by Neil Smith
In my most recent school photograph, I wear a T-shirt printed with this Albert Einstein quote: “Education is what remains after you forget what you learned at school.” In fact, I would be surprised if Mr. Plumb, our principal, called attention to this quote. I would be surprised if the school paid homage to me at all. I expect my classmates deemed me expendable. “Well, if one of us had to bite the dust, better it be Boo,” they probably said. Johnny Henzel’s death, however, must have caused plenty of sorrow, since he was a good athlete and a good artist.
I rise from our throw rug, go to the window, and push back the drapes. Because Johnny arrived late at night, he did not get a good glimpse of Town, and so I wave him over. He comes to stand beside me, and as he stares from our third-floor window, he says, “This place looks a little run-down, a little like Armpits.”
Armpits, as you know, is the derogatory name some people give to the Sandpits Apartments. It is true that Town is a land of low-rises like Sandpits. “Everything here is very plain and serviceable,” I tell Johnny.
“So it’s no land of milk and honey.”
“No, it’s not. In fact, we don’t receive either milk or honey here. Zig seems to be a strict vegetarian.”
Johnny shakes his head in disbelief. “Thelma told me we’re stuck here for fifty f*cking years,” he says. “And then we croak all over again.”
I tell him some townies even claim that, in the seconds before redeath, we age fifty years all at once.
His eyes go wide.
“I say poppycock till someone shows me proof.”
If only I had a movie camera to film fifty-year-olds in their sleep. There are so many experiments to conduct here.
“What if I fall out this window?” he says, looking down at the brittle shrubs and dandelions gone to seed in the Frank and Joe’s front lawn.
“You’ll probably survive and be carted off to the infirmary.”
I recently visited the Meg Murry Infirmary again to collect data on healing times for broken arms and legs. I explain to Johnny that because we mend quickly, some townies act irresponsibly. They ride their bicycles too fast and suffer nasty collisions.
Johnny watches people on bicycles zip by in the street below. He seems almost hypnotized by the procession. I wonder how I will adapt to his presence. I am not used to sharing my space and must already fight the urge to make his bed so it is as tidy as my own. I hope he does not leave his underwear on the floor, clutter his desk with garish knickknacks, or hang color-by-number posters on the walls.
“What happens if we kill somebody, Boo?”
I figure he is worried about getting shot again, so I say, “I doubt there are any handguns here, Johnny.”
He turns to me at the window. He is only a foot away. I prefer to keep two feet between me and another person, so I step back.
“I wonder if he’s here,” he says, looking me straight in the eye. His irises are so dark his eyes look all pupil. I know immediately whom he is referring to.
“Thelma says Zig wouldn’t let him in,” I say. “But the thought did cross my mind that maybe she is mistaken.”
“If Gunboy is here, he’ll pay the price for turning us into frigging bones in a coffin, man.”
“What price is that?” I ask.
Johnny touches a fingertip to his eyelid and then reaches over and tries to touch one of my eyelids, but I jerk away.
“An eye for an eye,” he says.
Johnny Henzel’s body back in America is not a skeleton yet: it has not been dead long enough to have decomposed fully in its grave. In a coffin, an embalmed body takes many months to break down enough to expose bones. The decay depends on the temperature, the process speeding up in hot summer months. Johnny’s eyes, being softer tissue, would rot first. Of course, if his body were mummified, decomposition would stretch over hundreds of years, and if he were buried in Alaska’s frozen tundra, scientists could dig him up in three centuries, thaw him out, and then flip through our school yearbook and easily pick out which student lay before them.
Had I died of a holey heart on an Arctic fact-finding mission and been buried in the ice, I would not mind scientists digging me up centuries later and putting me in a museum showcase as an educational exhibit. To me, spending day after day in a science museum is paradise.
At Uncle Seymour’s funeral, Mother and Father, you said you favored cremation, so I suppose you had my body cremated. Did you put my ashes in a ceramic urn and shelf it next to the Encyclopedia Americana? I hope my ashes soothe your pain. I worry about you. Mother, you are easily distracted and often forget to look both ways as you cross the highway to Clippers. And, Father, you must not start smoking Camels again. Remember Uncle Seymour’s lung cancer.
I wonder if you would be happier now if you were Christian, Buddhist, Mormon, or of any other religious persuasion that puts faith in an afterlife. Would my death be easier on you if you knew that on this Halloween, I am seated in an auditorium at the Sophie and watching a variety show put on by angels?
It is Johnny’s birthday today, but alas, birthdays are not celebrated in heaven because we are not getting any older. Here we celebrate only rebirthdays, the date we passed into Town.
Can you guess what costume I am wearing for Halloween?
Here is a hint: think of my nickname.
Yes, I am a ghost. I have a white sheet over my head with two large eyeholes cut out by Johnny. His own costume is simply a black domino mask like that worn by bank robbers or Zorro. He said our goal tonight was to disguise ourselves. He also had me clip his hair even shorter. I do not like touching people’s skin, but I can touch their hair because hair, which consists mostly of keratin protein, as you know, is dead. Barbering must be intuitive for me, because I did a crackerjack job.
We are far from the only townies in costume tonight. However, Johnny and I are disguised not only for Halloween but also because Johnny fears we might run into Gunboy. On Halloween, townies travel far and wide.
“If he is here, he won’t want us ratting him out,” Johnny said back at the Frank and Joe. “If he sees us, he could attack again. We got to get him, before he gets us.”
So now in the Sophie’s auditorium, Johnny twists his head around and scans the crowd for a brown-haired boy with ears that stick out—the boy he still sees in his nightmares in Town. (Since becoming my roommate two and a half weeks ago, he has screamed in his sleep several times. Needless to say, my insomnia is acting up again.)
“There are dozens of brown-haired boys with ears that stick out,” I tell him.
We are sitting in aisle seats so we can easily move closer to Gunboy if Johnny spots him. Our killer will be disguised as well, Johnny says. Maybe as a pirate with an eye patch, Frankenstein’s monster with fake bolts in his neck, or the Grim Reaper with a scythe (the reaper I see is carrying a toilet plunger). As you can imagine, zombies are a popular costume since we are the living dead (ha-ha). Zombies wear white face paint with their eyes circled in dusky charcoal makeup. They rub white glue (polyvinyl acetate) into their hair so it stands on end. They wear shabby jeans with tattered legs that descend to mid-calf.
The costumes are homemade because Zig does not deliver the kind of premade Halloween costumes and rubber masks sold in American department stores. Instead, he delivers rolls of fabric and sewing machines so townies can make costumes for their theater productions and Halloween parties.
Halloween is a big holiday here, on a par with New Year’s Eve. Fake blood is everywhere tonight. It is made of acrylic paint or ketchup. It drips from head wounds and runs down cheeks. It spots chests. It does not make me queasy, and even if it were real, I would not balk. Remember in sixth grade when my classmates all pricked their fingers and tested their blood type for their ABO and rhesus factor? Some students went white from queasiness. Some felt faint. I did not go white—at least not any whiter. I expected to have a rare blood type, so I was not surprised to discover I was AB+.
I spot Esther Haglund standing in the center aisle,
looking for a seat before the Halloween program begins. Her hair is styled elaborately with fancy waves hanging over her big forehead. The blouse she wears is covered in sequins. She squeezes into our row and sits in the empty seat beside me.
“Hello, Esther,” I say. “How are you doing this fine evening?”
She stares into the eyeholes in my sheet. “Is that you, Oliver?”
“Yes, I am a ghost. What are you dressed as?”
“A newbie in my dorm gave me this ghastly hairdo,” she says. “I’m an actress who plays an angel private eye on TV. I don’t remember her name. I passed back in sixty-nine, so I don’t know modern TV.”
I tell her we watched mostly PBS television at home because my mother and father claimed that the commercial stations rotted the soul. Apparently, you two can be agnostics and still use words like “soul” (I jest).
I introduce Johnny and Esther and ask Johnny if he knows the actress to whom Esther is referring.
“For f*ck sake, Boo, it’s that stupid b*tch Farrah Fawcett. Did you live under a rock, man?”
Unlike you, Father and Mother, I am not bothered by cursing. Words like “assh*le,” “sh*t,” and “c*nt” are just different rearrangements of the same twenty-six letters found in all English words. For me, “c*cksucker” is no more offensive an expression than “weed wacker” or “bumper sticker.” I do tell Johnny, however, that if people must swear, they should at least be grammatical. He should say “for f*ck’s sake” with an apostrophe and an s.
“People speak appallingly in Town,” I add. “They have no adults to serve as grammar role models.”
He looks as though he wants to shoot me in the head. “Why you always such a d*ckhead, Boo?”
“Perhaps I possess the d*ckhead gene.”
Johnny does not laugh at my joke.
I turn to Esther. “Thelma is one of the performers tonight, but she would not tell me what she will be doing. She wants it to be a surprise.”
“She’s doing a reenactment,” Esther says, rolling her big eyes under her shaggy hairdo. “So get ready for loads of pain and suffering.”
“What’s a reenactment?” Johnny asks.
“Thelma’s a gommer,” Esther says. “She’s reenacting her murder.”
Thelma Rudd is dressed as a Holstein. Her costume is a kind of padded white snowsuit spotted with black felt patches. Where in Town did she get a snowsuit? On her head is a hood with cow ears attached to the sides, one black ear and one white, but the part of the costume that draws the audience’s laughter is at groin level: the udder. The four teats look to be made of pink party balloons.
She stands at the edge of the stage, twitching her tail, which is a kind of marionette because it is attached to a string that rises into the rafters.
At the back of the stage, in the semidarkness, stand four trees. I presume they are made of wiring and papier-mâché and their leaves of green construction paper or felt. A single boy steps out from behind each trunk. The four boys stand a few yards behind Thelma with their arms behind their backs. They are big boys—tall and muscular—and look older than thirteen, though of course they are not.
“Moooo! Moooo!” one of them cries out. Then another joins in, then another, till they are all mooing. Louder and louder. “Moooo! Moooo! Moooo!”
Thelma smiles sweetly. Nervous giggles erupt from the audience.
Beside me, Esther whispers, “I can’t watch this.”
The white boys close in on Thelma. They surround her. They carry thin branches, which they use to poke her back, buttocks, and udder.
“It’s supper and I’m sure hungry for a burger,” says one boy.
“This cow has enough meat on her to feed an army,” says another.
“I bet she gives chocolate milk,” says the third.
“String her up!” says the fourth.
Three of the boys keep prodding Thelma as the fourth boy mimes throwing something skyward. Down from the rafters comes a rope with a noose tied to its end.
One boy says, “She’s so fat she’ll break the damn branch.”
The noose slowly descends to the stage as the lights dim. By the time the noose reaches Thelma, only a spotlight is left, trained on her face.
“For once in my short little life, I wasn’t fat enough,” Thelma says, slipping the noose around her neck. “The branch held.”
Then the lights go out completely. We hear footsteps as the actors move offstage.
Beside me, Esther whispers, “Is it over? Can I open my eyes?”
But it is not over. A voice onstage starts singing. It is Thelma. She is still there.
The song she chose is one of your favorites, Mother and Father. It is a Billie Holiday song about bulging eyes, twisted mouths, and blood on leaves. It is a song about hanging from a poplar tree.
When all the performances are over, townies gather in the Sophie’s gymnasium, where black and orange streamers hang from the ceiling and balloons bounce across the floor. In one corner, a group of townies wielding knives is all set to enter the pumpkin-carving contest. Disco music plays on a hi-fi system set up under one of the basketball hoops, and a group of green-faced Frankenstein’s monsters do a spastic dance that looks like a conniption fit. Do-gooders—they wear their usual purple armbands over their costumes—pass around trays of a fruit punch called blood. The chunks floating in the drink are not tumors from a witch’s heart as claimed but pieces of maraschino cherry.
Some old threadbare sofas and armchairs have been moved into the gymnasium. I sit on a love seat, and Johnny and Esther cram in on either side. I feel their body heat even through the sheet. I can be close to one person briefly without discomfort, but two people simultaneously are hard to bear unless those two people are you, Father and Mother. I wiggle in my seat, and Johnny says, “Oh, I forgot you can’t stand being touched.”
“Because you got murdered?” Esther asks.
“No,” says Johnny. “Even back in America, he hated it. Remember, Boo, in gym when we did wrestling? You were paired with Jermaine Tucker, and when he grabbed you, you went limp like you fainted.”
I get up and pull off my ghost sheet. My hair stands straight up from static (or maybe I saw a ghost, ha-ha). The lights are so dim in the gym that in the unlikely event Gunboy is gyrating on the dance floor to “Disco Duck,” he will not see us.
I tell Johnny and Esther the story of Uncle Seymour’s funeral to explain why I do not like touching others. As you will remember, Mother and Father, his friends and relatives stood around his open casket and talked, mostly about his bakery and how he was famous for cinnamon buns, which were served at the gathering.
Uncle Seymour had always been kind to me. He was an artistic fellow. For my eleventh birthday, he gave me a pretty cake decorated not with eleven candles but with eleven test tubes.
When I saw Uncle Seymour lying in his casket, I realized at once that my dislike of touching applied only to the living. People are ecosystems. The pumping of blood. The dividing of cells. The growing of bones. The killing of cancer cells by soldier cells. It is dizzying all that goes on simultaneously in the human body. To me, two people touching is akin to two galaxies colliding. (Okay, I exaggerate a touch, ha-ha.)
Maybe you will say, “But, Oliver, a decomposing body is also an ecosystem, a kind of dying galaxy.”
Still, I felt an urge to touch Uncle Seymour. He had such an unusual nose, a bulbous schnozzola with tributaries of purplish capillaries and a field of tiny craters.
I was trailing a fingertip along the cool bridge of Uncle Seymour’s nose when Cousin Maureen slapped my hand, called me a ghoul, and shoved me away. As you will recall, I knocked into Aunt Rose and overturned a tray of scones.
“So what you’re telling us,” Esther says, “is you can touch people if they’ve kicked the bucket.”
“Preferably.”
“But we’ve all kicked the bucket,” Johnny says.
“Passed is not the same as dead,” I say, echoing Thelma. I scan the crowd
for her. I want to commend her for her riveting reenactment.
Johnny rises, grabs hold of my shoulders, and sits me back down on the love seat. Then he plunks down in my lap and throws an arm around my shoulders.
Such proximity is horribly unpleasant.
“Get off me, Johnny.”
“Five more seconds.”
“Stop it,” Esther snaps at Johnny.
“Up yours,” he says to Esther. Then Johnny races through his countdown—“five, four, three, two, one”—and stands up again. “You need to get used to it. With practice, you can turn into a normal human being.”
Esther gets up from the couch and kicks Johnny in the shin. “Maybe, doofus, we don’t all want to be normal,” she says.
“Look, if he acts like a freak here, kids will sh*t on him just like they did back in America.”
Rest assured, Mother and Father, that Johnny is speaking figuratively. Nobody actually ever defecated on me (though, as I said earlier, I was urinated on).
Three costumed boys standing nearby must have been watching because one of them, a clown with lipstick and a line of pompoms down his front, yells, “Pile on!” and then they all jump on the love seat. They squirm and wiggle on top of me. Their touch is horrendous, their weight excruciating, and their body odor torture. I almost expect my lungs to deflate, my limbs to snap, and my brain to lapse into a coma.
“Get the f*ck off him!” Johnny yells.
A shoulder blade presses against my face, an elbow strikes me in my side, and a knee jabs me in the groin. I whimper.
Johnny pulls off two boys, a vampire and a scarecrow, and then yanks the white-faced clown off by the boy’s curly red hair (his real hair, not a wig).
I pant as the clown yells at Johnny, “Cool it, assh*le!”
A Halloween song, “Monster Mash,” plays on the hi-fi. The singer sings about a graveyard smash as Johnny balls up his fist and punches the clown in his middle pompom. The clown doubles over and falls to his knees. His face distorts, his mouth gapes, and his fingers claw at the floor. He has the wind knocked out of him (medically speaking, his diaphragm has gone into spasms, thus preventing him from inhaling).