by Neil Smith
“Anything of note in the new batch?”
I hold up a box of Lucky Charms cereal. Usually Zig sends us wholesome cereal like bran flakes and shredded wheat. Though Peter Peter came to heaven long ago, he has kept up with developments in America, thanks to newbies, whom he regularly interviews. Hence he knows about anti-acne creams and cereals containing miniature marshmallows in assorted colors.
“I’m surprised a warehouse worker didn’t wolf those down,” Peter Peter says. Often the edibles do not arrive at our offices intact.
“It is fortified with eight essential vitamins,” I say.
“Is that so?” Peter Peter replies.
I study the ingredients list for a moment, and when I look up, Peter Peter is still there, smiling sadly.
“Oliver, may I have a word in private?”
I nod. I wonder what he means by “in private.” Nobody else is around. Still, when Peter Peter steps into my office, he shuts the door behind him. He drags a chair in front of my desk and fiddles with his necktie, which he wears in a thick Windsor knot over his T-shirt. “I have something to propose to you,” he says, “something I’ve touched on in our past discussions. You recall our talk on last-minute edits?”
I nod. Like many other townies, Peter Peter speculates that a person who died a vile death does not recall all the details. He may recall the basics. He knows, for example, that he leaped out a fifth-story window during a fire that engulfed his family’s apartment, but he does not remember the searing pain as his clothes caught fire, the horrific panic, the sickening plunge, or the brutal impact with the sidewalk. I use this example because it is the one Peter Peter used with me. He died in this manner in the thirties on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
“You mentioned I may not remember the nitty-gritty of the shooting at my school,” I say. “That certain images, sounds, and feelings might be forever buried in my brain.”
“I never said ‘forever.’ ”
I throw him a questioning look.
“There’s a way to recover some of our lost memories, son. I know because I recovered some of mine long ago.”
I point the meat tenderizer at him. “So you do remember the sickening plunge and the brutal impact?”
“Regrettably, yes,” he says. “Zig does us a favor with last-minute edits. If you die a death like mine, you shouldn’t know all the details. That’s why I don’t often talk about the method for retrieving memories. But, in your case, knowing all the facts might help.”
I lean across my desk toward Peter Peter and ask how he recovered his memories.
“I had the help of a specialist decades ago. Somebody who’s now an old boy like me.”
“Will you introduce me to him?”
Peter Peter swallows, and his Adam’s apple seems to get caught in his Windsor-knotted tie. He looks almost pained when he says, “You already know him.”
“I do?”
“He’s a hypnotist.”
The last time I saw Czar, at the Sal Paradise Infirmary, his face was so swollen and battered I could not tell what he really looked like, but when I meet him on the evening before Johnny’s trial, I realize he looks only slightly like the dead-or-alive poster Johnny drew. True, both boys have big, sharp incisors and ears that stick out, but the Gunboy in the drawing had a broad nose and Czar’s nose is slender and crooked. Gunboy’s eyebrows were thick and black; Czar’s eyebrows are fine and fair.
The day before Johnny’s trial commences, Czar and I meet at Curios on the settee beside the display of American coinage, featuring ten Susan B. Anthony dollars, which I have taken out to clean. As he approaches the settee, Czar says, “I hope you don’t have a f*cking flashlight on you.”
He is making a droll reference to the attack, but fortunately his injuries have healed completely. Not even a remnant of a bruise is visible.
“You’re looking well, Czar,” I say.
“No thanks to you,” he replies as he sits down beside me.
“I am so sorry for the dreadful error that resulted in your infirmary stay,” I tell him. “Though I did not wield the flashlight, I am as much to blame as Johnny Henzel. I wish to make amends. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Well, Petey says you’re a smart whippersnapper. So what you can do is find me a real portal.”
I think of Johnny and his claim to have found one.
“Time’s running out. Find me one before my expiry date.”
Czar is also forty-six heaven years old, and hence he will repass in four years’ time.
“Well, I can try. Once the trial is over, perhaps I will have more time to devote to new projects.”
Czar says he will testify tomorrow. He does not recall the beating—“Your sicko friend knocked me out cold with his first blow”—so he will talk about his injuries, his recovery, his anger.
“I’m mad as hell about the weeks you two goofballs stole from me.” He taps his index finger against my sternum. “I’m no spring chicken. I don’t have much time left, so I can’t afford to be in a coma for almost two f*cking months.”
He taps his finger harder and harder to underline the seriousness of his ordeal. In fact, he looks so peeved I begin to fear for my safety. Peter Peter is around the corner in his office, and he said that if Czar becomes too brutish, I should call out. The two old boys, despite their different characters, have been friends since the year of their original passing, when they shared a room in Four. I wonder if Peter Peter appealed to Czar’s sense of duty by evoking the parallels between their friendship and mine with Johnny.
“His brutality is mostly an act,” Peter Peter assured me. “Charles behaves like a czar because he thinks he gets more respect if he appears intimidating.”
Czar hypnotizes in private. He needs absolute silence and no distractions, and that is why Peter Peter is waiting in his office. The hypnotist wears a T-shirt with a sketch of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a top hat. “Let’s get this show on the road,” he announces. He gets up from the settee and tells me to lie down. He goes over to the light switches and dims the overhead lamps. Then he walks around the room and switches off the individual lamps we shine on our different displays. “For a hypnosis, I like it nice and dark,” he says.
I am prepared for some form of ruse. For the so-called hauntings of his, Czar first drew information from his subjects about their former lives so he could invent stories to feed to them while they were hypnotized. But Czar has a very real power, Peter Peter told me. He can help townies recall the final moments of their deaths—in details they do not remember in their afterlife. “Not every detail,” Peter Peter warned. “There may still be blank spots, like missing frames in a film reel, but you’ll certainly have a fuller picture of your death.”
Peter Peter said that Czar keeps this power of his mostly under wraps because it has had tragic consequences. Years ago, a gommer attempted suicide after learning the full details of her rape and death at her uncle’s hands. As a result, I promised I would not speak to others about my hypnosis whatever the outcome might be.
“Don’t move a muscle, okay?” Czar tells me.
The settee, though worn, is still very padded, so I feel comfortable. I cross my arms and rest them on my chest, but Czar says, “You look like a frigging corpse in a coffin,” so I move my arms to my side.
“I want you to recount to me the details of your death,” Czar says. “Then once you’re under my spell, I’ll feed these details back to you gradually like a cook adding oats to boiling water. I need to stimulate the brain slowly so it releases both the remembered memories and the lost memories. If I go too quickly, the scene will play back too fast and there’ll be too many holes for you to follow what’s going on.”
I am unsure whether to believe in this exercise, but out of my desperation to understand the madness that struck Johnny and me, I will give it a try. I describe my final moments in America: the hallway, Jermaine Tucker, Richard Dawkins and Jane Goodall, the periodic table, the countdown to s
eaborgium.
When I have finished my story, Czar kneels beside the settee. “Breathe deeply through your nose,” he tells me. From his pants pocket, he takes out a fake gold chain with a blue bauble attached to its end. The thing looks like the gaudy jewelry sold in gumball machines in America. He tells me it is blue topaz. He swings it above my face, and I follow the bauble with my eyes.
In her graduation gown and mortarboard, Helen Keller looks down at me from her portrait on the wall. I am standing in front of my locker, No. 106, and turning the dial of my lock—to 7 and then to 25 and then to 34. Around me, I hear the laughter and cries of my fellow students. Their voices say or shout or sing such things as “Can I borrow your lip gloss?” and “Up your nose with a rubber hose!” and “Shake your body down to the ground!” and “Go, Trojans, go!” and “Miss Stephens got herself a Dorothy Hamill do!”
I swing open my locker. Taped to the inside of its door are two magazine pictures, one of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and one of primatologist Jane Goodall. My classmates have mocked me for putting up pictures of my “parents” in my locker.
Also on the inside of my locker door is a copy of the periodic table. I have concocted a game whereby I must try to recite the elements in chronological order whenever I open my locker. I am trying to memorize all 106 of them.
I mumble the elements under my breath. Beside me, Jermaine Tucker fishes a textbook out of the holy mess that is his own locker. I am at No. 78, platinum (Pt), when he cuffs me hard on the back of the head. He is an athletic boy several inches taller than I, so his cuff hurts, but I remind myself I have a high threshold for pain.
“What the hell you doing, Boo?” he says. I ignore his question and continue with my mumbling. I find it best not to make eye contact when a classmate begins harassing me because sometimes a lack of response causes the person to lose interest. My tactic works, and Jermaine Tucker wanders off.
The noises around me, the shouts and guffaws, fade away as I fall back into the world of elements. For the first time, I do reach No. 106, seaborgium (Sg), without needing to steal a peek at the periodic table. My second parents, Richard and Jane, are thoroughly pleased and smile from their photographs as though to congratulate me on my feat. I smile back at them.
“Good-bye,” I whisper to them, just as I always do before heading off to class. Then I reach for something inside my locker.
Blackness. Silence.
I am now as blind and deaf as Helen Keller herself. I suppose there is nothing more to see or hear in this world. I suppose I am dead. I wait to be reborn.
But these few moments are simply missing frames in my film reel, because an instant later light seeps in, sounds erupt, and I can see again.
What I see is horrific. I am on the floor and a boy is lying within arm’s reach. His eyelids flutter, his eyes look without seeing, his face contorts, and his blood seeps from the side of his head and drenches his long brown hair.
Then the darkness swallows me again. But not the silence. A scream fills my head. A scream so bloodcurdling, so nightmarish, it wakes me from my trance.
When I come to, Thelma is beating up Czar. She has pushed him to the floor and is straddling him. She slaps him in the face with her big, meaty hands. Once, twice, thrice. “What’d you do to him?” she cries. “Tell me, you son of a b*tch!”
Czar flails his arms. “Ouch! Stop! Ouch!” he hollers.
I sit up, groggy, on the settee as Peter Peter runs in, his tie flapping. He hurries over to pull Thelma off Czar.
“You people are all f*cking nuts!” Czar yells as he struggles to get up. His T-shirt is torn at the neck and his hair disheveled. “Why do I try helping you when all I get is bruises and concussions?”
Peter Peter looks dismayed. He brushes the dust off his friend’s back as Thelma straightens her kitten T-shirt, which has ridden up her belly.
“I’m a professional hypnotist!” Czar cries. “I deserve respect, but all I get is f*cking abuse!” He swats at the display of ten Susan B. Anthonys, and the dollar coins go flying and then bounce across the floor in a jingle-jangle. How upset I will be if we lose one!
Thelma comes to sit with me on the settee. “Are you okay, Oliver?” She places her fingertips on my elbow as a gesture of concern.
“I feel very curious,” I say.
“What the hell were you doing to him?” Thelma says, scowling at Czar. “You some kind of maniac?”
“I ain’t the maniac!” Czar snaps, his voice now high-pitched. “You people are the maniacs!”
Peter Peter steps forward. “I’m afraid this is entirely my fault.”
Czar says, “I should have known not to get mixed up in this filthy business.” He turns on his heel and storms off.
“Charles, wait,” Peter Peter calls out. At the corned beef display, Czar turns around and gives Peter Peter the finger.
“No need to be uncivilized,” Peter Peter calls out.
“F*ck off and redie!” Czar yells. Then he stomps out of the exhibition hall.
Once Czar is gone, I tell Thelma we were conducting an experiment. I am still dazed, still partly immersed in my horrible lost memory.
“I was worried, honey. You didn’t come home this evening, so I biked here to see if you was okay and I found that kook standing over you. I thought he was killing you, ’cause all a sudden you started hollerin’.”
“Was I screaming?” It is true my voice sounds hoarse.
“To high heaven,” Thelma says.
Peter Peter explains what Czar was doing. He must trust his new girlfriend, because he discloses everything, even his own fiery plunge from his penthouse apartment. Thelma keeps patting her own cheeks as though to revive her circulation. When Peter Peter is finished, she says, “This is dangerous information.”
Peter Peter replies, “So dangerous I urge you to keep it secret.”
Thelma nods slowly. Then she turns to me. With a mix of dread and excitement, she says, “Tell me what you saw, Oliver.”
I tell them I did not see who shot me. “But I must not have died immediately from my wound,” I say, almost breathless. “I must have passed out and then come to next to Johnny.”
Thelma and Peter Peter give me looks of sympathy. In a way, these two thirteen-year-olds are my foster parents, not Richard and Jane.
“You saw him?” Peter Peter prods. “You saw Johnny?”
“The last thing I saw,” I say, “was the bloody bullet hole in his head.”
“Zig in heaven,” Thelma whispers, and then she glowers at Peter Peter for having arranged this experiment. “Who was screaming?” she asks me. “Was it you? Or was it Johnny?”
I blink a few times, as if the light in the dim room is still too bright. “I believe it was I,” I say. “But I do not believe I was screaming aloud. I believe I was screaming in my head.”
Mother. I want my real mother. I want you. And, Father, where are you? I want you too. I think I may break my rule of never crying. But I do not. I sit silently on the settee and stare at a dollar coin that rolled under our display of dead telephones that will never ring.
I tell Thelma I will work into the wee hours because my insomnia will surely keep me up tonight. I do not tell her I have not slept in days. Still, she is not pleased. “You need your rest,” she scolds, waving her hands about. “The trial starts tomorrow. You need to be fresh.” I lie that I will sleep on the couch in my office, and she finally caves in. Before she leaves, she wraps her arms around herself and squeezes. This is our code: when she hugs herself this way, she means she is hugging me. Peter Peter tells me not to work too hard. “Don’t kill yourself, son,” he says, and then looks away embarrassed because his wording is ill-chosen.
“Rest in peace,” they both tell me as they are leaving.
I decide to spend the night here because I need to talk to Zig. I feel closer to him at Curios, probably because I am surrounded by the unusual objects he sends our way. The shelves lining my office walls are filled with these object
s. A bottle of white wine from the Napa Valley, a cash register, a jumbo box of diapers, a biography of American crooner Barry Manilow, a slender electric razor used to trim nostril hairs. And on and on and on.
Some objects are obvious mistakes, things Zig sent us accidentally. Falling into this category are diapers (newborns here are already toilet-trained, ha-ha) and nostril-hair trimmers (boys here have little facial hair, certainly no protruding nostril hairs).
But other items may not be mistakes. Two weeks ago, for instance, our heaven received its first photocopier, a clunky, stove-size machine now shoved into a corner of my office near the door. Like all electrical devices, it works without being plugged in. I suppose—and Peter Peter tends to agree—that the photocopier is a test. Zig wishes to see how we will make use of this new contraption, just as, a year ago, he sent us our first microwave oven and, decades ago, he sent us our first washing machine.
Will we use the photocopier wisely? Will we, say, copy the books, stories, and plays we write? Will we distribute these works of fiction throughout Town for others to enjoy? If so, Zig may send us other photocopiers. Or will we use the device recklessly, maybe to copy dead-or-alive posters of a Gunboy we wish to put to death?
In other words, we may be his guinea pigs. My guinea-pig theory is what I wish to discuss with him tonight. I sit at my desk and turn the crank on my music box. The little figurine wiggles on his broom as the box tinkles out its playful tune about the pitiful goblin who trades in his broken broom for an airplane.
I identify with this goblin tonight. Boo, too, is wobbly. My hand trembles as I turn the crank. My voice is shaky as I speak aloud. “You are watching, aren’t you?” I say, looking at my beat-up couch as though our old god is lounging there like an old dog. I must say I feel silly—I have never spoken to Zig like this. “You sent us a photocopier to see what we would do with it,” I say. “And you sent us a Gunboy to see what we would do with him.”
I am admitting aloud to Zig that Johnny may have killed someone (killed me, I should say). Maybe I am the last person involved to come to this conclusion. I came to it slowly because, as a junior scientist, I do not jump to conclusions.