by Ilsa J. Bick
Boy in a Box
1
TONY SUCKS IN a breath.
Everything has changed. Now he stands, towel around his waist and toothbrush in hand, before a bathroom mirror fogged with condensation because he’s just stepped out of a hot shower. Michael Jackson’s tinny falsetto splutters about how he might be trying to scream from a piece-of-crap Sony transistor, while from beyond the bathroom door comes the ceaseless, monotonous one-note song that is his mother: kak-kak-kak.
I’m back. There has been no transition, no snap to wakefulness, no ka-BANG and bolt of bright yellow light, shattering the darkness, because his father—hair standing in corkscrews, and sleep crumbs like snow in the purple hollows under his eyes—has come bursting in to see why his son’s screaming his lungs out. He is just suddenly awake, like he’s been dreaming standing up and with his eyes open.
And I’ve been here before. Déjà vu of the worst kind blasts through his body. On his electric toothbrush—which would be totally boss, if it wasn’t for the fact that this is a little kid’s Snoopy set (red-roofed doghouse and everything) that his pastor-dad unearthed at Goodwill—a bloated green worm of mint Crest oozes on bristles so worn they splay like the tired legs of dead tarantulas. I’m getting ready for school. His eyes flick to the mirror, where his face is an oval blur behind scummy moisture. In ten minutes, I’ll go downstairs and flush the oatmeal glop Dad’s left, because he just doesn’t get that I hate that stuff. I’ll brush my teeth again, because Mom will want a kiss. I’ll drive my piece-of-shit Camry to school. I’m where I belong, and everything is as it’s always been.
This should make him feel better, but only for a second. Sure, of course, he’s doing a lot of the same things. But not everything is exactly the same now as it was, say, yesterday or last week, is it? No, that would be crazy. His eyes fall to a Twisted Tales that he really likes. The comic book’s open to his favorite story, about these soldiers and their lieutenant, a guy named Hacker, who suspects that he and his men have been hunkering in their foxholes forever. Then his gaze slides right to the paperback of Our Mutual Friend he’s supposed to be reading instead of his comic. (God, what a snooze, and Dickens was popular? The whole river rat thing—fishing bodies out of the Thames—is okay, but there are so many characters, and trying to keep track of that John Harmon guy and all his disguises and alter egos and who the dude’s supposed to be now only gives Tony a headache. And he’s got to cough up a ten-page paper comparing and contrasting Dickens’s use of doubles in this monster with either Great Expectations or that story … The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain? Gag him with a spoon. At least Haunted Man is short, the last Christmas book Dickens published, and anyone with half a brain can see that Evil Genius is really Redlaw. Thank God, they’re going on to Sherlock Holmes next. Hound of the Baskervilles—now that’s a story. That black dog gives him the shivers. He wonders if he can talk the teacher into trying Lovecraft after that. Talk about spooky.)
But how long have I been reading this stupid book? He can’t remember. He starts to reach a hand to the Dickens he’s placed facedown to mark his place … then hesitates. Think. Where, exactly, is he in the book? He knows the name John Harmon and the thing about river rats—what else can he recall about the story? Jesus, why can’t I remember? He tries to dredge up some more facts, scenes, names of other characters—and can’t. It is almost as if this is all the information he’s allowed to know.
Oh, that is crazy. It’s because the book is so boring he’d rather set his hair on fire, that’s all. But come on, he must know what he’s read so far, right? After all, he knows about John Harmon and doubles, and isn’t there a girl? Important girl … what’s her name? Prying the information from his brain is like worrying a piece of meat from between his teeth that’s wedged in so tight he needs a toothpick to dig it out …
“Lizzie.” The name comes in an explosive hiss. He should feel a blast of relief—but all he gets is a jolt in his chest. Like the name Lizzie is totally bad news. But that is the girl’s name in Our Mutual Friend: Lizzie, short for Elizabeth, and she … sheeeee … Christ. The fine hairs spike along his neck. That’s all he knows about the chick. The name, and that’s it. This is like my nightmare, when I couldn’t remember where I lived, when I didn’t have a face …
“Screw it. Not important.” The words ride a dry croak. “Who the hell cares? All I have to do is look and then I’ll know what page I’m on.” But he’s afraid to check. He has the funniest feeling: flip that book over … and everything will be a blur. Or blank. That the book is just a prop, like in a movie.
“This is nuts,” he says as, on the radio, Jackson’s wailing to some girl that she better hope this is her imagination. Got that right. The song grates. He doesn’t particularly love Michael Jackson, but anything’s better than listening to his mother kak-kak-kakking.
Only … is she out there?
Of course; you just heard her. Don’t be dumb. Just that nightmare or daymare or whatever the hell he’d just had—of him as a blank-faced mannequin floating in midair—still eating at him.
On the other hand … is there anything beyond this bathroom? Trying to place details is like trying to remember scenes from that Dickens novel. All he has to do is open the door and check; pick up the book, scan a page, and he’ll know. But that all feels too weird.
On the radio, Jackson has decided the girl hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in hell against something with forty eyes—and man, is that close to his nightmare or what? Spooked, he switches off the radio, Michael urping out before he can tell him that they—the monsters, the demons, these creepy zombies—will possess him, too.
“You have to calm down, Tony.” He’s tired; his mom’s dying; his preacher-dad’s wearing out his knees praying to thin air. If Tony’s not careful, he’ll wind up like Jack Nicholson in that movie a few years ago, which he’d never have seen if Matt hadn’t worked the theater’s ticket office. (Honestly, if he had to put up with Shelley Duvall, he’d go after her with an ax, too.) The little kid was okay. Come to think of it, wasn’t that kid’s imaginary friend named Tony? Was that in the movie or the book? Both? He can’t remember, and no, he is not imaginary.
“Why are you even thinking about all this, you moron?” His eyes tick back to the fogged bathroom mirror where his reflection is nothing but a shimmering blob. Because of the nightmare he knows he’s had but can’t really remember anymore?
There is a sodden little splot. His gaze falls to the sink, where a light green glob of toothpaste shimmers wetly, like exotic bird shit, on porcelain. Come on. You’ll be late for school. Turning on the tap, he uses a forefinger to edge the slick glop from the porcelain and down the drain. He shudders at the feel. Like a squirmy slug, like snot. Cranking on the hot water full blast, he rinses his finger and lets out a little ugh at the sudden burn. God, stop it already. He studies the angry red scald. Be lucky if that doesn’t blister. It’s just toothpaste, you dope.
Squishing out another rope of green goop, he lifts the brush to his mouth, then hesitates. Behind its watery film, his reflection patiently waits. He feels its eyes trying to bore through that mist—but for a split second, he has the eeriest feeling: I don’t know what you look like. Which means he’s not sure what he looks like either, just like that moment in his dream when he reached for his face and …
“Stop it.” Yet … has he ever seen his face in this mirror? With his free hand, he skims the hollow under his left eye. In the mirror, the blob shifts, and its arm mimics his move, of course, of course, because that is just a reflection. But what color are his eyes? He waits for the answer to slot into his brain. Nothing comes. Okay, what about the color of my hair? No answer surfaces from the well of his brain; nothing drifts from the dark to settle on his tongue. Total blank.
That’s crazy. I can’t be nothing. But he’s never looked at himself in the mirror now, has he? Has he? He can’t remember. Shit. He feels the spit drying up on his tongue. This is just too close to that damn nightma
re.
Well then, settle it. Go on. Check, you coward. Go on.
“Okay” —and then, casually, “No big deal.” Which is such a lie, because it is, it is. Heart thumping, he uses the side of his left hand to squeegee water from silvered glass, and he seeees … him. He. Whatever. That is, he recognizes the kid with the cap of wet brown curls and light blue eyes in the mirror as the boy he’s always imagined he is.
“Well, who else would it be?” Lifting his hand, he turns it this way and that. His hand, all right. Isn’t it? How can you really tell something like that? Just because you keep waking up in the same body? How do you know that whatever you wake up in is yours?
“What’s going on?” He raises his eyes to his reflection. “Do you know?”
For just a sec, he has the funniest feeling that the kid in the mirror will answer, like that kid stands on the other side of a pane of rain-spattered glass: different bathroom, another Wisconsin, whole other planet. A twin, all tangled up in his life the way Mr. Steele, his physics teacher, says might happen if you believe Schrödinger. (Although Einstein didn’t. But the concept’s cool, actually: that a cat can exist in between, both alive and dead at the same moment. When you look in the box—collapse the wave function is how Steele put it—Schrödinger’s cat is either alive or dead because you looked. You forced that cat to be either/or. The cat can’t be both.)
So he’s stupidly relieved when his reflection perfectly syncs, saying the same thing right back at him at the same time. Still, he can’t rid himself of this nagging sense that something has changed. Like … what has he forced by clearing fog from that bathroom mirror for the very first time? In a funny way, isn’t this bathroom a kind of box? Who knows what’s really beyond the door?
“You’re a nut. You’re going to drive yourself crazy with shit like this.” Thumbing his stupid Snoopy electric to life, he begins scrubbing his teeth, hard and thoroughly. Yet he’s also got this strangest swoop of déjà vu all over again, the sneaking suspicion that this whole routine is something he’s gone through maybe more times than he can count: Michael on the radio, Twisted Tales by the sink, Crest on his toothbrush, and so much green foam on his mouth, he looks like a rabid dog that’s escaped from the set of The Wizard of Oz.
Stop. But he can’t. He spits, sucks water from the faucet, rinses, spits again. Fights the urge to see what the boy in the mirror is doing. Instead, he watches murky spit-water circle down the drain.
What’s new is the nightmare. Now he does turn a look at his reflection. And you. This is the first time I’ve ever wiped away the fog to find you.
It hits him then: the first time.
But the first time … when?
2
BEIRUT HAPPENED IN October. So did Grenada. He knows that it’s the week before Christmas, buuut …
Shit. His heart flutters against the cage of his ribs. He reaches for his comic, the movements as slo-mo as a dream. Being generally sucky at art, he doesn’t know squat about perspective, but he thinks the view in the first color panel is foreshortened, the scene set as if you’re looking up from the bottom of a foxhole to a soldier with a weapon balanced on his lap and the bright coin of a moon hanging in a purple, starless sky. His gaze skims the panel’s last line, when Hacker thinks that maybe he and his men have been in this desert …
“Forever,” he says, and wonders just who he’s talking about here. Look at it a certain way, and isn’t Hacker, stuck on six flimsy pages sandwiched between glossy covers, a guy in a box, too? Hacker’s only alive when Tony’s there to read him, right? Yeah, but what really happens inside the comic book when I’m not looking? Does Hacker go off and do something else? Maybe characters from other stories decide, Hey, let’s go visit those guys on page 20; that’s waaay more interesting than here. Or when Tony decides to start Hacker’s story on page 13 instead of 10 … doesn’t that become Hacker’s present, his now, as opposed to then?
And what if he—Tony, a real live boy—what if he’s the same way? What if he’s like Hacker, and the only reason he’s standing at his sink, brushing his teeth, getting ready for school, listening to his mother die … is because he’s not a real boy but only a character in a book that someone just happens to be reading?
“What?” he says to his reflection. “What are you doing? Stop thinking this way.” But he can’t stop this, and isn’t entirely sure he wants to. His brain is feverish, a steaming, belching runaway train, his thoughts whirring over the tracks clickityclack-clickity-clack. Because … here’s the thing, the flip side, the whole other part of it all.
What happens to him when there’s no one there, outside, looking at him and putting him together letter by letter, word by word?
Jesus. If this moment, this day, is only a couple three, four pages in a book … what about when the book is closed? When there’s no one out there to read him? Or when they’ve skipped his chapter, started in a different place? What if he—his character—never shows up again? Does that mean he doesn’t exist?
If there is no one to read him … is there any him—a Tony—at all?
“Stop it, stop it!” Of course he’s real; he knows about Michael Jackson and Einstein and Jack Nicholson! But wait wait wait—he’s starting to hyperventilate, his breaths coming short and sharp—don’t writers put pieces of real life into books all the time to make the characters seem more like people?
Damn. That’s right. Pop-cultural references is what his English teacher said: Writers do this to ground characters in their particular time periods or add a layer of verisimilitude to the narrative. The references didn’t have to be books either, or movies, but slang, food, songs, even people who’d actually existed. Like a writer could slot in Einstein or Charles Dickens or Arthur Conan Doyle, use one of them as a character to make the book seem closer to reality. God, and if you did that, even if you changed them all around or did one of those alternative-universe things, made them into the people they might have become … would they know they were characters?
“Shit.” His forehead’s slick with perspiration. “Shit.” What if he only knows about Michael Jackson or Crest toothpaste or The Wizard of Oz because some writer—some crazy lady, hunched over a typewriter and stuck in a room somewhere—is playing God, sprinkling cutesy pop-cultural references to make some point, and she’s thinking, Oh, that Tony, he’s such an interesting character; let’s torture him some more.
There’s a sudden crack, like the snap of a branch, and a jump of pain. Winking against the sting of salt, he stares at his hand, then at the mirror and the red splotch on that kid’s cheek. Slapped myself. He just hit himself! Had he meant to do that? Or did the crazy lady at the typewriter just put that in for kicks?
Stop this, stop this! Laughter gurgles in his chest, but he’s afraid to start, worried he won’t stop until he’s clawing out his eyes and eating them like gumdrops. Get a grip. He grits his teeth and welcomes the ache in his jaw. He tastes copper. That’s real. He tongues the small rip in his cheek. I feel that. It hurts. I can taste my blood, and no one wrote that. I did that to myself.
Unlesss … Unless someone wrote that he ought to do it. Unless the crazy lady at the typewriter’s talking to her cat: Oh, this is good, this is great, bwahahaha, go on, slap yourself. Take that, Tony.
Which might happen if he truly isn’t real.
“This is crazy,” he says, and spits, the foamy red gob splatting like a squished mosquito. “Your mom is dying and you’re freaked, and that’s all. Hacker’s the one who’s only ink on crappy paper that you picked up from a drugstore.”
But when did he buy this? He picks up the comic, listens to the rustle of paper. That’s real. It’s got pages. Flipping back to the table of contents—cheap, pulpy paper fanning past so that whatever’s printed there is a blur—he looks for the date. It’s there, solid and in black letters. Okay, okay, this is good. He says it out loud, feeling the words full and heavy and real in his mouth: “April. April, 1983.”
Okay. Doesn’t matter if he c
an’t remember the exact date he tugged the comic from its rack. (Who pays attention to crap like that? No one.) But he’d done that in April, and now, it’s the week before Christmas. Which means December. That’s right. Christmas happens in December, on … He has to close his eyes and think think think. Don’t freak don’t freak don’t freak …
“The twenty-fifth!” he blurts. “Twenty-five. Thirty days have September, April, June, and November … Jesus.” In the mirror, sweat pearls his reflection’s upper lip. “What’s the date, Tony?” he asks that other kid. “Come on, it’s not a trick question. What is today, right now?”
The other kid doesn’t reply. His own head is blank, except for that same phrase:
it’s the week before Christmas.
A slow shudder slithers the rungs of his spine. Easy, take it easy. Think. His gaze settles on the silvered plastic of his Sony transistor. The radio. He snicks it to life, thinking, Yeah, there’s a DJ. He’ll tell me the weather and the time and the …
And it’s still Michael Jackson.
3
NO. HIS THROAT catches and knots. It’s still … it’s … the song’s the sa—
You try to screeeeam. Michael holds the note an impressive four beats. Again. And then he goes on about terror … but, Jesus, Ol’ Michael doesn’t know the half of it.
This is also when he’d … tuned in? Faded in? Awakened in this bathroom, doing the same thing in the same exact way and sequence in a day he’s already been through over and over again and only thinks he’s living for the first time? Because someone cracked the book of his life and this is the page where they started? Or they’ve started from the very beginning, page one, chapter one—where and when he’s not—and now reached the point in the book where he—the character named Tony— finally shows up?
Get out of here. Go to school. Just … Slotting his toothbrush into Snoopy’s red roof, he turns like a little robot boy and reaches for the knob with stiff, robot-boy fingers.