by Dale Peck
I’m bringing this up now because I originally started this chapter by saying that the week Ty disappeared was the longest of my life. But really, it was the second longest. The entire time he was gone, though, I couldn’t help but think he’d never come back, just like I’d believed my mom was never going to get out of the hospital. But it was worse than that. Because my mom did get out. She came home. But once she was home, a part of me wished she’d never left the hospital, because the only reason she returned was to say goodbye. To die. And I know the two situations are completely different, but after Ty showed up again I found myself swamped by those same feelings. The feeling that I only had him for a limited time. That I had to maximize every single second. Had to hold on with all my might, before he slipped away again. Slipped away for good.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the past has a way of catching up with you. I mean, duh, right? Paging Dr. Freud! But sometimes the past is more present than other times. In the last six weeks of the semester—the last six weeks before the State Essay Contest—the ghosts of my pre-Kansas existence seemed to dance before my eyes, and sometimes it was hard to tell who I was looking at. No, that’s not quite it. I always knew who I was looking at, but sometimes I forgot who was doing the looking. Who I was: sixteen-year-old Sprout Bradford, well-coifed gay teen on the make, as opposed to eleven- or twelve-year-old Daniel B., praying fervently to a god he didn’t believe in to save his mom. To bring her back. It didn’t help matters that Ty was the first person since my mom to call me by my given name. We’d be in the middle of things when one whispered “Daniel” would knock me out of orbit, and I’d fall back into that awful year and a half after my mom’s diagnosis. The whispers. The smells. The endless hours in the waiting room.
“Endless,” I call them. But of course they ended.
I dunno. Maybe it happened because, once the whole physical thing with Ty worked itself out, my mind was free to look elsewhere. Or maybe it was just because, well, we needed a place to get physical. To have sex. I only had the car on Saturdays, remember, which meant we had to find a rendezvous closer to home the other six days of the week. Someplace secluded, but offering certain, shall we say, horizontal amenities. Ty’s property was out, as was the Regiers’—frosty fields and the threat of being disemboweled by ostriches don’t exactly set a romantic mood, and plus Ty said his dad had taken to wandering the Regiers’ land with a rifle, ostensibly to hunt deer or pheasant or turkey (or ostriches), but Ty was pretty sure he was really just looking for evidence of what his son’d been getting up to the last couple of months. That left our place. The trailer was no good. My dad went to Mrs. Miller’s pretty much every night, but he was usually still home when school let out, and then too he sometimes popped in because he’d “forgotten” something or other—a pretty lame excuse, but he was my dad, so what could I do? The only alternative was the forest, and, though there were any number of trees that would’ve worked in a pinch, there was one place that made more sense than any other, and it was high time I showed it to Ty.
And, I suppose, to you.
“I call it the nidus.”
“Okay.” Ty peered at the shadowy outlines barely visible through several layers of moldy plastic.
“Nidus means nest.”
“Sure.” He was running his fingers over the plastic now, trying to find a seam.
“Because, you know, it’s kind of like a nest.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
“And also cuz I’m a geek.”
Ty turned just long enough to give me a little kiss. He used only the right side of his mouth, to avoid pressing on the scab on the left. “Yeah, I got that too.” He found the flap then, pulled it open; a long low whistle plumed from his mouth in a foggy cone. “Jesus, Daniel.”
So, uh, you remember the things that hadn’t fit in the trailer? The sofa, the dining room table, etc., etc.? I think I told you my dad left them in the front yard, like it was our second home or something, albeit one without walls or floor or roof. He even slept there on warm nights—said he was going to spend some time in “the summer house, har har.” (His hars, not mine. Really.) Anyway, maybe his joke inspired me, or maybe I just got tired of looking at all his crap, but a month or so after we moved in I decided to drag everything into the forest: sofa, table, three mismatched chairs, the bottom half of the china cabinet (the top never made it off Long Island), the long dresser that’d been in my bedroom, the tall dresser that’d been in my parents’, a big Navy trunk that’d belonged to my father’s father, a tall IKEA-style computer desk with attached shelves, and then an endless assortment of pretty much random stuff: books, dishes, lamps, clothes, board games, pictures, and, well, a lot of junk. My dad’d draped plastic dropcloths over everything to protect it from the rain, and I took these into the forest too. Tied some clothesline between a trio of tree trunks and laid the plastic over it to make this kind of bulbous opalescent tent that was practically as big as our trailer. Truth be told, it looked more like a soap bubble than a nest, a giant pearl, a crystal ball, but “nidus” had been Word of the Day on Nov. 17, 2004, and, like I told Ty, I’m a geek. And Nov. 17 had been my mom’s birthday.
He limped into the little enclosure warily. The plastic walls were as thin as, well, plastic, but the nidus still had a self-contained, almost otherworldly air about it. Moisture had collected between the layers of dropcloth, frozen now into glittering, paper-thin strips of ice that refracted the light into little rainbow raindrops. A healthy coating of mold and mildew added a greenish tint, and four years of fallen leaves mulching on the roof contributed their own dark shadows. The cumulative effect was of stepping into a cave on the bottom of the ocean, one that just happened to be furnished with the flotsam and jetsam of a suburban home. The outlines of everything in the room were softened by darkness and decay, but once your eyes had grown accustomed to the dim light, you realized it wasn’t darkness that had altered the furniture, or even exposure to the elements, but a more purposeful consciousness. I’m talking about me, of course, but as I walked into that room with Ty—the first time I’d ever entered it with another human being—I had a hard time believing I was responsible for the hallucinatory vision that swam before my eyes.
For his part, Ty seemed to have a hard time believing it wasn’t a hallucination, period. Tapping the seat with his toe, as if to make sure it would take his weight, he sat down on the sofa, wincing slightly as his bruised butt made contact. He brushed at a twig that poked from between two cushions, then realized it was actually the stem of a young tree growing up through the sofa’s innards. Realized a second later that another one grew from the opposite end. Realized that in fact there were trees and vines growing through or coiling around most of the other pieces of furniture in the room. Realized, finally, that they hadn’t just grown there. That they’d been planted. That I’d planted them, in the same way my dad had planted all those vines around our house. I could see him fighting this chain of logic—could tell the exact moment he reached the part about my dad and the vines—but all he did was look at me. His tongue worried the scab on his lip and the fading bruises under his eyes made him look tired, so tired, but he didn’t say anything.
I nodded.
He turned to face forward. The TV had been set in front of the sofa on a pair of milkcrates. (“Broadway Dairy, Bay Shore, NY,” one of them read; the other was from Idaho, where, as far as I know, no one in my family has ever gone.) The thin brown husk of bindweed spiraled around the TV’s powercord and up the purely symbolic rabbit ears I’d made from a couple of coathangers. The rabbit ears were symbolic because, one, we’d had satellite, and two, the TV had neither screen nor tube. Instead a single fat book sat inside the empty shell, its moisture-soaked pages swollen like a spoiled can of food.
“So, uh.” Ty paused to clear his throat. “Get good reception out here?”
“Little fuzzy,” I admitted. “Lot of times no picture at all.”
Ty nodded. He turned to the left, looked at the
computer on the desk. The chair was half pulled away, as though the user’d dashed to the bathroom for a pee break in the middle of an all-night IM. Flower petals and beetle shells had been glued to the keys on the keyboard, which was connected to the terminal by a length of vine, and a suspiciously symmetrical bird’s nest sat in the shell of the empty monitor. On closer inspection, you saw that the nest was made of sparkly plastic swizzle sticks, No. 2 pencils, and something that looked like the inner filament of old-fashioned cassette tapes.
“Spend a lot of time surfing the web, do you?”
I shrugged. “Not so much, really. You ask me, the internet’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
Ty nodded again, continued looking around the nidus. On the ground, moldy books had been buried spine up in a circle around the perimeter of the room, as if to form a ring of protection. On the ceiling, garland made from intricately knotted lengths of strips of old clothes hung from the ropes that held up the sheets of plastic. A half dozen framed pictures had been mounted to shorter and taller stakes around the room, and another dozen or so hung from the roof on lengths of twine or vine. Leaves had been glued over faces, bird bones and twigs affixed along limbs, backgrounds painted out with green sap or red pokeberry juice or the nacreous fluid that comes out of milkweed stems. Strange ceramic collages made from bits and pieces of broken dishes dotted every available flat surface: simple things, like a teapot’s spout mounted on the base of an inverted mixing bowl, or a half dozen coffee cup handles ringing a dinner plate; and then more elaborate constructions, such as a turtlelike creature, made from dozens of one- and two-inch shards with the necks of four Amstel bottles serving as legs, and several other four-legged creatures that could be identified no more specifically than as quadrupeds. There was only one attempt at a human face: a cracked white oval of dinner plate fragments studded with the circular red base of a candy dish for the mouth, a Wedgwood chariot for one eye, a ceramic Garfield head for the other, and a spiky mane of hair made from shards of Heineken bottles that looked less like grass than the teeth of a shark with serious plaque buildup.
When he’d finally taken it all in, or as much as he could process, he turned back to me.
“It’s a little, um, Through the Looking-Glass.”
I picked up one of the pottery collages. It could’ve been a fish, a sunflower, a ’57 Chevy. “I always thought Humpty Dumpty myself. You know, all the king’s horses, all the king’s men?”
“Couldn’t put Sprout’s life together again?”
“Sprout’s . . . past.” I shrugged. “Sprout’s mom.”
Ty opened his scabbed mouth, then closed it. Opened it again. Closed it again. I found myself worrying that the scab was going to rip and start bleeding, but all that came out of him was a long sigh. Grimacing slightly, he heaved himself up and took a couple of limping steps in my direction, and then held out his fists to me, knuckles up, palms down.
On Long Island we’d had a neighbor, an old man named Mr. Villanueva, who used to walk the sidewalks with one pocket full of candy, the other of quarters, and whenever he ran into a kid he would hold out his hands like this, and as Ty did now, he always said,
“Pick one.”
Every kid on the block had profited from Mr. V.’s generosity a dozen times, until a family named Smith moved in down the street when I was eight. Mrs. Smith said it was creepy for an old man to give candy to strange children (never mind that he’d known most of us since we were born) and, by the end of her first summer in the hood he’d retreated to his porch, sucking on his candies himself, and jingling a pocketful of change.
“Before my arms fall off,” Ty prompted.
I roused myself. “Um, what are my choices?”
“One of them”—he shook his right hand as he spoke—“holds an ironic comment about your atrocious lack of crafting skills, and is designed to downplay all the implications of this weird-ass little hut you’ve got going on—”
“Nidus.”
“—while the other”—he shook his left—“contains a serious inquiry into the state of your mental health, and is meant to show that I’m not, you know, completely insensitive, even if I do think this place is a little, well, freaky.”
“I call it the nidus.”
“Yeah, I’m not gonna say that, cuz I’m not a tool.” He put his hands behind his back, made movements as though he were passing the two questions back and forth so I wouldn’t know which hand either was in, then put his fists back in front of him. “The choice”—dramatic pause—“is yours.”
I stared at his hands for a moment, noticed for the first time that his knuckles were chafed and bruised. Realized with a start that he’d fought back this time. That he’d hit his dad. For some reason this shocked me more than the idea that his dad had hit him, and I looked away guiltily. And there it was. The nidus: TV, computer, altered pictures, ceramic collages, all the rest of it. My own version of bruised knuckles. Or, who knows, maybe just my own version of bruises.
I turned back to Ty. I put each of my hands on one of his, but instead of tapping one or the other I used them to pull him close to me.
“I choose this one,” I said, and planted my lips over his, and when I felt his battered hands open and reach around my back to press me against him I imagined his questions falling to the ground and breaking into little pieces, just like all those dishes I’d diligently packed when we moved from Long Island, the broken fragments of which now looked down on us with skeptical but mercifully silent expressions.
Right in the middle of things Ty got up from the sofa and limped over to the china cabinet, where the ceramic version of me stared at us with its round red polyp of a mouth and two crazy eyes.
“It’s not the eyes actually,” he said as he placed it face down on the shelf. “It’s the mouth. Looks way too much like a poo-hole.” And then, bending his knees and clasping his hands as though he were getting ready to dive off a cliff, he jumped back on top of me.
Okay, so maybe I’d done a bit more than drag the leftover furniture out into the woods and cover it with some plastic. Maybe I’d carefully cleared and leveled a plot of land between a few trees, leaving behind a few saplings and shrubs and vines to use later. Maybe I’d arranged and rearranged the furniture a few hundred times until the feng shui was exactly right. Maybe I’d trained the plants I’d left behind to grow into and around the furniture to make it seem like the various pieces had been there for decades rather than a few years, and maybe I’d spent hours on end turning dozens of family pictures into crazy collages with bird bones and feathers, leaves and flower petals, twigs, pebbles, seeds, until all those naively optimistic faces mounted atop lissome bodies had been transformed into animated Day of the Dead caricatures. And maybe I’d relied on a bit more than my dad’s drunkenness to keep me stocked with all the broken crockery I needed to make my collages. Maybe I’d broken a few dishes myself.
Maybe you figured this out already.
I swear, though, it was a long time before I realized I was actually making something. At first I was just getting our stuff out of the yard so I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore, or face the questioning, condescending looks of anyone who ventured up our driveway and saw half a house’s worth of furniture sitting on the lawn. The plastic was just a way of protecting everything, so that if my dad came to his senses one day and we moved into a real house, we wouldn’t have to start over. And if I left the occasional plant behind when I cleared the land, it wasn’t with any intention of using them, it was just because something about that particular plant had caught my imagination. One of the first things you learn in botany is that a tree spreads its branches so its leaves can absorb as much sunshine as possible, but also so it can keep the sunshine from reaching the ground beneath it, which is a good way of keeping new trees from growing up and crowding the originals out. So for a plant to manage to take root beneath the shade canopy was a fairly determined feat, and it was hard for me to just up and nix that with one good tug. And when I was dra
gging the stuff under the plastic it made more sense to have it six feet off the ground so I could move around beneath it, and then some things just naturally seemed to go here, some there, a chair flanking the sofa, say, or pushed up to the desk. But it wasn’t until a cold wet day during our first fall that I came to think of the room as anything other than a make-do attic. My dad was drunk out of his mind, and when he gets that way he starts talking to people who aren’t there—my mom, usually, or his parents, with whom he had such a bad relationship that he refuses to speak to them, or some totally random person. “I am not drunk, ossifer. I am three sheets to the wind. I am sheet-faced. As opposed to you, who has a face—like—shhh!You’ll—wake—up—Daniel!” Usually when he gets like this he goes for a walk or a drive—it’s a good bet a stump’ll show up later, or some vines’ll get planted around the house. But that day he was glued to a chair, so, since he wouldn’t leave, I had to.