by Neil Smith
Casper the Friendly Ghost reads eleven forty-five.
“Red Rover, Red Rover,” I mutter, stroking the revolver, “send Johnny right over.”
As you know, Mother and Father, I do not usually perspire, but I am sweating now, so much so I must smell as oniony as my old roommate.
The doors to the boys’ locker room open, and Johnny and Reginald appear. Johnny is barefoot and bare-chested. He wears only gym shorts, plus cuffs around his ankles and wrists. Reginald, in gym clothes, wears a pillowcase over his head and a whistle around his neck. He grasps Johnny by the arm and leads him toward me in a slow shuffle. The expression “dead man’s walk” comes to mind.
When the two boys reach the center circle, Johnny nods at me. Reginald helps Johnny kneel, a clumsy movement given the two pairs of cuffs. Johnny almost keels over, but Reginald pulls him up. I kneel, too, just in front of Johnny. Reginald blinks at me through his eyeholes and then he gives Johnny a pat on the head as a master would do to his basset hound. Without a word, the do-good president retreats back to the doorway of the locker room, where he will stand watch.
I stare at Johnny, who glances up at the three hundred brickers on the overhead track above us. They are not allowed to talk, but a few emit coughs. One hacks so violently I should lend him my new CO2 bag, which is in the right pocket of my overalls.
Johnny’s cheeks are pimply, and his lips are chapped. He leans toward me and, in a near whisper, says, “At my trial, I said one thing that was really true.”
“What?”
“You’re strong and smart and pure. Don’t forget that, even when I’m not around anymore to remind you. Promise me.”
My heart twinges. “Promise.”
“A lot of what I said was bullsh*t. Talking to Zig, killing Willa, all bullsh*t. But you knew that already ’cause you’re smart.”
“I know Gunboy is not you. Not the real you.”
He smirks and says, “There’s a little Gunboy in all of us.”
“Johnny, I have a gun with me now. The one from Curios.” I pat the lump in my left pocket. “I found bullets. Two bullets.”
His eyebrows raise. “Really?”
I nod.
“Well, that’s perfect.” Looking up, he calls out, “Thank Zig!”
I am startled by Blaberus craniifer, which suddenly climbs out of the pocket of Johnny’s shorts, scurries up his chest and neck, and then burrows into his tangled hair. I glance up at the brickers and over at Reginald, but nobody seems to have noticed.
Johnny seems unfazed that a roach is crawling across his scalp. “Zig never talks to me,” he says. “I wish he would, but the b*stard has never said two words to me. Though I think those bullets of yours count as two words.”
I am afraid he may be right.
“But Zig gave me Rover, and the roach talks. Remember I thought the voice was Willa’s? Well, in jail the whispering got louder and clearer, and I realized who it is.”
“Who?”
He leans closer and bores his eyes into mine. “The people in my hospital room. My sister mostly. My folks too. Sometimes a nurse or doctor. I can hear them, but they can’t hear me.”
He has been hallucinating, just like Thelma when she stopped eating and saw toucans in the trees. “Oh, Johnny, you are not in a hospital anymore,” I insist. “Your mind is playing tricks.”
“I’m alive down in America!” he says, eyes flashing. “I died, you see. But only for a few minutes. My heart stopped beating, but the doctors got it pumping again. I came back to life and I’m getting stronger, but I’m still comatose. I just gotta wake up now. And to wake up there, I can’t be alive here, you understand?”
The cockroach emerges from his hairline and perches above his left eyebrow.
“I can hear Brenda right now,” he says, glancing up to Rover. “She’s saying, ‘Come on, Johnny. Open your eyes!’ ”
I do not know what to say. My heart shudders. My breathing goes shallow. My eyes water. The tears drip, and I wipe them away with my thumbs.
“Oh, don’t be sad for me, Boo,” he says in a kind voice. “I’m going home. I’m going back to our old hometown. Everything will be hunky-dory.”
He is as mad as Willa with her suicide leap to America. And, what is worse, I want to share in this madness. “Can I go with you?” I say, my voice breaking.
“No, man, you gotta stay in Town.”
“Do not leave me alone!” I beg.
“You aren’t alone. You got Thelma and Esther and you’ll make new friends.”
“I do not make friends easily. I am an oddball.”
“You gotta stay, ’cause you’re dead. Sorry, man, but you’re really truly doorknob dead.”
He squirms, trying to get comfortable despite the cuffs restraining his wrists and ankles. When he settles down, he says, “I’ll get another chance at life, Boo. A real life.”
Rover beetles across his forehead and burrows back into his hair. It is eerie how calm Johnny looks, whereas my hair must be standing straight up and my skin must be albino white. “I am really scared,” I say. “Aren’t you?”
“I don’t think it’ll hurt much,” he says. “I was expecting hundreds of bricks. A bullet will sure as hell hurt a lot less.”
A deep sigh from me. “I can’t. I…”
“Well, I can’t. Not in cuffs. So you got to.”
I start crying again. I glance over at Reginald Washington in the doorway to the locker room, but given the pillowcase, I cannot gauge his reaction.
“There are two bullets left,” I say pleadingly. “Two. One for you, one for me.”
“Don’t be an idiot!” he cries. Lowering his voice, he says, “You’re dead, man. There’s no bullet for you! You must’ve got two in case the first don’t work. Understand? Shoot me in the heart, and if I don’t disappear right away, shoot me in the head.”
I take out the CO2 bag and hold it to my mouth. I inhale and exhale, and the bag puffs up and crinkles back down with my breath.
“Listen,” he says, his voice gentler now. “We never got a chance to know each other too good down in America. But up in Town, we got to be best friends. Aren’t we best friends?”
I nod as I breathe into my bag.
“Well, only my best friend can do this for me.”
I stop breathing into the bag. “Please don’t make me.”
My voice is shrill, childish. I am too weak. I am far too weak.
Johnny closes his eyes. When he opens them again, a tear trickles down his cheek. I reach up and wipe it with my thumb. He flinches at my touch.
“Give me a hug. You can do it. And while we’re hugging, you take out the gun and you slip it between us so nobody else sees. You point it at my heart.” He glances down at his chest, the bull’s-eye. “Then you just pull the trigger, and get out of here. Easy as peach pie.”
My tears give way to racking sobs. Snot drips from my nostrils and runs into my mouth. I wipe my lips. I wipe my face. I jab my fingertips into the corners of my eyes.
“Help me go home,” Johnny says softly. “Help me grow up. Help me get past thirteen.”
I pinch the skin on my arm to control my sobs. There are footsteps overhead: more brickers are quitting their jobs. Perhaps if I sob loudly enough, I will drive them all away. But I will never drive them all away. If I do not shoot Johnny, he will die in any case, but in a much ghastlier manner.
Johnny smiles at me, and a dimple pocks his cheek. His eyes are not smiling, though. The whites of his eyes are red.
“Please,” Johnny whispers.
And so I lean toward my mad blood brother. I hug him to me. His body smells as oniony as my own. His skin feels feverish, and yet I shiver.
The death’s head has scrambled down his neck and now perches on his shoulder, like a fairy in a children’s book.
I slip my hand into the pocket of my overalls.
“Thank you, Oliver,” Johnny whispers.
I pull out the revolver. “Close your eyes, dear Johnny,”
I say into his ear.
His eyelids clamp shut. His face grimaces. His whole body tenses. I pull back a little. I point the gun at his skinny chest. My hand does not even shake.
“Zig have mercy,” I mutter.
I pull the trigger.
Johnny Henzel does not vanish. Instead, his body falls backward in the center circle. His head smacks against the floor. The brickers, seemingly all three hundred of them, gasp together in the echo of the bang. Some yell, “No! No!” as I lift the revolver to shoot again, this time pointing at Johnny’s head. A bricker flings a brick and hits me in the thigh just as the gun goes off. The bullet misses Johnny and ricochets off the floor. Reginald is running toward me. He stumbles, falls, and rolls, the pillowcase slipping off his head. “I’ve been shot!” he yells, even though he has not been. Another brick hits the court, breaks in two, and tumbles toward Reginald. He sits up and grabs the whistle from around his neck. His cheeks puff cartoonishly as he blows. The shrillness needles through my brain.
On the overhead track, there is movement and noise and cursing, but I do not glance up. I stare at Johnny. At the red bull’s-eye in the center of his chest.
I want to unlock the cuffs from around his ankles and wrists. It must hurt him to lie in such an awkward position. “Do you have the keys to the cuffs?” I call to Reginald, who grasps his ankle, which he twisted in his fall.
“What did you do!?” Reginald whines, his face distorted.
“I killed Johnny,” I reply.
“You didn’t, you idiot! He’s still alive! He’s still here!”
I put down the revolver, crawl to Johnny, and lean over him. His eyes are closed. His face is relaxed. There is no tension left. He is as peaceful as an angel. The wound in his chest is the size of a nickel, and the blood looks oddly fake, like the zombie ketchup we townies squirt on ourselves on Halloween.
I place my ear to his chest as dozens of brickers descend into the gymnasium, pulling their pillowcases from their heads. They surround Johnny and me, a few with bricks in their hands as though they may still beat Johnny’s brains out, or maybe even mine. Benny Baggarly is here. He picks up the revolver and points it at the ceiling. He pulls the trigger again and again, but of course the gun does not shoot.
The brickers jabber. Reginald groans. Johnny stays silent.
“Please quiet down,” I say to the brickers. A few kneel beside Johnny and me as I listen to Johnny’s chest.
I sit back up. “There is no heartbeat,” I say. “He is redead.”
“He’s not redead!” Reginald cries out, exasperated. He drags himself toward me through the crowd of brickers. He thinks me mad. I see it in his mean, angry, splotchy face.
At that moment, the death’s head scurries out from underneath Johnny and climbs atop his shoulder. A few brickers gasp. Rover sits for a second or two, the death mask on its pronotum seeming to pulsate. And then—poof!—the roach disappears into thin air.
I am sent to the Deborah to recover. A six-month stay imposed on me for my own good by Reginald Washington and his do-good council. Yes, Mother and Father, I have become a sadcon—a third-floor sadcon to be precise, the category of unstable patients forbidden from leaving the asylum grounds. Because I stay calm and collected in the days after I kill Johnny, people assume I am in shock. They tiptoe around me, literally (the ballerina-looking nurse who earlier brought me my breakfast of gruel and English muffin with jam walked as if she were afraid to make the floorboards squeak).
Albert Schmidt, the baby-faced asylum manager, often drops by my room (thankfully, not Willa Blake’s old one) to check on me.
“How are you getting on?” he always asks.
“Hunkily-dorily,” I reply, coining an adverb.
He does not believe me, of course. Nobody does. I do not even know if I believe myself. I lie on my bed and gaze at the creeping ceiling cracks and twirling ceiling fan, just as I used to do in my room in our apartment, and I miss you both dearly, Mother and Father, and I miss the models of the planets that hung from my ceiling, and I even miss the cobwebs that gathered there because, on my insistence, you gave the spiders the freedom to spin their webs.
Most of all, I miss Johnny.
At least once a day, I go down to the courtyard. I like the courtyard. The sad and confused seem less so here. Bushes blossom with red, yellow, and orange roses. A pergola has trellises overrun with thick vines like those you described in Jack and the Beanstalk, Mother. How I regret not having listened raptly when you read me fairy tales in my childhood. Remember how I used to scoff at The Little Engine That Could and ask for encyclopedia entries on train combustion? For my limited interest in fictional worlds, I am sorry.
Today when I enter the courtyard, some sadcons are sitting on benches and reading about fictional worlds in novels (Flowers in the Attic and We Have Always Lived in the Castle). Others are playing gentle games like four square, hopscotch, and jacks. As I stroll by, a few sadcons nod at me or tip their balloon hats. I have become rather famous here. Yet they are too shy to approach and so keep at a safe distance. They think me dodgy and erratic because, despite appearing docile, I did kill a boy.
I sit on my favorite bench. It is my favorite for two reasons. First, it has wise graffiti carved into it: ETERNAL HAPPINESS IS JUST PLAIN CRAZY. Second, it is beside a yellow rosebush whose thorns are sharp. I like to prick a finger and time, with Casper the Friendly Ghost’s help, how fast the tiny wound heals. Today my nick takes a mere twenty-two minutes to vanish (a record).
After the nick heals, I look up from my hand and see Esther Haglund coming into the courtyard for a visit. Luckily, she is a full-fledged do-gooder now (third-floor sadcons are allowed visits from do-gooders only). Esther comes weekly to update me on the world outside the Deborah. Today all the sadcons eye her because to match her purple armband, she has on a purple velvet gown—her most flamboyant outfit to date. Zig only knows how she managed to bicycle here. I should ask her to make me a purple velvet suit: if I am to be an oddball, I should look the part.
Esther sits down on my bench, and her feet do not touch the ground. On her feet are slippers with gold sparkles glued to them. She picks a yellow rose and tucks it into her fluffy hair. An artist might capture the beauty of this scene in paint.
“Johnny’s still redead, I presume,” I say.
Esther nods. Two weeks ago, she told me his body had been taken on a stretcher from the Marcy Lewis Gymnasium to the Sal Paradise Infirmary in Five.
“The nurses still think he’ll heal and wake up.”
“But his heart isn’t beating,” I point out.
“They think it’ll start up again.”
“It never will.”
“You don’t know that!” she snaps. She rubs her eyes. She looks dumbfounded and frustrated. “Well, if he’s redead for good,” she asks, “why’s this happening? Why’s Johnny sticking around?” Her bulbous brow knits. She wants me to solve the puzzle of the first redead townie who does not vanish in the blink of an eye.
“It is a true mystery,” I say. “One of my theories is that perhaps Zig believes I need Johnny around, so he left him, or at least part of him, here in Town.”
Esther taps my knee, and I wince because I have relapsed into my hands-off policy. “You don’t need Johnny anymore, Boo,” she says. “We all have to get on with our afterlives without him.”
“Oh dear, I can’t imagine that,” I say.
She stares at me a moment and then shakes her head. “You should start imagining it. Maybe then Zig will let Johnny go.”
“No,” I simply say, with a shake of my head.
It starts to rain, a light sprinkling at first that nonetheless chases the sadcons and the nurses out of the courtyard and back into the Deborah. Esther stays put even when the rain comes down in cats and dogs and soaks her puffy hair, velvet dress, and sparkly shoes.
We sit and watch the fat raindrops pound the roses. They lose several petals. Yet they are hardy boys (like Frank and Joe, ha-ha), so they will b
ounce back, I am sure. And so will we, I suppose. I want to share this thought with Esther, but when I turn to her, she looks so wilted that I have my doubts.
She slips off the bench. She pushes her wet hair out of her eyes and gives me a weary look.
“What is it, Esther Haglund?”
“I don’t think I’ll come back to see you,” she says.
I wait in the rain for her to go on, but she just stands there eyeing me as if she has guessed something vital about me that I have not yet figured out myself.
“I know it is not as easy as peach pie to be my friend,” I finally say.
She does not reply. She just sighs. Then she turns on her sparkly heels and walks in her bowlegged gait out of my afterlife.
During my time at the Deborah, I take a still-life drawing class and, through much practice, learn to sketch vases, bicycles, desk lamps, pinwheels, typewriters, throw pillows, and the like. I hone my artistic skills to become a more balanced individual. I will never be a gifted artist like Johnny, but I am now at least above average. Next I will graduate to portraits. The first person I will draw will be Johnny, once I complete my six-month stay.
Sadcons have the option of speaking to a counselor here, but I opt not to. I do not interact much with the other sadcons either. In any case, they are wary of me. They conclude that I am an unlucky friend to have, the same decision Esther has come to. When I feel lonely, I ask Albert Schmidt to play a game of chess. Dr. Schmidt, as he is called here, is good at his job as asylum manager because he does not push anyone to get better. His policy is to live and let live. He likes having all us sadcons around. He calls us his children. He is usually kind, but occasionally grows testy if he does not win at chess, so sometimes I lose on purpose.
I gain roof privileges from Dr. Schmidt after letting him win several games in a row. At first, I was denied them lest I throw myself off à la Willa Blake. Once on the roof, I sketch stars in my notepad and undertake the grueling task of mapping the night sky. My favorite constellation to date is shaped like an ankylosaur.