When you’re older, Victor, you’ll be a truckload of trouble.”
Something stirred in Victor to hear it, but he kept quiet. Later, after Micah had gone, Victor found his mother weeping in the kitchen. “I won’t be trouble,” he said to her.
“Micah’s telling people bye is why I’m crying.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I mean he’s sick.”
“I’m sorry,” Victor could have replied, or “Why,” but instead he said, “Micah’s a name I wouldn’t hate.”
“You can change your name when you’re grown.” They’d been through this already. To base his favor on the sound of names was another quirk of Victor’s. If he were, say, a Micah, hearing tell of a Victor, he would hate that boy’s guts—not because Victor meant winner but because the name’s ugly asymmetry suggested an ungainly boy. It disappointed his parents, Mary and Ralph, for him to feel this way. But theirs were neutral names. Victor didn’t adore one or hate the other, the way he did with Albert and Sievert Alfsson across the road.
Albert and Sievert were twins with identically curly manes of yellow hair, but from Victor’s bedroom window perch he could distinguish them readily. Albert was chubby, for one, but more importantly Victor’s grandfather had been an Albert. The name connoted decrepitude, unsightliness. He’d never known a Sievert, on the other hand. Sievert—impish, lithe, fresh—was the only twin Victor yearned to touch. If asked what sounded nice about the boy’s name, he couldn’t have answered. Why were bluebirds pretty? Self-evident. The problem started when Sievert quit coming outside.
For months he showed up only in the back of the Alfssons’ station wagon as Mrs. Alfsson drove out of the garage. Out his window Victor would watch roly-poly Albert bouncing alone on a pogo stick, thousands of times in a row.
“Is Micah dead yet?” he asked his mother one day, thinking that in her grief she might rename him after her late friend.
“I’m sick of your crap, Victor,” she replied, upsetting him so much that he quit breathing. His skin tingled, his sight blackened, and he passed out cold. He awoke to find Mary pressing a cold cloth to his forehead.
“Thank God,” she said, as if she’d solved the problem and not caused it.
Lying there under her pressed washcloth, Victor said, “Where am I?” He wanted to freak her out, because he was hurt by the betrayal of her words. It was more than their sentiment—it was that crap, ugly in both sound and meaning, smack at the end of a blame. A voiceless bilabial stop, as vexing as the voiceless velar plosive at the end of his father’s favorite word. Although he couldn’t analyze consonants that way yet, he knew what he didn’t like. He breathed more quickly, aware of sucking in air, of being a breathing body. When his lungs filled up, would he remember to quit? Could he turn things around? Maybe not. His skin tingled, his sight vanished. Again he was gone.
After a dozen more such spells Ralph suggested specialists, like a pediatric cardiologist, whereas Mary suggested that Victor buck up. “He needs to act like a grown-up,” she said to Ralph, who went behind Mary’s back to find a shrink named Dolf Pappadopolous.
“I doubt your son will ever feel a normal range of emotions,” said Dr. Pappadopolous to Ralph as Victor sat between them. “This will worsen at puberty. His grasp of metaphor will be impeded, if it develops at all.”
“What kind of name is your name?” said Victor, phrasing the query so as not to utter any of its horrid mishmash.
“Greek and German. You probably have not heard of a Dolf, but go to West Germany, you will meet more.” Dr. Pappadopolous might as well have said, “Dunk your head in the toilet, you will eat a turd.” Victor’s head grew light again, his vision clouded. He put a hand out to steady himself.
“He does it again, you see? Makes himself faint? You or I could decide not to, but that is the nature of the dilemma.”
If he was fainting on purpose, Victor thought, he should faint again now. If some illness was causing his problem, he should remain awake. Which action would prove this odious man wrong? He breathed sharply in and out, considering the question. Before he could choose, his lungs ballooned so full of air that he panicked again and it was too late already. He awakened on the table as Ralph pleaded, “Son?”
Victor didn’t mean to reply with silence. He just didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t the names themselves so much as how no one, not even Ralph, perceived why Victor responded negatively. The answer wasn’t as simple as a need for aesthetic bliss. In his dungeon dream the sole color was the dull gray of concrete, of cinder blocks, of skin gone sallow in lantern light. There wasn’t electricity. It wasn’t the 1980s above that cellar maze, but a timeless realm without paved roads or child safety laws. The master of a lush, unspoiled land had banished each ugly thing underground, where Victor sat chained to a ball. How could he explain to his anxious father that he didn’t miss the sun? In an airy meadow overhead, wisps danced in the light, while Victor basked in the well-being he drew from knowing that all was neatly fenced off by the planet’s curve: grandeur above, everything else below.
As time passed, the quarrels over Victor’s bouts grew bigger. Ralph moved out, out of Yazoo City entirely, into an apartment in Hattiesburg. After that the house stayed messier. Alone with his mother, Victor learned to steady himself through fussy tidying. For an hour each evening he wiped down surfaces, straightened things just so. Out in the world, he and Mary would take the old highway past pawn shops, auto garages, the ball fields where several strata of asphalt merged in a chaotic pimple of broken tarmac. Victor suspected that none of the Little Leaguers hyperventilated, as he did, at the sight of Queen Anne’s lace sprouting through those pavement cracks. He alone hung a wrecking ball from space to demolish every derelict building as they passed. By shutting his left eye, he crushed whatever needed it on that side, likewise with his other eye on the right. He was uncompromising. Whole cities he flattened while imagining them from a bird’s-eye view, like the hideously named Hattiesburg, and then he seeded the scars with tulip bulbs, and that was how it was for years, until the day in ninth grade when he spotted Sievert Alfsson mowing the Alfssons’ lawn, a breeze rippling his open shirt and blond curls.
Transfixed, Victor knelt at the window. He’d never seen such a compelling boy before, or a richer contrast between someone’s ruddy skin and the green grass. For half an hour Sievert mowed. When he was done, he leaned on the lawnmower handle and gazed toward Victor’s house until Victor raised a hand.
Sievert did the same, in a gesture that could only mean he was beckoning Victor to come say hello.
Heart fluttering, Victor ventured outside on his left foot. He crossed into the Alfssons’ yard and ended in front of his neighbor on his right foot.
“Hey, Victor,” said Sievert in a voice whose deep pitch stirred Victor and rendered him briefly mute.
“I’m Micah,” he finally managed to reply.
“I thought you’re Victor.”
“That’s my middle name.”
“My dad says you’re disturbed.”
“My mom says you’re a Seventh-Day Adventist.”
“Sievert’s one, but I worship the devil.”
Victor’s impulse was to correct this boy: “Sievert’s you,” he nearly said, but in fact he was speaking to ugly old Albert.
He looked the alleged Albert up and down, judging whether this newly slim kid could own such a hideous name. “You’re skinny,” he said, his lungs seizing a little.
“So?” said Albert, as if it had been ever thus.
“How do you worship the devil?”
“You drink,” Albert said, pulling out a flask.
Albert sipped, then passed the flask to Victor, who took it, stealing a glance across
the road. He’d done nothing like this before. Albert was home-schooled, ignorant of Victor’s reputation as a good kid.
I’m Micah, he thought, tilting the flask to his lips to pour what tasted like medicine into his mouth. Immediately he could feel stamina spreading through him, coating his insides as he choked on the burn.
“Too hot for a shirt,” said Albert, pulling his own off to toss it at his feet.
It was only about sixty degrees out, with cool gusts of wind. “Yeah,” Victor said.
“Been in the woods?”
“Those?” said Victor, gesturing behind the Alfssons’.
“Know some others?” retorted Albert, so that Victor heard how moronic he’d just sounded. Did he always sound that way? He fell out of the moment and stood thinking of Albert’s name, his grandpa Albert, wizened old men, until a tingling moved up his arms. Once again he would faint unless he did something. Albert was now squeezing under a barbed-wire fence toward a stand of pines. In alarm Victor drank. Right away, something flowed through him again and halted his decline. A layer of dry needles softened the pine-cone crunch under his feet as Victor hurried into the dark of the woods.
“My dad works for the radio,” Albert said when Victor had caught up, “so there’s free trips to Gulf Shores. What’s yours do?”
“He moved out of town.”
“Where’d he move?”
“East of here.” Victor didn’t want to say Hattiesburg.
“My mom’s on disability. She’s possessed.”
“Mine’s a nurse.”
“She wrote to Rome to ask for an exorcist, but they wouldn’t send one, so she switched to Adventist.”
“Mine’s nothing,” said Victor, giggling, because the alcohol was in his blood now, and his body felt like an unclenching fist.
“Here’s the swamp.”
They emerged into a meadow where willows grew by the shore of a cow pond. It wasn’t a swamp. From now on, thought Victor as he drank again, if he felt like saying something dumb like “It’s not a swamp,” he would drink instead.
“Dad will whip me later,” said Albert with a cramped smile.
“He won’t find out,” said Victor.
“Maybe I want it,” said Albert, and suddenly it didn’t matter if the blond fuzz on Albert’s arm belonged to someone with an unattractive name; Victor couldn’t go any longer without touching it. He reached a hand tentatively toward the boy. It felt like he was pushing through a thick morass. Then, as his finger hovered near Albert’s skin, a heron’s wings flapped, rippling the water.
Scared out of his reverie, Victor pulled back. “I wanted it to keep going,” said Albert, as if he meant the approach of Victor’s hand.
“Getting whipped?”
“Sievert and I punch each other.”
Following his new protocol Victor sipped from the flask until he had a better reply than “I like Sievert’s name.” The better one was, “Why?”
“To see who can take more hits.”
“Should I do it to you?”
“Are you gay?”
“You just said you like it.”
“No, assmunch.”
“Want to do it to me?”
“In the face like a girl?”
“However you like,” said Victor, immediately gulping down an impulse to take it back, to run away from this strange thrall. He folded his hands across his lap. Beyond Albert the sky was ripe with white clouds that floated above the pines while Albert’s cupped palm whooshed in to slap him. Right away Albert gasped as if he’d been the one hit.
“Happy now?” he asked.
“I guess,” said Victor, his cheek stinging.
“Again, assmunch?” said Albert, as Victor kept unclenching. Hard not to conflate that with the stinging, so he presented his cheek. He breathed with ease. He hadn’t liked the slap, but being drunk felt sublime. His lungs weren’t tight anymore. His head didn’t hurt. He had binocular vision, not just in the merging of his two eyes’ fields but in the two halves of the earth. In this new state as he awaited Albert’s palm, beauty wasn’t repelling ugliness. He desired no stick for raking scum off the pond water. He didn’t care about the trash strewn on the far shore.
From then on, Albert let Victor drink with him once a week when his family was at service. They did it in Albert’s basement and in the woods, in an abandoned school bus there, or by the pond where it had first happened. A summer evening in the school bus could calm Victor for a week. They smoked Marlboros Albert purchased from the cousin who sold him gin. They arrived home reeking of gin and cigarettes, so Victor started stowing a toothbrush and toothpaste behind a loose house brick, brushing his teeth to mask the scent. Not that Mary noticed stuff like that. As for Albert, he didn’t care what his parents smelled; he hated them for messing up his brother’s head.
“What did they do to it?” asked Victor more than once, to which Albert would say only, “Fucked it up.”
Victor hadn’t forgotten how he used to react to the harsh edges at the end of fuck and crap. Such a childish kid he’d been. “Is that why you worship the devil?”
“Micah, don’t be a dipshit.”
“What do you mean?”
“Should I hit you again?”
Victor nodded not because he liked the feeling, but because of symmetry. If Albert wished to slap him, and Victor wished to allow it, there was symmetry. Anyway it never hurt much, at least not until the day Albert watched him brush his teeth.
They had spent three hours in the bus. Afterward Victor swallowed the toothpaste like usual.
“Raise your arms,” Albert said then. When Victor did, Albert punched him in the gut. He dropped his toothbrush and bowled over.
“Why’d you do that?” he howled.
“Because you’re retarded.”
“For swallowing toothpaste?”
“Did you swallow toothpaste?”
“I’ve always done it that way.”
“You’re worse than Sievert,” said Albert, turning to go.
As he crossed the road home, the curtains fluttered in the Alfssons’ living room. “I don’t care,” said Victor aloud, enjoying the words as he spoke them. He stayed put afterward, admiring their echo. Nothing was symmetrical about I don’t care, but the phrase wasn’t ungainly. He was seeing beyond its shape and sound to the deeper meaning, the notion of not caring. Who gives a fuck, he thought, feeling wise beyond his years. That night, still buzzed, he spat his toothpaste out for the first time. Thinking back to Albert’s last withering glance he watched it swirl down the drain.
The next morning, sober but still wise, he did the same. “It’s what I always do,” he let himself whisper aloud, a workmanlike phrase striking in its plainness. After a few more days, spitting was old hat. The shift proved so strangely easy that, when Albert didn’t show up the following weekend at the usual hour, Victor braved beginning a journey on his right foot, ending on the Alfssons’ porch on his left.
He rang the bell. Almost immediately the door opened to reveal white-haired Mr. Alfsson, his hazel cat-eyes daring Victor to ask, “Albert home?”
“Where Albert is is the Lyman Ward Military Academy,” Mr. Alfsson said. “You can write to him there.”
“When will he be back?”
“Sievert is inside. Would you like to play with Sievert?”
“Okay,” he heard himself say, but he meant no. Suddenly Sievert appeared at the top of the stairs, as fat as his brother used to be. Their spirits had traded bodies, Victor thought, already pondering an excuse to leave. “I forgot my mother needs me,” he said, backing away.
Switching feet hadn’t worked out, he thought as he headed home. He should obey his own rules, heed words’ sounds and keep things tidy, swallow his toothpaste every time. Except he was realizing something. He wasn’t sad to lose Albert. Or he detected no sadness. What he gulped down as he crept across the road was excitement. Adrenaline. At school there were tons of better-looking boys than Albert, with names as hideous as Hugh
and Horace and he didn’t care, he had put that crap behind him. Names were subjective. The objective problem was obtaining alcohol.
Victor studied that problem until the day a Desert Storm veteran and addict in recovery came to speak at Magnolia High. On the gym bleachers, Victor positioned himself behind two kids he’d heard speaking on the subject in biology class, the ugly-named Hugh and Hugh’s neutral-named friend Clint. It seemed they drank from Clint’s parents’ liquor cabinet while they played Dungeons & Dragons. The fact that they were gaming nerds lowered the stakes for Victor, who waited to make his move until the assembly speaker alleged that no one ever wanted to grow up and become a drunk.
“I want to grow up and become a drunk ASAP,” Victor said.
Hugh laughed and turned to see who’d spoken.
“I’ll be better at it,” Victor added. “I’ll set high goals.”
They got to talking. Victor mentioned Dungeons & Dragons admiringly. Soon enough Hugh was suggesting he hang out with them. Did he want to? “Why not,” Victor answered. Within hours they were in Clint’s bedroom pouring peach schnapps and rolling dice to learn what qualities his character would have in the campaign.
For six months Victor played D&D, drinking more than Hugh and Clint and their other friends. The fakeness of the game’s dungeons compared to his dungeons stopped mattering. The energy he’d once spent hating names like Hugh’s he funneled into a crush on the boy, battling orcs until finally he acknowledged that they would never get naked together. That didn’t stymie him long. He drank until his old idiosyncrasies were like a logic problem he’d solved. He started going to the quarry on weekends. One moonlit Friday there, as some girls teased him about his gaming days, he thought how lucky he was that the Alfssons had banished Albert. Without outgrowing Albert, he couldn’t have outgrown Hugh. Now he would also outgrow these girls, along with their friends. It was a destiny that seemed to stem from innate willpower. Night after night he drank with whomever at whatever house, whatever their names. Then one day as he was about to check the mailbox, he heard someone saying, “Micah,” and gazed across at a gigantic figure in the Alfssons’ downstairs window, summoning him.