by Neil Smith
To keep busy, I also volunteer in the kitchen. I like doing dishes: it is calming to scrape away the remains of our meals and then soap up our chipped dishes and get them gleaming again. For some reason, Zig has not sent us a dishwasher yet. Perhaps we are not ready for that test.
I also enjoy peeling potatoes. I have even become adept at making sweet potato pie, like the one mentioned in Mother’s favorite song, Sarah Vaughan’s “It’s Crazy.” My secret ingredient is the Indian spice garam masala, which I found at the back of the Deborah’s pantry. I wish I could make my pie for the both of you. It is much healthier than the pizza pies you scarf down.
To keep fit, I do calisthenics in the courtyard with a Bicentennial sweatband wrapped around my forehead. Dr. Schmidt recommends exercise to combat sadness and confusion. When he spots us exercising, he pretends to be a drill sergeant and cries, “Hup, two, three, four! Hup, two, three, four!” Thankfully, he never attempts to touch us. No pats on the shoulder. No hugs. I think he, too, dislikes being touched. A nurse named Francine, who used to be hard of hearing in America and now still talks too loudly, once laid a hand on his back and he cringed.
Dr. Schmidt died in a school-bus accident. He and three other townies killed in the accident keep in touch and sometimes get together to play Mille Bornes in the games room. He is the grandson of a silent-screen star whose name eludes me since I do not even know the names of current movie stars. I believe, though, that the actress once played Jane in a Tarzan movie.
Even though I respect Dr. Schmidt, he will never become a best friend, not like the blendship I had with Johnny. After all, blendships are rare, as I am sure you two will agree, being in a blendship yourselves.
Johnny is still here in Town, resting in peace at the Sal Paradise Infirmary. His heart is still quiet. The do-good council is unsure what to do with Johnny’s body.
Townies sometimes slip into the infirmary to steal peeks at the famous “half-deader,” as they call him. Despite the nurses’ watch, some townies manage to touch his skin to feel how dry and cool it is. They run a fingertip around the circumference of his chest wound, which has dried but not healed.
I know all this because Czar told me so in a letter. He said he snuck into the Sal himself, and when he saw Johnny’s lifeless body and touched his chest wound, he decided to place a blue bauble necklace around my friend’s neck. “The poor bugger deserves some magic,” he wrote. “Maybe the topaz will kickstart his heart.” A noble position, I feel.
Other than Czar and Esther, I have had little contact with the outside world. I refuse other visitors, and now I say no even to Thelma and Peter Peter because I believe they, too, need a break from me. I write them to apologize. They write back, but I do not open that letter, or the later ones they send.
Many strangers also write me. I presume they are gommers. Dr. Schmidt tells me some gommers see me as a hero, while others see me as a nuisance for spoiling their bricking fun. I throw all these letters down the garbage chute unopened.
Esther Haglund does not write and, as she promised, does not visit. I do not write her either. I respect her decision. I miss her, though.
A month before my six-month stay ends, I move to the second floor of the Deborah. Several of my fellow patients and I apply for day passes to work as sorters at a nearby supply warehouse. Zig made an overnight delivery, and I have high hopes of stumbling on another clue from him or instructions—something like the bullets he sent me. I want to know how I should proceed from here because, honestly, I feel adrift. I need some direction to decide what I will do with the rest of my afterlife.
At the warehouse, I drag mattresses and box springs around, load lamps into grocery carts, stack desks on dollies, sort dozens of T-shirts according to size, and fill boxes with art supplies. While I work, I daydream that the warehouse is a portal that will teleport me back to Hoffman Estates, where I can visit you, Mother and Father. Silly, I know.
Some of the sorters pilfer belongings—I see a surly sadcon named Clementine stick a donkey marionette into her knapsack—but I do not steal a thing. In any case, nothing out of the ordinary comes my way that day or the other days I volunteer. Nothing curious. Perhaps I have lost my ability to discern.
Or perhaps Zig is telling me to find my own way, fly on my own angel wings, as it were (ha-ha).
One evening, while I sit on my bed at the Deborah and draw a still life of a scruffy one-eared teddy bear that once shared its life with Willa Blake, an idea pops into my head. I mull it over and decide it is indeed splendid. I know what I ought to do with my afterlife, and with the still life that is Johnny Henzel.
I immediately write Peter Peter in care of Curios. I apologize for my long silence. I ask for my old job back provided he can forgive me for stealing one of his curious objects (the revolver). I arrange to see him and Thelma on the Friday before the Monday of my release from the Deborah.
We meet in the art room, a neutral ground that Dr. Schmidt favors for get-togethers between sadcons and non-sadcons. On the walls of the room, I hang many of my still-life drawings because there is a link between them and the favor I will ask Peter Peter and Thelma.
They show up wearing matching straw hats tied with red ribbons, like those worn by gondoliers. Thelma goes teary-eyed and says, “My baby’s lost weight.” I tell her she knows as well as I that weight loss is impossible in Town unless a townie lops off, say, his own hand or foot. I tell her she has lost not a single pound since last I saw her, and she hugs her fat stomach tightly, which means she is hugging me.
Peter Peter has a gift for me in an oblong box that looks like the type that fountain pens come in. Inside is not a pen, however. Instead, the gift is a one-of-a-kind newly arrived curious object, a mercury thermometer that shows that the Deborah’s art room is seventy-seven degrees Fahrenheit and twenty-five degrees Celsius. Mercury, also known as quicksilver, is element No. 80, abbreviated as Hg.
“I want you to keep the thermometer till you return to work at Curios,” Peter Peter says.
“I am touched,” I tell them. “Touched in the sense of emotionally moved, not in the sense of slightly mad.”
Thelma shows me her gap-toothed smile. Peter Peter chuckles. These people do care about me. It is hard to imagine why at this point in my afterlife.
I tell them my splendid idea.
Three months later, a new exhibition is set to begin its run at Curios. It is simply called Zoo, like the name of the pet shop Johnny had planned to open one day.
My posters for the exhibition mention that Zoo will pay tribute to the late animals that once called Town their home: the gerbil Lars, the budgie Gloria, the kitten Crappy, the roach Rover, and the sea monkeys, which we never bothered to name.
Over the past week, townies have written their names on our sign-up sheet for a guided visit of Zoo to be held on Sunday evening. For the event, places are limited to thirteen and reserved on a first-come, first-served basis.
When Sunday evening arrives, I gather my audience in front of the door leading into the exhibition hall that houses Zoo. Above the door is a sign painted with a big red Z, a big white O, and a big blue O (the colors are Thelma’s idea; she is patriotic). An ornate old bureau is set in front of the door so nobody can slip into Zoo before I am ready. When a boy in an NBC peacock T-shirt tries sliding the bureau away, Czar, who now serves as the security guard at Curios, yells, “Get your dirty paws off that, you motherf*cking, assl*cking ignoramus!”
I feel bad for the peacock boy because he and all my visitors tonight are the kind of avid pupils, bookworms, and loners who would spend their lunch hours studying in the library at Helen Keller. In other words, they are versions of yours truly.
When Casper the Friendly Ghost reads eight o’clock, I emerge from a table in the corner, where I have been quietly polishing Susan B. Anthony coins with a toothbrush dipped in white vinegar. I introduce myself as Oliver Dalrymple, their Zoo guide this evening.
“Hey, you’re that kid!” says a girl who—oddly en
ough—has the end of her arm shoved inside a sock puppet of a tabby kitten, possibly a likeness of Crappy. When she talks, she makes the kitten’s mouth move. “You’re Gunboy, aren’t you?” she asks.
Townies have begun to call me Gunboy.
“There’s a little Gunboy in all of us,” I reply.
I nod toward Czar. He begins dragging the bureau away from the door with help from Peter Peter, who has come out of his office to assist.
My guests eye me warily, now that they know who I am. They seem to fear I may draw a revolver and shoot them down.
I open the doors to the exhibition hall and lead them inside. Around the rectangular room are displays commemorating Town’s animal life. The gerbil display, for instance, is Lars’s former terrarium with its little exercise wheel and water bottle and even a few of his half-chewed toilet rolls, all of which Peter Peter saved because he is a pack rat (or perhaps a pack gerbil, ha-ha).
Now that I, too, am an artist of sorts, I made a faux gerbil using scraps from a leatherette handbag and the brown bristles of old hairbrushes. Posted on a bristol board beside the gerbil display is the story of Lars, mentioning such details as his Latin name (Meriones unguiculatus), the zone he was discovered in (Three), the date of his discovery in a crate of tennis balls (September 25, 1974), his favorite food (parsnips), and his life span in heaven years (two years, one month, four days).
Around the room are similar displays for the other creatures. I made a tabby out of felt and fabric, and a budgie out of yellow and green feather boas.
As for Blaberus craniifer, we have plenty of Johnny’s drawings, from thumb sketches in India ink to full-page sketches in colored pencil. I made a life-size figurine of the cockroach out of clay and painted a detailed black blotch on its head to replicate the death mask that gives the insect its name.
I still do not understand why Rover vanished instead of Johnny, but perhaps it had simply reached the end of its natural life in heaven. Or perhaps it died of a broken heart (a cockroach’s heart, by the way, has thirteen chambers).
My guests listen politely as I give my talk about Zoo and the creatures in it. I try to pique their curiosity by telling amusing anecdotes: for example, that Crappy was so named because she was separated from her mother too young and thus took a long time to learn how to use the litter box containing playground sand as her kitty litter (an example of which is on display).
A gloomy-looking fellow, whom somebody called an old boy, says, “We were all separated from our mothers too young.”
After I finish my talk, I lead my visitors to the end of the exhibition hall, where, hanging from the ceiling, is a red velvet curtain.
“What’s behind it? The Wizard of Oz?” says a smart aleck.
I shake my head and draw the curtain to reveal a door leading into a smaller exhibition hall (formerly a storage room). I open the door and guide my visitors inside. It is dark in this second room, and so nobody sees at first what is on display. With the light from Casper the Friendly Ghost, I find the floor lamp and click it on.
“Behold the star attraction,” I say.
At the back of the windowless room, lying on a single bed, is a boy. We all approach his bed.
“It’s just a kid sleeping,” the smart aleck says. “Big whoop!”
“Rise and shine!” says puppet girl, and snaps her free fingers in his face.
“He won’t wake up,” I tell her.
We all continue staring at the boy in the bed. Nobody makes a sound.
Finally, a fat girl exclaims, “Jeez, it’s the half-deader!”
The other twelve visitors also arrive at the same conclusion: before them lies the body of Johnny Henzel.
Johnny Henzel is my splendid idea.
Let me tell you, Mother and Father, that nobody was initially receptive to my plan. I first had to persuade Peter Peter and Thelma, who found the idea a little ghoulish. As for Reginald Washington, well, he wanted me confined to the Deborah for an extra six months simply for suggesting my idea. I explained, however, that tucking Johnny away in an infirmary and forgetting about him would do no one any good. We need to remember him. We need to talk about his life here and in America to better understand his story. As a result, we can be better prepared should Zig one day send us another boy like Johnny Henzel.
My aim, you see, is to honor my friend, but also to avoid another bricking of another sadcon.
In the end, Reginald and the do-good council gave my Zoo the green light, at least on a trial basis, thanks partly to support the project obtained from warden Lydia Finkle. When I asked Reginald what he meant by “trial basis,” he replied, “We’ll shut you down, Mr. Dalrymple, if you go mental again.”
For opening night, Johnny is wearing cutoff jeans and a tank top printed with Tony the Tiger of Frosted Flakes fame. The blue bauble sits atop the bullet wound. On his feet, he wears gym socks whose bumblebee stripes (yellow and black) are the Helen Keller colors.
His eyes are closed. He does not look peaceful, nor does he look in pain. He looks absorbed, as if he is figuring out a tricky arithmetic problem in his head.
Czar comes into the hall and warns visitors not to get too close to Johnny. “Don’t smother the guy, folks,” he orders. “Give him some air.”
“We can’t smother somebody who isn’t alive,” say the girl and Crappy 2.
“Hello there, Johnny,” I say, leaning over the bed. “How are you doing this fine evening?” I do not expect an answer. If he did blink open his eyes and say, “Hunky-dory,” thirteen townies might develop their own holey hearts (ha-ha).
Around the room, I posted all of Johnny’s drawings and paintings that I could gather together. He had done portraits and caricatures of Esther, Thelma, and me, as well as his parents and Brenda, his jailer Ringo, his basset hound—and of course Gunboy. He drew dorms (the Frank and Joe), trees, bicycles, warehouses, jungle gyms, basketball nets, dandelions, even a row of urinals.
I give my thirteen visitors the facts that I recall from Johnny’s life in Hoffman Estates and from his afterlife in Town. I do not hide embarrassing details. I tell them I now suspect that the camp (the infamous Squeaky Fromme) he attended in the summer before our passing was actually a kind of mental asylum like the Deborah.
Since it is too late for mercy, I try to elicit sympathy for my friend. I tell my audience that a troubled mind can cause a boy to do strange things. “He had an illness as serious as the cancer that felled certain thirteen-year-olds before they came to Town,” I say.
I allow the visitors to touch Johnny’s arms and legs. “Gross!” the fat girl cries, but the others take turns running a hand along his limbs. They tell me his skin is cool.
“Does he have rigor mortis?” the old boy asks.
“Good question,” I say. “But no, he does not.” To prove this, I lift one of his arms and bend it back and forth at the elbow.
“Is he in a coma?” asks a boy with a walleye (strabismus).
“No, the comatose still have functioning hearts, whereas Johnny’s is as quiet as a piece of lapis lazuli.” I refer to lapis lazuli in particular because its name translates as “stone of heaven.”
“Is the bullet still in him?” the same boy asks.
I move the fake topaz away from his dented wound. The dried blood is almost black.
“The bullet hasn’t resurfaced,” I tell my guests.
The hand-puppet girl suggests that Johnny’s bullet may have dissolved, and I admit she may be right. “Can we see the gun?” she asks.
There are drawers that slide out from beneath the bed. Two are used to store extra clothes because I change Johnny’s tank top, shorts, socks, and boxers weekly, with Czar’s help. Even though Johnny no longer sweats, he retains an oniony odor, but it is so faint I have to put my nose almost against his scalp to detect it.
Another drawer contains the revolver. I open it and pull out the gun. Several of the visitors gasp. The fat girl clasps her hands over her mouth.
The smart aleck says, �
��It ain’t loaded, I hope,” but he has an excited look that says otherwise.
I pass the revolver around. Some of my guests take it as though it were a hot potato or a grenade set to go off.
The puppet girl holds Crappy 2 close to my face. One of its button eyes is coming loose, the black thread hanging like an optic nerve. “When you pointed that gun at your friend’s chest,” Crappy 2 says, “what was going through your mind?”
“It may sound strange for me to say so,” I answer, “but I thought I was saving Johnny.”
“Maybe when he shot you,” Crappy 2 replies, “Johnny thought he was saving you too.”
Later that evening, after everyone has left curios, I am sweeping the floor in Johnny’s room when I hear footsteps in Zoo. The red velvet curtain is pushed aside, and there stands Esther Haglund in the doorway. She is wearing a shiny white dress, and her hair is piled atop her head in ringlets.
“Wow, you look just like an angel, Esther,” I say. I have not seen her since my early days at the Deborah.
“I want to show Johnny I made an effort,” she says, smoothing out the front of her dress. “It’s taffeta, but not real silk. Unfortunately, that b*stard Zig is stingy with his silk.”
I heard from Thelma that Esther moved to Three, where she now makes clothes for other townies, with help—believe it or not—from former jailer Ringo, who finally quit his job at the Gene to become a tailor.
Thelma must have told Esther about Zoo and its main attraction. My old friend goes over and sits on the side of Johnny’s bed and, with a deep sigh, touches a finger to the bridge of his nose, just as I once did to dearly departed Uncle Seymour.
I wonder if Esther was in love with Johnny Henzel. Perhaps that is why she needed time away from him and me. I picture the broken plastic heart from the Operation game in her chest, and my eyes tear up, something they have not done in some time. I turn away so Esther does not see me.
“Excuse me a minute, Esther. I need to fetch something from my office,” I say, to give her time alone with Johnny.