THE LAST BOY

by ROBERT H. LIEBERMAN

  “To say the least,” agreed Miss Francis. “Every time I turned around he was gone. You couldn’t keep that boy in the classroom. From that first day, Matthew was like a caged animal. You could almost see him literally panting for air. Craving to get out. That's, of course, why his mother was sitting there. I’d turn my back, he’d be out the door, and she’d catch him and drag him right back in.

  “But Mrs. Roland was a working woman. She couldn’t sit there forever. After a couple of weeks, she thought she would try to go back to the luncheonette. I even suggested it.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I was alone with Matthew. Thirty-one children and Matthew. It was an almost impossible situation to handle. I had to teach a class—not neglect the other children—and also attempt to deal with him.” Miss Francis bit her lip.

  “Matthew tried everything. Even climbed out of windows. Going to the lunchroom, I’d have to hold his hand to make sure he didn’t break away. I certainly couldn’t let him go to the boys’ room unaccompanied. I used to have to call Mr. Carpenter, the gym teacher.”

  “Where was he going?”

  “Into the air. Outside.”

  “Like Daniel,” remarked Tripoli, nodding to himself.

  She took a long breath.“You have to understand. I was exceedingly young then. Fresh out of teachers’ college, where in those days they emphasized discipline in the classroom. I was beside myself. I had a conference with Matthew's mother in the principal's office. ‘Please,’ she begged us,‘don’t give up on my Matthew. If he doesn’t go to school, how's he ever going to make a life in this world?’”

  “I kept him after school for hours—which, of course, only made matters worse.” Miss Francis began to pace the white carpet as she spoke.“I made him sit still right in front of me while I graded papers and prepared lesson plans. Mrs. Roland, at her wits’ end, resorted to spanking the poor child. Between us, we kept Matthew imprisoned—yes, that's what we did.” Her eyes brimmed with tears. “Excuse me,” she said and blew her nose.

  Flossie Francis took back the photo and stared at it for the longest moment, then turned to look back at her visitor.

  “I remember the day he disappeared. The hour. He had just tried to crawl out of the window again, and I had caught him by the tail of his shirt and pulled him back into the classroom. The other children were laughing and I fed their laughter, asking them what kind of animals climb out of windows and up trees.‘Monkeys!’ they were all shouting.‘Monkeys!’” she raised her own voice, and Tripoli could almost hear the cries of the children.

  “‘And what do we do with monkeys?’ I asked, hanging onto Matthew and dragging him toward my desk. I was terribly angry. So angry that I did something unconscionable. I took some rope, tied it around his waist, and leashed him to my desk.”

  Her hands were trembling, and she clasped them together in an attempt to control them.

  “By the time I finished with him, Matthew really did look like an animal. A beaten, hurt creature. He had the most pitiful look on his face. But at that moment I just didn’t care, didn’t see. Didn’t hear his whimper. Didn’t listen!

  “After he was gone, a great but inexplicable sadness descended on our town. It felt as if something vital were suddenly missing— and, of course, it was. His mother died a few years later, still a young woman. I don’t know if you believe in broken hearts?”

  “I’ve seen it happen,”Tripoli said with compassion.

  “Matthew had a gift for us, but we just weren’t ready for it. It was only much later, after he was gone, that I understood the extent of his message.”

  “Yes?”

  “Even then, we lived in a tumultuous world. There was a world war going on. We were all too busy, life was too noisy for us to listen. To listen to each other, to the natural world around us, and— most importantly—to listen to our own hearts. Tell me, Mr. Tripoli, what could be more simple or true than that?”

  Danny was way ahead of Rosie, pushing the carriage with the twins over the bed of black cinders.

  “Let me at least give you a break for a couple of hours,” Rosie had said when she rang up Molly at the office. Molly had hesitated, but had finally given in.

  They went south from the Spencer Road and ended up on the old, abandoned railroad bed that switchbacked up the hill.

  “I wish there were trains again,” Danny said when Rosie caught up with him and took hold of the handlebar.

  “Oh?”

  “Well, there used to be trains here,” said Danny.“And they were nice.”

  She looked at him puzzled.“Now when did you ever ride on a train?”

  “I didn’t!” he laughed.“But this is a good way to go. You know,” he said, leaning into the carriage to check on the babies as they slept. “You can follow these and get just about anywhere. And no one can see you.” He turned to gaze up at her.“It's like you’re invisible.”

  “And you know your way around, huh?”

  “Sure we do.”

  “We?” asked Rosie as they pushed on. “You mean the old Hermit?”

  “Uh-huh. He knows everything. And the others do, too.”

  chapter twenty

  On his return flight from Florida, Tripoli got stranded in the Newark Airport. It was hardly the first time he got stuck on the last leg home. The airline kept Tripoli and the six other Ithaca passengers waiting in a congested and sweltering lounge as planes taxied noisily past the open gates. The room was low ceilinged and smelled of kerosene, stale pizza, and sweat. He picked up a USA Today that someone had discarded. There was a front page story on a vast forest burning in Thailand.

  Tripoli's thoughts turned to the weeks and months he had spent looking for Danny. The leads and dead ends. He remembered how he had fallen in love with Molly. That first time they made love— how sweet it had felt in those bitterest of times. He recalled the raid in the forest, that look of recognition in the old Hermit's eyes as they made fleeting contact. And he thought about the people in Watertown who had been touched by Matthew—and about Flossie Francis. It was only when Matthew was gone, that we—no, that I—began to comprehend just what we had all lost.

  He stared out at the expanse of shimmering tarmac and the long lines of planes that stood idling in the August sun, and he wondered…wondered if the legacy had been broken, if that accumulated wisdom could still be salvaged. If Daniel could still be made ready? Was it all there in the books? “What's up?” asked Curly Donahue as he hunted through his big ring of keys. It was still early in the morning; he’d only had his first cup of coffee, and here was Tripoli, standing over him, hustling him.

  The books were locked away in the Evidence Room, and Curly was the man in charge. Having joined the department as a young officer back in the early sixties, he had been the one to oversee the station's security for the last thirty-five years. Except for a couple of wisps of hair, Curly was bald. Even his eyebrows were all but absent.

  As he unlocked the cage, he stopped and turned. “You’ll bring them back, right?”

  “No,” said Tripoli,“I’m going to eat them.”

  “They can’t leave this building. Not till the investigation is over.”

  “Will you give me the fucking books?”

  Tripoli took them up the stairs and out the station house door.

  The pages felt like parchment but were not made of animal skin; they had the texture of a wood product yet were not paper. Tripoli remembered seeing some material like it once at an exhibition at the university museum. Tapa cloth, it was called, and it was made by the Polynesians from the bark of mulberry trees. The leaves of these ancient volumes sitting on Tripoli's kitchen table had the exact same feel. Tissue thin, yet strong.

  Outside, the wind suddenly picked up and began whistling around his isolated farmhouse, rocking the trees as the sky darkened and flashes of electrical discharge illuminated the distant hills. Oblivious to the weather, he hunched over the books that sat nestled in the small ring of yellow light spilling
from his lamp.

  The bindings on the books—and there were five of them in all—were hand-sewn. Each gathering had been stitched together, then connected to make the whole. Tripoli's father had been a collector of old books. What a pity that he was no longer alive, he would have relished seeing these.

  The five books were all of different lengths. The first was the shortest, a little more than one hundred pages. The third was the longest, almost three hundred pages. Some of the entries in the books were simply a couple of paragraphs long, others went on for pages. Using the differences in penmanship and ink colors, Tripoli tried to gauge the number of different authors who had made entries into the text and complex tabulations, and lost count after three dozen. There could easily have been fifty authors. If one attributed to each scribe thirty years of entries, that made the books more than one thousand years old. Perhaps two thousand!

  Tripoli began on what he guessed to be the first volume. It was not easy going. The books were in a multiple of languages, both ancient and modern. They were written in what looked to be Hebrew and Greek, English that spanned the gamut from old to medieval to modern. There were even portions written in Chinese-looking characters, and other sections in what might be Sanskrit.

  He concentrated on the portions that were in English. They were handwritten in a florid style that was difficult to decipher, and the language was old-fashioned and strange.

  The first book appeared to be about the world, the greater world, not just the sun and planets but other galaxies and solar systems. There were drawings of orbits, endless charts with numbered entries. Interspersed through the book were elaborate illustrations adorned with gold leaf and colored with hues of lapis lazuli and the most dazzling of red-orange pigments. There were pages covered with what could have been mathematical formulas, though the symbols were like none that he had ever seen; and diagrams, too, plans and schematics for what looked like machines and odd contraptions.

  Once Tripoli started, everything around him seemed to fall away; the day vanished into night, then dawn broke through with its early, pink light.

  Slowly, very slowly, he began to understand—or thought he understood. Here, locked away in these precious books, was a virtual treasure trove of accumulated wisdom, a merging of philosophy and science, psychology and engineering. Whoever these anonymous scribes had been, they had attempted to come to grips with the mysteries that had bedeviled human beings in all times, the very meaning of life—or, at any rate, how to invest life with meaning. They had come to understand how one could live in harmony with nature, both receiving her bounty and returning it in kind; how to live a fulfilling and productive life free from stress and disease, exhaustion and despair. Somehow it all fit together, worked together, the practical and the theoretical, art and technology, music and poetry dovetailed into mathematics and physics to create a single body of knowledge that offered a unified theory of life. And here it was, sitting on his kitchen table. If only he could truly penetrate these works, do more than pick up intelligible fragments from what to him were all but hieroglyphics. If only he could plumb their depths, tap into this enlightenment.

  Tripoli pushed on through the next day, breaking only to give the animals some water and fresh fodder, reading until his eyes burned and his head ached. Jumping ahead to the more recent volumes, he discovered small inserts attached in strategic places where gaps had been left in the text. When he ran his fingers over the surface of these attachments, he discovered that the paper was different from the surrounding pages, crisper, newer. The ink, too, seemed fresher. When he put his nose close to the paper, it smelled of bark and berries. The notations contained some kind of ideograms commingled with numbers. One of the images looked like that of a little boy. It was Danny, he was sure. The old man had been keeping a record of Danny's visit, a log of his progress, plotting the trajectory of their encounter.

  That evening as he wandered the fields and forests surrounding his home, he thought about the ancient texts. Here, distilled for the reader, was what poets have written about, musicians composed, and artists painted. The more he thought about it, the simpler it all became. It was what Daniel was always speaking about. If you listen, you can hear. And if you can hear the natural world outside yourself, you begin to love it, to get an inkling of what love actually is, come to grips with the core of existence, come to care about the planet, other creatures, other people. For that, the books seemed to say to Tripoli, was the meaning of life, and societies that failed to heed these meanings were ultimately doomed.

  As he continued to plow his way through the books, sifting back and forth between the pages of the old scribes and those of recent insertion, laying one volume aside while cross-referencing yet another, it was obvious to Tripoli that the people who had worked on these books were not superstitious, fumbling amateurs, but surprisingly advanced. They spoke of how to use the Earth's renewable sources of energy; they had proposed ways of harnessing the wave action of large bodies of waters, devised means of tapping the heat reservoir that was the ocean, appeared to have built solar collectors that were connected to devices that were capable of storing electricity in very small and transportable packages. These were certainly not a people opposed to innovation. On the contrary, they were prophets and scholars who recognized the value of technology but also realized that a society that became too highly centralized, too dependent on vast quantities of energy, and too wasteful was ultimately programmed for catastrophic collapse.

  Though Tripoli could but scratch the surface, he now thought he knew why Daniel had disappeared. Daniel was an integral part of this legacy of prophets, the newest disciple to be indoctrinated and trained and granted the wisdom of this succession of sages. Once mature, he too would be charged with the responsibility of carrying forth this knowledge and making salvation available to the greater world when it was ready—ready to listen.

  For some still mysterious reason, Daniel had interrupted his studies to return to the modern world. Or maybe it wasn’t an interruption? Perhaps, Tripoli speculated, this was an integral part of his learning: perhaps he had been sent back to the modern world to learn, gather information about the new technologies and devices so that they, too, could be integrated into the old? Whatever the purpose, killing the old Hermit had broken the chain, disrupted the continuity. Yet here were these priceless books, the awesome legacy to be passed on to the next visionary, now in Tripoli's hands.

  “I’ve got a question for you,”Tripoli said.

  Outside, the air was perfectly still and the last days of August were brutally hot. The gardens around Ithaca that weren’t scrupulously watered had all but dried up. In the vineyards along the shores of the lake, the grapes that would be squeezed for wine were few and far between. Only the fruit trees in the orchards scattered outside of town seemed to be faring better. With their deep roots, they were still able to tap into deep levels of ground water. Yet, though there was fruit to be had, many of the late varieties seemed stunted. The summer had turned exceptionally dry and every day it felt as though it were going to rain—yet it never did.

  “I’ve got a question,”Tripoli repeated. His face was covered with the beginnings of a beard and his eyes were bloodshot and heavy-lidded.

  He had found the old priest in his sacristy, hanging up his vestments. Although he hadn’t seen Tripoli in years, the priest didn’t seem at all surprised by the sudden visit. In the intervening years, his thinning hair had turned snow white and his eyebrows had grown long and bushy. Sticking out of his ears were tufts of white hair that looked like puffs of cotton. Tripoli followed him as he shuffled back to his office. Tripoli hadn’t stepped into this church since his wedding to Kim.

  “You’re a man of wisdom, a real scholar, and I figured maybe you’re the right person to ask.”

  “I’m flattered, Lou, but I wouldn’t go that far.” The old man laughed. Although his face was deeply furrowed and his features sagged, his eyes were a clear, bright blue.

  “Enlightenme
nt,”Tripoli said. His hands were knotted together and he shook them as he searched for the right words. “How long does it take?”

  “Take?”

  “Till someone is ready?”

  “Ready?”

  Tripoli struggled to formulate his question.“I mean if you look back in history at the prophets.”

  “Oh…” said the priest, sinking down into his chair.“That's quite a question.”

  Tripoli stood hovering over him, waiting.

  The old man drew a long, deep breath. He studied his own hands and brought his furry brow together in contemplation. “Well,” he said finally glancing up at Tripoli, “If you look at the prophets…if you read the Bible or the Koran or the Bahgavad Gita, it's really unclear whether they gained enlightenment in a single moment or over a period of years.”

  “Christ. Mohammed. Buddha sitting under his tree,” persisted Tripoli.“How long did it take?”

  “Forty days in the desert or a lifetime under a tree. As long as it takes,” said the priest with a chuckle. Then seeing the look on Tripoli's face asked,“You’re not kidding about this, are you?”

  Tripoli didn’t respond, but pushed on. “When I say the name John, who do you think of?”

  “The Bible's full of Johns. And there are numerous Popes named John. John? Well, I think of John the Evangelist. John the Divine— if you’re curious about the mystical. And, of course, John the Baptist comes to mind.”

  “Oh!” exclaimed Tripoli.“Yes. I should have thought of that.”

  “I don’t get it,” said the priest, smiling with mystification.“And why all these questions?”

  “Well, I’ve been reading these books.”

  “What books?”

  “Well, just certain old books I found,” replied Tripoli evasively. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of translucent paper onto which he had traced the inscription he had found at the very head of the first volume, on what might have been the title page.“I know you’re a biblical scholar and.…Can you read this?” he asked, handing the sheet across the desk.