The Forgetting Time: A Novel

by Sharon Guskin

  Then one day he was standing outside throwing a tennis ball against the shed and the cat was walking by on the fence and it looked at him. He felt it through his whole body, the cat looking right at him. Nobody looked at him like that lately. Not right in the eyes like that. The invisible man, that’s what he felt like sometimes. The high school was three times as big as his middle school had been and nobody paid much attention to freshmen anyway and he had no friends there since they had sold their good house and moved across town to this crappy rental. All his friends were at the other high school. He wasn’t picked on, but he found himself alone in the afternoons more often than not, doing his homework and playing his video games and throwing the ball over and over against the shed.

  The next day he went out there to throw the ball again and the cat was there on the fence, and he brought it a bowl of milk and the cat came right over and lapped it up.

  So he did it the next day and then the day after that, until the cat showed up when it saw him coming through the back door, like the cat was his. One time he was standing there and it rubbed right by him. He could feel its body pressing against his leg. Its coat was matted and he was nervous about touching it. It might have fleas or something. It was making a little noise. Purring. The feeling went right up his calf through his whole body. It made his whole body hum.

  Then that Saturday he woke up late and saw the cat out there and when he poured the milk in the bowl he heard a shout.

  “What are you doing?”

  He glanced up and saw his dad looking right at him. He was sitting there in the living room, one shoe in his hand, his face red.

  Paul was so startled his hand shook and the milk spilled over the side of the bowl and spread across the table, falling off the wood, making a pond on the linoleum.

  “I said, what are you doing?”

  He looked up. It was the usual scene. His mom was reading on the sofa, his little brother arranging his baseball cards on the floor in front of the TV set, his dad watching the news from his chair—only he wasn’t looking at the news. He was still looking at him.

  It was like being in the dark and someone turns on the lights too bright. He watched the milk puddle grow on the floor.

  “Cleaning up,” he said.

  He got a kitchen cloth and mopped it all up. He hoped his dad would leave him alone again. Paul licked his lips. His dad was still staring at him.

  “You’re drinking milk from a bowl now?”

  “No.”

  “So why are you doing that?”

  He looked at his dad’s bare feet, resting on the ottoman. The ugliest feet he’d ever seen, the toes were all swollen from arthritis and having to stand every day in his good shoes. In the old days he used to make coffee for his mom and then leave in the morning whistling while they were eating breakfast, and he’d sleep in on the weekends and maybe watch a game on TV, but these days on Saturdays he was up before the rest of them with his feet up on the ottoman, shining his shoes. Now his dad’s eyes were squinting out at him, two red slits in his heavy gray face, as if it was Paul’s fault that his life had worked out this way and he had to stand there all day trying to sell stereos to people who only wanted speakers for their iPods.

  “For the cat.”

  “We don’t have a cat,” his dad said.

  “There’s a cat out there.”

  His dad sat up now in the chair.

  “You think it’s your cat? That cat’s got nothing to do with you. That’s not your cat. You think I’m gonna feed you and a cat, too? You can go get a job and pay for the milk yourself. Then you can get a goddamn cat.”

  “He’s in school,” his mom said from behind her book on the couch. “That’s his job.”

  “Well, he ought to do better then.”

  “He’s doing fine.”

  He could feel his dad starting up again. He looked at the wall. Lately it didn’t take much to start him up. “How is a C in gym fine? How do you even get a C, if you show up, unless you’re a total wuss?”

  His mom glanced up, as if she was annoyed at having to interrupt her reading. She was always reading these true-crime books with terrible photos in the inserts. “It’s only freshman year. Give him a break, Terrance. He’s not like you.”

  His dad had been a wrestling champion when he was in high school. They had kept the trophies on a shelf in the old house. He didn’t know where they were now, though. His mom had thrown most of that stuff out.

  His father swiped at his shoe with the polish. “I’ll say. He’s a fucking disappointment.”

  Paul didn’t say anything. At first he had thought his dad was talking about the guy on the TV, some senator talking to the newscaster, but then he realized his dad was talking about him.

  “Terrance…,” his mother said, but she said it really weakly. It was like that one word used up all her energy. She didn’t have much to begin with. When she was home from working nights at Denny’s she liked to do a lot of nothing.

  His dad snorted. “Like we have money for a cat.” He looked back over at the news.

  Paul finished cleaning up the kitchen and went into his room and shut the door. He turned on his PlayStation and hunted down the peasants one by one, obliterated them with his tongues of fire.

  After a while he reached the next level and still felt that jumpy feeling inside him. When he went outside his room they were all gone. His dad had gone to work and his mother must have taken Aaron out to a playground or something. He stood still for a moment, breathing in the empty house. He turned the TV on, looking for a baseball game or something to focus his mind, but there was nothing. He opened the fridge, but there were none of the yogurts he liked in there. He kept telling her to get them and she kept buying the other kind. There was no soda either.

  “We’ve got to tighten our belts now,” she’d said.

  Fucking disappointment.

  He drank one of his dad’s beers. He thought maybe it’d make him happy and relaxed like it did sometimes for his dad, but instead it made him feel queasy and light-headed. He ambled into his parents’ bedroom. He opened some drawers and looked at his mom’s underwear and then he closed them fast. He squatted by the bed and pulled out the rifles from underneath. His dad kept them in their original boxes. They weren’t supposed to touch them, but he liked to look at them sometimes when he was alone. When he was younger his dad used to take him out in the woods for target practice. “Nice one, Pauly!” he’d say when he hit a can, and he’d reach out and ruffle his hair. He’d do stuff like that with him all the time when he was a little kid.

  His dad used to hunt, but he’d heard his mom say once that his dad was too hungover these days to shoot anything.

  Paul took the lids carefully off the boxes and he reached out and stroked the metal. They were beautiful.

  He pulled one of them out of its box. He wanted to feel it again in his hands, to remember what it felt like to hold that kind of power. He thought it would feel good to fire it. It might relieve all the pressure in his head and the weird beery feeling in his stomach. To shoot at the target on a tree and imagine his father’s face. Fucking disappointment. When he had tried so hard in his new school and gotten mostly Bs and even an A in biology. He picked some bullets from the box under the bed and he tucked the rifle under his shirt and he headed out the back door.

  He passed through the hole in the fence and into the cornfields. There was an old dirt road that snaked through them and eventually skirted the woods. It was a fine spring day and it felt good to walk along the road with the corn rising on either side of him, feeling the rifle against his stomach. His whole body began to tingle with excitement. He was thinking how it was a damn shame none of his friends was around to see him holding the rifle when he heard a squeak of wheels on dirt and saw a boy wobbling fast toward him on his Schwinn, his hands raised a foot above the handlebars, a crazy grin on his face, like he knew his mom would kill him if she saw him riding fast like that with no hands.

  The boy sl
owed up when he saw him and put his hands back on to steer out of his way.

  Paul had seen him around the neighborhood and had even played a pickup game of baseball with him once in Lincoln Park. He was Aaron’s age but he was all right; he was a really good pitcher, for a nine-year-old. Aaron always talked about how he played up with the twelve-year-olds. He was black, like a lot of the kids around this neighborhood, which made Paul like him better, somehow, though he didn’t know why. The boy rode right by him on the bike and nodded at him (why couldn’t this kid have been his brother instead of Annoying Aaron?) and he thought, well, why not? It wasn’t like showing a friend but it was better than nothing. He was tired of being alone all the time. Tommy was his name.

  “Hey! Tommy,” he called out.

  Tommy had passed him; he put his feet down and looked back at him.

  “Wanna see something?”

  Tommy wheeled back a bit and looked at him over the handlebars like he thought it might be a trick. “What kind of thing?”

  “It’s really cool. Come here.” Tommy got off the bike and walked over to Paul. “You can’t tell Aaron. If you tell Aaron I’ll know and you’ll be sorry.”

  “I won’t.”

  This wasn’t such a good idea, Paul thought. If he told Aaron, his brother would rat on him for sure and he’d get in big trouble. But Tommy was waiting for him to make good on his promise. What kind of a loser would he be if he backed out now? He’d be the laughingstock of the whole neighborhood.

  Paul edged the top of the rifle higher and higher until it poked up over his collar. “Look-ee here.”

  “Wow. That is cool.” Tommy seemed suitably impressed. “That yours?”

  He grinned. He liked this boy. He was a damn fine kid. “Yep. Genuine .54-caliber Renegade. I’m doing target practice. Want to take a shot?”

  “I don’t know.” Tommy’s face wavered. He grinned and then he grimaced like he couldn’t decide. Paul could almost read his mind: my mom wouldn’t like it, he was thinking. For some reason this made Paul want him to come even more.

  “Come on. Onetime offer. Ends today.”

  “I’m going to Oscar’s.”

  “Come on. Just for a minute. I won’t tell anyone. I’ll bet you’ve never tried it before.”

  Tommy’s face turned up to him with this weird look, like he wanted Paul to tell him the right thing to do. Like he really wanted to go to his friend’s house but he also really wanted to try the gun and he couldn’t decide which person to be.

  “You’re probably a good shot, too, what with your pitching and all.”

  He knew that would do it and it did. “Well … okay. Just one shot.” And Tommy set his bike aside by the low wall of corn and they walked together down the road and into the woods.

  * * *

  His dad always used to bring a piece of cardboard with a bull’s-eye on it when they went out to target practice, but he hadn’t thought to bring that with him. They had gone shooting once at a place in the woods where there was an old well with a bucket swinging from the top and some trash around from when hippies and bikers used to hang out in that part of the woods.

  “Hey, Tommy, watch this.”

  He grabbed a soda bottle and set it up on the well. He picked up the gun and felt its weight in his hands and looked through the viewfinder and without thinking took a shot. The recoil almost knocked him down but aiming it wasn’t so different from one of his video games.

  “Hey!” Tommy said. “Good one.”

  He looked on the ground and saw that he had hit the bottle right off that old well. The not thinking part was the part that had done it. Anytime he thought too much about anything he messed it up.

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  All the video games must have really helped with his hand-eye coordination. His dad was always giving him a hard time about playing them, but if he could see him now he wouldn’t call him a wuss at all. Except that he would kill him for handling his gun.

  “Can you set one up for me?” he asked Tommy.

  “Okay.” Tommy ran back out there and set up another bottle on the well. Really nice kid.

  He aimed at the bottle and knocked that one over, too. It was amazing. Two for two.

  The boy ran back to him breathlessly.

  “You’re good at this.”

  Tommy was looking up at him like he had just single-handedly won the marksman championship of the world.

  “You think I can do it again?”

  Tommy nodded. “Sure you can, Pauly. But can I have a turn next?” The boy was itching to get his hands on the rifle and show what he could do. Paul wondered if the boy would be a better marksman than he was. It was possible. “Just one more,” Paul said.

  Tommy put another bottle up on the stone well and stood back.

  Paul aimed at the bottle and then moved his aim to the old half-rusted bucket glinting above it in the sun. He thought of his dad’s face saying “fucking disappointment” as he squeezed the trigger. He heard a sharp ding of metal as the bullet hit and bounced off. Ha!

  The bucket was swinging on its rope. Try that, kid, he thought.

  “I did it!” He turned to the boy. He was excited. “Three for three,” he was saying, but the boy wasn’t there. He was lying flat in the dirt.

  Tommy didn’t move. There was a weird red splash on his back.

  Paul looked around him. The forest was completely still. There was nobody there. There weren’t even any birds singing. It was a warm, clear day. It was as if nothing had happened. He closed his eyes and wished that he could go back fifteen seconds to before he had aimed at the bucket, but when he opened them the boy was still lying on the ground.

  Why couldn’t he have aimed at the bottle and not the pail? Nothing would have ricocheted from the bottle. The bottle would have smashed.

  He let the current of that thought carry his mind for a period of time he had no sense of (a minute, an hour?) as if by surrendering to it he could remain there, in the past. But the present asserted itself at last in his dry mouth and the heat beating down on his head. There was no taking it back. He was here. Tommy’s body was there. His life was ruined. He was probably going to spend the rest of it in prison. There was nothing anymore to look forward to. He couldn’t be a veterinarian, or anything at all.

  It was unreal. His life was over because of the body lying there. But if the body wasn’t there, then his life wouldn’t be over, and would go on as before.

  He closed his eyes and opened them and closed them again. But every time he opened his eyes the body was still lying there and he could hardly stand to look at it.

  How could your whole life end so quickly? One moment it was there before you, not perfect, but yours, and the next it was gone. He put the gun down on the ground. He couldn’t wrap his mind around it.

  He hadn’t meant to kill Tommy, but nobody would believe him. They’d probably think he was a racist ’cause Tommy was black. His dad was going to murder him. He’d strangle him with his bare hands. His mom would never talk to him again.

  But what if he could make the body disappear? That boy’s life was over. He hadn’t meant to kill him, but he was dead now. But why should Paul’s life be over, too? He didn’t want to lose his life, he realized. It hadn’t seemed very good to him an hour ago but right now he wanted it back more than anything.

  He picked up Tommy’s body and carried it to the well. It was lighter than he’d thought it would be and it was easy to tumble it over into the brackish water. He heard it splash. He looked at the dirt where the boy had been but there was no blood there at all or any sign that anything had happened. He stood there, next to the well, breathing heavily, trying to get his head on straight. It was done, he thought. It was over. It had never happened. He had never met up with the boy. He heard himself breathing and the barking of the dog way down the road and then he heard a splashing noise and something that sounded like a voice.

  It was the boy. Tommy. Calling out. He wasn’t dead. He was alive, in
the well, at least some part of him was. Maybe he was dying in there. Probably he was almost dead. He’d die any second.

  The voice was hoarse and feeble, calling out for help from at least twenty feet down. He could hear the splish-splash as he tread water in the well.

  Paul couldn’t bring himself to look down or to answer. The voice was wrapping itself tightly around his throat. He ran around, looking for a vine or a rope or something to pull him out with but there was nothing, no way to get someone out of something that deep, much less a person who was probably dying of a gunshot wound. He could run for help, but they were half a mile from any houses, and by the time help got there the boy would probably be dead already, and then how would he explain himself? Tommy shot himself and then threw himself down the well? He stood there, trying to figure out what he would say, what he should do, all these thoughts running through him, all the time listening to that voice that felt like it was coming from inside of his own body saying, “Help me, Pauly! Help me! Lemme out! Lemme out! Lemme out!” and then just “Mama! Mama! Mama!” and then, finally—nothing.

  It was over. After a long time had passed he peered into the well and saw the same dark green dirty water that had always been there. The sun was still shining. He picked up his father’s rifle and the bullets and ran back through the woods and down the road between the cornfields and kept running, past Tommy’s bike, until he got to his own house. He put his dad’s gun back in its box and slid it under the bed, drank another one of his dad’s beers, and watched TV. It’s over, he thought.

  By night the police were knocking on every door in the neighborhood, and his mother went out with the others looking through the fields and the woods. By the next morning he was seeing Tommy’s face grinning at him on every pole and storefront downtown. They drained the swimming pond on the other side of the fields. There was a sighting of Tommy in Kentucky, but it was nothing. They took the computer teacher at the elementary school in for questioning, but he came back to work. Paul waited for them to find Tommy in the well, but nothing happened.