by Neil Smith
“The word ‘schizophrenia’ means ‘split mind,’ ” I say.
“Some of them claim they were schizo back in America,” Esther says, “but I bet they’re exaggerating just to get out of working.”
“Gunboy was crazy,” Johnny says. “Maybe he checked in here.”
We stop dead in our tracks. Esther says, “Good point.”
Thelma gives us permission to wander the floors of the patient areas while she checks the rebirthing book. “But promise me, Johnny, that if you think you spot Gunboy, you won’t lose your cool.”
“I’ll be as cool as a cucumber,” Johnny says, smiling slyly.
I do not believe him.
“Cool as a jalapeño pepper is more like it,” Esther says. To Thelma she promises, “We’ll keep an eye on him.”
Thelma reminds us that we must contact the local do-good council if we come across our killer. “It ain’t up to you to dish out punishment.”
“I’ll be good,” Johnny says. “Cross my heart and hope to redie.”
As we walk down the halls of the Deborah, we peek into rooms where sadcons are reading in bed, staring out their window, or snoozing with earplugs stuffed in their ear canals. We wander around an inner courtyard filled with rosebushes. We walk through the cafeteria (today’s special: rigatoni) and also through an arts and crafts class where a dozen people are making sock puppets. (Esther says that instead of sock puppets the sadcons just need “a good sock in the head.” Sometimes I wonder how she managed to pass her do-gooder training courses.)
Along the way, Johnny pulls his dead-or-alive poster from his backpack to show around. “Seen this kid anywhere?” Nobody has. One sadcon we come across crouched in a stairwell says, “He looks like me.” Nonsense. She is a redheaded girl mottled with freckles.
Johnny also approaches the do-good staff, again with no luck. Maybe only the most caring and kind do-gooders are posted at an asylum. They probably listen carefully to a sadcon’s problems and lend helpful and heartening advice. I would not be able to hold down such a job because I have no wise advice to offer other than, “Sadness and confusion can be fleeting. Wait awhile and maybe they’ll wane.”
We trail up and down the hallways of the first two floors to no avail. After we are denied entry to the third floor (because the most serious mental cases reside there), Johnny decides to take Rover to the roof for some exercise. I follow him while Esther goes off to find Thelma.
The Deborah’s rooftop affords a wide view of Six, the schools, the parks, the warehouses. We slip off our knapsacks and sit on the little concrete wall surrounding the roof edge. Johnny peels off the lid of the margarine tub (which he has taken to calling the roach’s “camper”), and the death’s head climbs out and scurries along the wall.
“We’re getting warmer,” Johnny says.
“I estimate eighty degrees,” I reply, squinting at the yellow blur of the sun hidden behind a cloud. “But then again, it’s always about eighty degrees in the afternoon in Town. I think I’ll miss seasons. Back in Hoffman Estates, the leaves will be falling from the trees now.”
“I’m not talking about seasons, Boo. I’m talking about Gunboy.”
I stare at my roommate. His irises are the color of old Lincoln pennies. “How do you know we’re getting close?”
“I feel it in my bones.” He rubs his bony knees. “Maybe I’m some kind of divining rod that feels things others can’t. Maybe I’m different from other kids.”
Because he looks so serious, I ask if he had this sixth sense back in America.
“Possibly. That’s maybe why I was sad and confused.” After a pause, he adds, “Do you remember everything about your old life, Boo?”
“I suppose so—unless Zig erased things I don’t realize he erased,” I say. “In general, I have a photographic memory. I even recall word for word the pages from our math textbook. Page seventy-two explained the Pythagorean theorem and how to find the length of the hypotenuse.”
“My memory’s a bit shot,” Johnny says with an anxious look. “But then, I got shot in the head, so some of my brain might be missing. Some of my past as well. Like the summer before I came here. I don’t remember much of that. Just snippets here and there.”
We embarked on this road trip on the basis of Johnny’s memory. Perhaps that was not very wise if his memory is shaky.
Rover returns from its jaunt and climbs onto Johnny’s shoulder. “Polly wanna cracker?” he asks as if the roach were a parrot. Then a grin spreads across his face. “He’s whispering again,” Johnny says.
I stare at the roach on his shoulder to see if it is rubbing its wings or limbs together. It seems to be doing neither. “What do you mean it is talking?” I say.
“I can hear his little voice mumbling.”
“It is not talking, Johnny.”
“I hear something.”
“You must have the ears of Rover the basset hound.”
“My word, is that an insect?” a voice says.
Johnny and I turn our heads and see a girl in pajamas coming up behind us. She is the freckly sadcon from the stairwell, who believed herself to be Gunboy’s spitting image. Johnny pulls Rover off his shoulder and cups the roach in his hands to show the girl. I explain that the insect is a species of cockroach known as a death’s head.
“Death’s head!” the girl says, her eyes round as she stares at Rover. “Well, that’s the biggest sign Zig ever sent me.”
The girl sits between us on the wall circling the roof. She has hazel irises—green, yellow, spots of brown—the deep, busy eyes that remind me of gas planets in a far-off galaxy.
“Zig sends you signs?” Johnny asks.
“He sends us all signs, but not everybody knows how to read them.”
“What’s my roach a sign of?”
The girl gives Johnny a sly half smile. “A portal,” she says.
“Rover came out of a portal!” Johnny’s eyes light up. “The drain of a sink that leads all the way back to America.”
“A sink’s no portal!” she exclaims. “Are you crazy?”
“So where’s there a portal then?” Johnny asks, still cupping the death’s head.
The girl ignores him. She strokes the insect with a fingertip. “You got wings,” the girl says to Rover. “So you’re a real angel, not frauds like the rest of us suckers.”
“Despite its wings, the death’s head cockroach cannot fly or even glide,” I say, “unlike the American cockroach, Periplaneta americana.”
The girl blinks at me. She has an orangey stain on the front of her pajama top, perhaps pasta sauce from lunch. The cuffs of her pajama bottoms are gray with dirt.
“Are you sad and confused?” I ask the girl. Johnny shakes his head to deter me.
“Huh?”
“Sad and confused.”
She looks skyward. “Zig above, let me grow wings. Let me soar,” she calls out, her brow knitted.
“I wonder why people suppose their gods are circling high above in the clouds,” I say. “Couldn’t they just as easily be hiding in the molecules of, say, a rock or a tree or even a roach?”
The girl’s toenails, I notice, are painted purple with what looks to be pastel crayons. The death’s head crawls out of Johnny’s hands and onto her lap. “What a pretty baby,” she murmurs, bowing her head to study the death-mask blotch on the roach’s pronotum. A spot near her crown is almost bald. Either she has had a hack-job haircut or she has been plucking individual hairs from that spot.
The girl suddenly looks up, astonished. “Your roach here can talk,” she says.
Johnny says, “You hear him too.”
“I can’t hear what he’s saying, but he’s saying something.”
“Certain roach species can make a hissing noise,” I say. “Perhaps that is what you are hearing.”
A whistle sounds, Esther’s trademark trill like the call of a red-winged blackbird. I glance down and see Esther and Thelma waiting in the parking lot beside our bicycles. Thelma wave
s. “Time to go, Johnny,” I say, nodding toward the girls.
Johnny lifts Rover gently from the girl’s thigh and drops it into its camper. He snaps the lid on.
“See you around,” Johnny says to the girl.
She mumbles, “Don’t count on it.”
Johnny and I head toward the stairs. As we pull open the door to the exit, the sadcon girl shouts, “May Zig be with you!”
As we walk down the stairs, Johnny says, “That chick looks nothing at all like Gunboy.”
When we reach the ground floor, he turns to me. “Holy sh*t!” he shouts, his face crumbling. He races back up the stairs.
Should I follow? His running shoes slap against the steps as he climbs higher. I assume he forgot something on the roof—his sketch pad, his pencils—though why so panicky?
I cut across the lobby (a stenciled poster reads, MY SADCON PROB IS NO CON JOB) and then leave the building through a side door and cross a stretch of lawn to the parking lot. Thelma and Esther are already astride their bicycles. I wave, but they do not see me. They are looking up. Thelma yelps and throws her ten-speed to the ground. She runs toward the Deborah.
I glance up just as the redhead girl plummets headfirst off the roof. She makes no sound as she falls. Her arms and legs do not flail. Her body does not right itself. She falls as if she is already dead. I gasp and flinch, expecting a horrible thud and the crack of her skull hitting the ground. But no thud comes. No crack either. Instead, her body passes through the solid earth as though she just dived into a calm lake.
Thelma reaches the spot where the girl disappeared. She drops to her knees. I sprint over. Thelma is panting and repeating shrilly, “Lordy! Lordy! Lordy!” Balled-up pajamas with an orange stain lie in a flowerbed of wilting black-eyed Susans. Thelma paws at the earth as though she might dig through the dirt and bring the girl back. Esther trots toward us in her ungainly run. I look up to see Johnny leaning over the edge of the roof. I fear that he, too, will leap. Never in my life have I screamed, but I do so now: “No!”
“Rest in peace” is a common expression in our heaven for thirteen-year-olds. It is all-purpose: it can mean “take care” or “see you later” or “all the best.” A townie has supper at the cafeteria, and before she heads off for an evening at the library, she says to her tablemates, “Rest in peace.” I do not know how long this practice has been going on, but I never use the expression. After all, we are not resting here in heaven and we are not, for the most part, more peaceful than we were in America. (Note that I do not say “up in heaven” and “down in America,” as many townies do. Who is to say which direction is which?)
“Rest in peace” is also an expression townies say when somebody repasses.
“Rest in peace, Willa Blake,” sadcons and do-gooders from the Deborah say as they gather around the flowerbed where the girl from the roof disappeared. They have just buried her pajamas in the flowerbed and planted a colorful pinwheel on the spot. Every so often, the pinwheel twirls, and even though there is a slight breeze today, a patient pipes up to say that Willa herself is making it move.
My companions and I stand off to the side with our bicycles. Thelma wants us to stay awhile to show our respect. Johnny tells us he had a sudden hunch that Willa would harm herself. “I raced back to the roof, but I got there too late,” he says.
The Deborah’s manager, a short boy named Albert Schmidt whose baby-fat cheeks make him look ten years old, wants to know what Willa Blake said on the rooftop. “Not that it makes much difference,” he admits. He tells us Willa had been talking about suicide for months.
“She talked about growing angel wings,” I say. “And finding a portal.”
The asylum manager shakes his head. “Oh dear,” he says. “Willa was a portal seeker. She thought the portal back to America was suicide. Angels who kill themselves in heaven, she said, fly back to America as ghosts.”
“How come you let her on the roof then?” Johnny says, irate. “Why didn’t you tie that crazy chick to her bed?”
Albert says Willa in fact did not have roof privileges, but the staff cannot keep track of patients every hour of the day.
“If I was you, honey, I’d keep Willa’s portal theory hush-hush,” Thelma tells Albert. “If word gets out, we might have other portal seekers leaping from rooftops.”
When the asylum manager leaves, Esther tells me suicide is rare in heaven. “Yeah, we have idiots, assh*les, and freaks up here, but nutcases who dive-bomb off buildings? No, they’re scarcer than a tube of toothpaste.”
It is hard to commit suicide in heaven. When a person falls from a rooftop, he usually does not die. Yes, he sustains major injuries—broken legs and ribs, concussions and the like—but he survives and eventually recovers in an infirmary. But sometimes all the king’s horses and all the king’s men (forgive me for being fanciful) cannot put a townie back together again. Poor Willa Blake probably died outright because she landed squarely on her head. Here in heaven, a dead person vanishes in the blink of an eye. Poof!
I wonder where the freckly girl is now. Is she finally dead for good? Or is she in another level of heaven with worse plumbing, uglier buildings, and lumpier gruel, cursing her bad luck because she is not back in America after all?
“I’m sorry, but Zig is supposed to cure severe sadcons before they get here,” Thelma says, looking befuddled. I have noticed that she apologizes whenever Zig does something embarrassing or uncaring, as if she is to blame for his blunders.
“If Zig is a Mr. Fix-It,” Johnny says, “he makes big freaking mistakes.” He is looking skyward, as though Zig is hovering overhead and watching the fine mess he made.
“What if Zig cured Gunboy?” I say. “What if Gunboy is no longer psycho? Maybe he’s now a normal boy who volunteers at a cafeteria, plays softball on his zone’s team, and hopes one day to serve as a do-gooder.”
Johnny glares at me. I stare back, and when I finally blink, he says, “You want to let him off the hook? Is that it? If you’re wimping out, just go back to the Frank and Joe, okay?”
He looks at Thelma and Esther and sees in their faces that they, too, must have asked themselves the same question. They have probably even discussed it in private.
“Screw you all,” Johnny spits. “I’ll find Gunboy myself, and I don’t care if he’s now an angel giving harp lessons to do-gooders, I’ll pound his head in with a brick.” He is shouting now: “You hear me?”
Mourners around Willa Blake’s gravesite throw us annoyed looks because we are being disrespectful. Two girls in plaid housecoats, who were wrapped in each other’s arms, stop their weeping and stare at us, aghast.
Johnny’s cheeks burn as he slips his knapsack on and mounts his bicycle. Thelma says, “Honey, let’s get some advice tonight at the meeting, okay? Let’s see what the gommers think we should do.”
Johnny does not reply. He pedals away furiously without a glance back. He almost collides with more of the Deborah’s sadcons who are coming to pay their respects.
I watch him speed down the street, pass a brick school, and converge with other cyclists out today, regular townies not on a quest to settle scores.
Thelma squeezes my arm and says, “Don’t worry, Oliver. Everything will be hunky-dory.”
Esther mutters, “Don’t bet your afterlife on it.”
YOU DON’T HAVE TO FORGIVE, reads a poster hung in the room where the gommers are meeting at the Ponyboy Curtis School. The lettering is done in red glitter sprinkled over glue. A second poster, also sparkly, is placed below the first. It reads, BUT YOU CAN IF YOU WANT.
I half listen to Thelma explain the Gunboy story as I sit on a shabby sofa with stuffing coming out of the arms. Beside me sits Esther. Gathered around us are twenty-two gommers, some of whom may have forgiven their murderers and some of whom may have not.
Have I forgiven Gunboy? I am not sure. To me, he is as mysterious as Zig. Both are invisible to me. Zig works behind the scenes. Gunboy also did his work behind the scenes (or at least behind m
y back), so I find it hard to summon hatred or harbor ill will toward my killer. If Gunboy had shot you, Mother and Father, I could be merciless. I could pick up a brick, as Johnny suggested, and strike Gunboy’s head again and again till his deranged mind spilled from his skull. But for my own passing, hatred is harder to drum up because here I am in a new world that is fascinating.
And, as I said earlier, what if Zig did indeed reform Gunboy? Then my grasp on the brick would be shakier.
I wish Johnny were here to tell our story himself, but he did not turn up at the Jack Merridew Dormitory, where we are to pass the night in Six, even though he has our itinerary with him. I left him a note in the room we are supposed to share in case he shows up later. It reads, “Dear Johnny, when we find Gunboy, I promise to put up my dukes. Please come to the gommer meeting (see the map I drew on the back). Your friend, Oliver (a.k.a. Boo). P.S. I left you an orange in case you are hungry.”
My roommate dislikes schools, so he probably will not come. For him, walking into all these schools in heaven is akin to a boy who died in an airplane crash boarding jumbo jets forevermore in his afterlife.
As usual, Thelma is wearing her purple armband this evening as a sign of her do-goodism. She gestures a lot as she speaks, making wavy hand movements like a Trojan cheerleader. “So Oliver and Johnny are in a darn pickle,” she says. “Their killer may be in Town. If so, we townies have to decide what to do. As a gommer myself, I think we could use your advice.”
The gommers, seated on sofas, armchairs, and throw cushions spread across the wood-slat floor, barely moved a muscle or batted an eye as Thelma told our story. They still seem spellbound. Some have their mouths hanging open. They remind me, in their patient excitement, of Rover the basset hound as he waited outside while his master delivered the Tribune at Sandpits.
A skinny girl with stringy hair speaks first. “Hunt Gunboy down,” she says matter-of-factly, “and drown him in a lake.”
For a moment nobody speaks. Then a boy says, “Stab him in the gut.”
A slew of different ends for Gunboy is suggested, including “Toss him off a bridge,” “Poison him with arsenic,” and “Push him in front of a subway train.”