A Comedy & a Tragedy

by Travis Hugh Culley

  Uneasily, I climbed down from the bunk bed. I was still dizzy. In a stupor, I walked down the hall. Behind me, tendrils of sunlight were moving; names followed me around corners. I pulled down my swim trunks, which I was still wearing. There, I felt suddenly displaced, as though I had never been in this place before. I didn’t recognize the little red stall that I was seated in. The toilet and the door were so close together that there was no room to place my knees. I tried to close the door, which wasn’t really a door but a board, a piece of siding, hung from a hinge and painted red. As it wafted open with the breeze, I heard the laughter again. The boys and girls were out on the baseball diamond, playing in shaving cream. I saw a stripe of black blood in my hand, and I disposed of it like a bug, flushing. I swore I must have been dreaming. Lines of colored light pierced me. Names seemed to change, trading letters back and forth behind me. I climbed back up into the bunk, pulled my sheets over my head, and thought I should just try to wake up again. It’ll stop, I assured myself. Above me, everywhere, the seconds whirled forward and back. Hours spun in place. Decades found themselves knotted to the woodwork. ROBERT 1959, STEVE WAS HERE ’72, HERB WAS HERE, GERALD ’67, MARK ’81, NICK SLEPT HERE ’75. Years flashed. Gleaming children ran past the windows in swimsuits, their bodies covered in white soap. The lake awaited them. I lay back feeling as though I’d been fighting all night.

  Survival Stories

  Stories like mine can be hard to tell. They are often told more easily in a whisper than in full voice, and the reason is plain: a survival story is nothing to celebrate. The right words are hard to find. Even if survivors do succeed in finding them, the most concerned reader will dread reading what they write down. This is why survival stories, truly lived, appear awkward and unfitting in their adaptations, as comedies or tragedies. They tend to have no easy place among the amber and blue hues of the theater. Too often the telling gets in the way. The issues are too delicate. The moral, which is cautionary, becomes too easily cluttered by the conventions of the art. The consequences of any misunderstanding can be far-reaching. There is no room for spectacle, no room for easy resolutions. The hero in a survival story doesn’t feel like a hero, doesn’t know he is a hero, and the villain can’t be taken seriously in costume.

  Every day it seems I read another story about victims of the church coming forward. We hear the awful truth about children who have been harmed. Some children are, and when they are it can be a shameful thing to place a name on. Terms can be abused. They can serve as a tool of religion, a branding, a scar. A child who is strong enough to resist a branding deserves to be listened to.

  I have to be grateful that the hardships I did experience would not impede my ability to become literate finally, and I have to be most grateful that a process rooted in art would help me to discover and explain all that had stood in the way. Without literacy, without art, without having some process with which to look over the passage of time, I think my grief would have consumed me, and I would never have come to know the full vindication that I have been able to receive by writing. To come this far, I would still have to take a long journey. I would be led even further away from reading. I would have to avoid letters and literacy completely because of what, for a time, I feared they might reveal. I never knew that a boy could be treated the way that I had been, and it was something I did not want to learn.

  All that I could hope for was a little normalcy. But when Mom emptied our clothes onto the pool table, one heavy tin of shaving cream with red and white stripes fell out onto a pile of jeans and towels. I caught the can as it rolled, and ran it to my room directly. Without thinking, I stuffed the can away in the bottom drawer of the unused desk in my room. Closing this drawer, I knew that I had become a boy with secrets.

  School started at the end of the summer, and I didn’t want to be there. I sat in a different classroom, looked at my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Southard, and decided to forget everything, just as the man had said.

  In the coming weeks, I found that I could say I did not know the answer to a question, even when I did. I didn’t want my teacher to sense what I had become aware of. I didn’t want her to know what was on my mind. I wouldn’t think. Why think? Instead, I stepped aside and imagined other possibilities. I refused any attempt at reading or writing—and my rejection was final and radical: I would no longer be the boy I’d been. I would forget myself. See with new eyes. I aimed at forgetting everything that I had learned before this summer, even the images of words I knew, every trace of internal representation. I tried to not recognize names, even street signs, no matter how common they were. I de-inscribed them, reversing the letters, scrambling the suffixes and pulling syllables back into misrecognition. I began using the wrong words for things. I said his when I meant hers, up when I meant down. My parents thought I was being glib. It seemed to them that I had returned from camp exactly as I’d left.

  Knowing that Mrs. Southard would never suspect, I began to play a little game, like Stone-Face, where two people look at each other until someone breaks into laughter. The difference was only that I never told her what I was doing, and she never caught on. I called the game Never-Mind, and the idea was to pretend that I was listening. This way, she would go on and on into exasperation and I would catch no part of the lesson.

  In the first few weeks of class, instead of paying attention, I was either scratching mosquito bites on my ankles or drawing tormented action figures on sheets of lined paper. If I couldn’t draw because Mrs. Southard had strictly prohibited it, then I began invisibly drawing: flying an airplane far outside of the room, chasing lint off into wholly new dimensions, navigating the ravine of a crinkled page. Then the bell would ring and my mind would come back to me. It was time for recess, and I was one of the other kids again.

  This year, Joe had said that he didn’t want to ride his bike to school anymore. He said the ride in the morning made him sweaty all day. Dad understood. Soon, a new ritual had been established. In the morning, Joe, a spitting image of his father, climbed into Dad’s company car and was whisked away to school.

  I pulled my old Sting-Ray out of the carport and rode. Pedaling through the damp morning air, I felt vindicated. I could now take any path I chose. Each morning, this became my whole objective: How can I take a new route to school? I didn’t want to be followed. I wanted to disappear from my kitchen door and reappear at my desk like magic. Leaning on one pedal, I thought no one should be able to predict my next move or imagine where I might be going. I cut through the church parking lot using the shortcut through our neighbor’s yard. On asphalt, I listened to my chain grind and my seat squeak. I wove crisscross lines in a labyrinth of residential streets. When my mind was free to wander, I sat back and coasted.

  Under the trees on Fourth Avenue, I thought about how the sky was only a thin blue net holding the earth together. I imagined that if the birds flew high enough, beneath them the whole planet would seem to rest in this blue net, staying afloat as the ground beneath me spun. I saw myself riding underneath this round world. Every street connected to another. The more I rode my bike, the more my imagination seemed to drift into new horizons. Some of the images became so real they would transfix me. Occasionally, I lost track of which world these pictures were set in, and then I found myself standing in the middle of an intersection, unsure of which way to go. It was as though I had found a special place in the corner of my mind from which I could begin to see and think, and when I thought from that place, I thought anew.

  On these rides, I began hearing voices. Something of a conversation was taking place in one room of my inner ear. There it was, continuing on as though in my absence. When I first acknowledged that this was happening, the voices receded. The talking stopped mid-sentence, as if they didn’t want to be noticed. I thought they were being shy. As I became more aware of them, I learned to attend to them differently: I tried to eavesdrop on myself. Through one ear I could scan for birds or traffic, and the voices would think I wasn’t listening. They see
med to think that most people didn’t listen. But I was onto them. I kept them in mind. I would fill my head with music, and melodies that I’d make up to give my voices a second to relax. As long as it seemed my thoughts were elsewhere, my voices would resume talking among themselves, playing bridge or telling stories about their neighbors and people they’d read about in the news, things I could never have come up with on my own.

  It never occurred to me that this might be the effect of an early psychotic break of some kind. I felt like it was a gift. It made me curious. Every morning, I was tapping into something new. There was no way to tell what I’d be hearing next. I found that these voices, in groups of four or five, were sometimes strangers to one another. In groups of two or three they were familiar, drawn together by some third element. I experienced no other peripherals, no flashes or wave effects like you see in dream spells on TV. I rode home, trying to imagine that everyone heard voices like I did.

  In Mrs. Southard’s class, I tried to sit at my desk and play Never-Mind, but I couldn’t sit still. My name was being called, but no one was calling it. Sometimes I would get confused because I would see the thoughts of my classmates going right across their faces. Much of my time in class I spent wondering how it was that I was even sitting there. Mrs. Southard couldn’t tell that I was off in other worlds. I wore a gentle smile and allowed her voice and those I was hearing to distract me from each other. My smile became brighter the sooner I lost track of these crisscrossing conversations. Sometimes Mrs. Southard would speak more loudly, I realized in horror, only to disperse her own inner voices. I tried not to absorb them.

  One day she announced that we were going to learn cursive. I sat back: Not me, not ever! When I looked at a line of cursive, my thoughts spilled across and over, analyzing the handwriting. Who writes that way? Tying these elastic words up in my head until they were tangled, I couldn’t be sure what I was seeing anymore. I ran my finger along a word, trying to read the letters in their combinations. The letters wound up so that I could not distinguish one from the other—and I didn’t try. The script was easy to imagine being only scribble, so unlike my own cross-hatching. I could imitate these shapes with my pen, but I could not get them to fit together in my mind.

  Voices emerged, and I entertained them. I wondered whether or not the people in my head knew cursive. They were always talking. Did they write? What did they write with? They argued against the curvy lines I held in hand. There were always other possibilities.

  At times, I found myself lost between likenesses, floating past signs as if I were on my bicycle. Suddenly there was no trace of where I was going or how I had gotten there. All memory of the prior moment had gone. One word replaced another, and then, as through a window in my mind, they went no place.

  That spring, on the Stanford Achievement Tests, I came up below average in every subject. Language, 39 percent; reading comprehension, 21 percent; math, 19 percent. On my report card, I received four Ds and two Fs. It was such a disaster that no one at home said anything about it. My grades were only symptomatic, my mother said. Of what, she could not say.

  Rebel, Rebel

  It was like a mask. At Biscayne Gardens I appeared to most people a clear-eyed, jovial child, but in fact I was a different person. I became shy in the presence of authorities. I turned red under observation. I felt punished in myself, in having to be myself. When class was over, I went through a reversal. I became talkative and social. I was ready to play. I was an element of everybody. I thought about intelligence abstractly. I thought that the skill a person must have to translate a sound into a word was based on the adoption of something deeper. I thought maybe this was one of the background processes my mother had talked about.

  Of course, I did not know the limits of my own intelligence, nor could I sense its levels. I could not tell—myself—whether or not I was equipped with a high degree of intelligence, a good or bad intelligence, a fast or a slow intelligence. How does one know these things? In my family, it seemed that intelligence did not work like nature worked. Intelligence borrowed and rearranged. Intelligence assumed itself superior, advantaging itself over unthinking things. My brother’s intelligence was his advantage over me, in this sense. From his point of view, I was unformed, gentle and dumb. I was the gullible stuff of human nature. I went into the backyard, disappeared behind the cover of trees to discover my own strengths and weaknesses. I was no Birdbrain. I became something of a wild child, Nature Boy, and I hoped to embrace what I did not know. I didn’t need to be smart, I needed to be brave and patient.

  We had exotic trees, many of which gave fruit. There were paper trees that lined the yard and schefflera at the corners of the house. We had an avocado tree that shook little green pears all over. The mango with its thick snakeskin branches would turn red and drop fruits the size of water balloons. We had an orange tree and four banana trees that bloomed constantly, but we were living on the property like campers in an RV. We camped in the house. Dad camped in his chair. Every weekend, Dad had Joe and me stand around with rakes and garbage bags, hauling sticks and leaves to the mulch pit by the fence. We ignored the fruit that fell. “They’re in our yard,” Dad said. “They’re dirty.” I would turn the unused orbs into little grenades. I stuffed them with M-80s and Black Cats and sent them blasting through the yard at night. On Saturday morning, Dad mowed it all under his tractor, fresh, rotten, or charred. The four-wheeled lawn mower spit avocado seeds out with a pop, and sent mango peels flying. The house was equally ignored. It had been built of brick in the 1930s; we moved in and never touched a thing. We let the hedges grow, and watched the yellow walls fade to powder. The front of the house was hidden by a ficus that was suffocating in vines. From the street, the only signs of real life were our cars, a covered boat in the carport, and our mailbox—its little red flag folded obediently downward.

  One day, while playing alone, I heard the laughter of two girls in the neighboring yard. They were in a little wooden house, built between two tree branches. “I see you!” I called. The girls fell quiet. They could not see me, and so I made my way over, barefoot, to a patch of dirt between our yards. I asked if I could come up and see their tree house.

  “Boys aren’t allowed,” the younger girl shouted down.

  “Why not?” I asked, too young to understand.

  “Because, those are the rules,” the older sister added.

  “Can I climb your other trees?”

  There was a brief pause. “Maybe.”

  Then, the younger voice: “Not this one!”

  I began walking along the top of the stone fence between our yards, boasting about how I could climb any tree, anything at all. The two sisters came down. Dana, the younger, had freckled cheeks and wore ponytails. Melanie was a delicate brunette, my age, with long hair and a perfect smile—but there was something else: she was wearing one green and one white shoe, striped pants, a yellow shirt, a blue denim jean jacket, and a teal bandanna wrapped around her arm. I wanted to make a joke, but she was keeping too careful an eye on me.

  “Pick any tree. I bet I can climb it,” I said, gazing at all the trees in her yard. She picked an oak tree some twenty feet away.

  Pointing, she said: “Okay, there’s one.”

  I ran to the foot of a tree that was twice as wide as the telephone pole that stood between our yards. There were no branches that I could reach with a leap. There were no knots in the trunk. I didn’t even know where to begin.

  Melanie looked at me with a smile, her hand on her hip. She must have thought this was fun. After hugging the tree for a handful of seconds, I let go. My struggle made Melanie laugh at me. I stepped away, shaking my fingers out. That’s how my first childhood crush began. I had found someone as smart as I was daring. For a moment we were aware of our equality. Then I ran over to the fence, and back to my yard, to show her how high I could climb in one of my own trees.

  She followed me to the fence but did not cross it. Dana stayed back too, and so I was stuck there again on t
hat stone fence, balancing. Then I realized that I could reach the telephone cables suspended down the length of our yards. At the back corner of our lot there was one of the ubiquitous wooden poles that carried the weight of these black cables as they led from house to house. Dana told me not to, but I did it. I grabbed hold of the electrical cable and hung. The rubber housing was as thick as my grip. I swung, asking Melanie to join me when Dana ran inside. Soon, Mr. Ortiz came out to see what was happening. When he saw me standing about with his daughter, the telephone cable hanging down between our yards, he knew what had happened. I could have killed his daughter.

  Mr. Ortiz remained calm as he said, “Don’t you ever do that again!” I heard him. It was a true reprimand. He didn’t raise his arm like my father did, and I didn’t fear that he would hit me. Then he told his daughters to go inside. He said I needed to go back home too—to think about this. I did exactly that. I crept home, listening to all the voices in my head while my newly unemployed father lay facedown on the carpet, asking me to scratch his back.

  In a few weeks, the event at the Ortiz house had been forgotten, and I was again allowed over to meet the girls. Mary Anne, their mother, opened the front door when I rang the bell. She introduced me to Melanie and Dana as if it were the first time. Soon I was coming over every day, eager to play. They were happy children, and I was desperate to absorb some of their energy. It was in their timing, in the way they allowed each other to talk, in the way they heard each other through. It wasn’t dumb, it was serious.