Not As Crazy As I Seem

by George Harrar

  There are forty-two holes in one line of one square block in the false ceiling overhead. It took me about ten minutes to count them, and my neck is sore from leaning back for so long. The trick to counting the holes is not to blink. One blink and you lose your place. I had to start over twenty times.

  I wonder if Dad ever plays tricks on the bodies. He has them all to himself behind a locked door. He could do whatever he wants to them. Who would know? Does he feel up the women? Does he check out the men?

  That's a pretty sick thought. I don't normally think sick thoughts. I guess I'm getting weirded out knowing that just on the other side of the door marked "Private," Dad is sucking the blood out of a guy, then filling him up with formaldehyde or something. What if Dad knew the guy—could he still do it? What if ... Granddad—did my father work on him?

  "Devon?"

  Dad's standing in the doorway, wiping his hands on a white towel, one finger at a time. His hands are red, as if they've been soaking in hot water.

  "Are you done?"

  "I just did the basic plumbing work today. Tomorrow I'll put on the makeup so he'll be fresh for the viewing."

  "A viewing? Isn't he all mangled?"

  "His body was pretty torn up, but his face doesn't have a scratch. I caught a break on that. But I still have to speak to his wife. She wants him buried in his old navy uniform."

  "What's wrong with that?"

  "He put on a lot of weight since those days. The jacket's so small I'd have to slit it up the spine to get it on him."

  "So? No one would ever know. It's not like he's going to roll over on his stomach or anything."

  "No, there's not much chance of that. Still, I want Mr. Keegan to rest easy."

  I like that Dad cares about the dead so much. Somebody has to. Actually, I think he prefers being with dead people more than live people. I heard Mom tell him this one time when he was complaining about going to a party with her.

  My grandfather was buried in his overalls, the ones he wore working in his garden before his heart got bad. He wrote that in his will to make sure nobody would try to put a suit on him. Granddad knew how to get his way, even after dying.

  CHAPTER 16

  If it's Wednesday afternoon, I must be at the shrink's. Of course, if I keep my eyes closed like this I could make believe I was anywhere else in the universe I want to be. I've always thought Pluto sounded like an interesting planet. At least it's far away.

  "Devon, I'd like to begin."

  Okay, back to Earth. If I don't cooperate Dr. W. will call home and get Dad angry at me again and who knows what he'll make me do next. Going to pick up a corpse with him was enough "consequences" for one week. It seemed like a "punishment" to me, but Mom and Dad don't use that word. I think they read in one of those "How to Raise a Perfect Kid" books that "punishment" sounded medieval.

  "All right, Doc. I'm ready."

  "I want to try something a little different today. Let's talk about memories. What's the first thing you can remember?"

  I send my mind backwards to our home in Amherst where we moved after Granddad died, then further back to Intercourse, where he lived with us on the third floor, when he got sick. I was the one who ran things up and down for him. He gave me a dollar a week to do it, which doesn't sound like much, but this wasn't a normal dollar. Each Friday he had me pull out his metal coin box from under his bed, and he gave me a Peace silver dollar from the 1920s. Each one of them is worth about thirty dollars today. He told me not to tell Mom and Dad because they wouldn't like him paying me. He said it was his business who he gave his money to, and he wanted to give it to me.

  I don't want to think about him. He was the nicest person in the world to me, and I hope he went to Heaven or someplace else good. I tried to be nice to him, too, but I was pretty young then—eight years old. It's hard being nice all the time when you're just a kid. It's not easy when you're a teenager either. The problem is that what seems perfectly nice to you isn't perfect for adults. I can't explain that.

  I grab a soft fuzzy ball from the shrinks shelf and throw it up and down a few times. Then I aim at the hoop hanging over the door. This shot is for Granddad. I shoot and miss by a foot. I never should have thought that. I pick up the ball and throw again and miss again. I pick it up again and throw and miss and pick it up and throw and miss...

  "Devon?"

  ...and pick it up and throw and swish—Devon the Dominator scores again! Granddad's safe.

  "I asked you about the first thing you can remember?"

  "I know. I was thinking. I don't remember anything first."

  "There must be something you can recall from when you were perhaps six years old, or even five or four."

  "I only remember general things, like going to school and..."

  "All right, that's a memory—going to school. What do you remember about it?"

  I try to think of something, anything to satisfy Dr. W. "Okay, I remember that my kindergarten teacher smelled like glue. She had big hands and sometimes when she touched you she stuck to you. She had hair on her hands, too, and above her lip, like a mustache. It was pretty disgusting."

  "Good, very good."

  This doesn't make sense. "Why is it very good that I remember a teacher who has hairy hands and smells like glue? Why would I want my brain filled up with that?"

  "It's not what you remember exactly, but that you remember at all. Sometimes people don't remember much because they're trying to block out certain memories, and they forget other things along with them."

  "I'm not blocking anything. I just don't remember a lot."

  "Let me ask you, were you happy as a little boy?"

  Happy? I'm not used to thinking of myself as happy or sad. Mostly I feel not unhappy, which is what Tanya said was the best I could hope for at this point in my life. But that's too complicated to explain to a shrink. It's simpler to claim happiness. "I was definitely happy. I was ecstatic, joyful, eu ... phonic."

  "Euphoric?"

  "Yeah, that's it, euphoric. I was euphoric from morning till night."

  "You're not euphoric anymore?"

  "I think I outgrew it."

  "What did you grow into?"

  Now that's easy to explain—"Depressed, nervous, sad, dejected, rejected, ejected..."

  "Ejected?"

  "Sure. I got ejected from my advanced biology class."

  "Does that bother you?"

  No, it doesn't, and I'm not sure why. A few weeks ago I would have painted myself green rather than get kicked out of class. But now I don't care so much. I even went underground with a kid smoking marijuana. I don't know if that's progress or not. Do normal kids think it's the end of the world to get into trouble?

  "Devon, I'm getting some signals from you that I want to follow up on."

  Signals? What am I, a radio station or something?

  "I believe that your fixation on doing certain things is your attempt to apply order to a world in which you feel powerless. You may also frequently doubt yourself about things you would normally feel sure of—turning off the burner on the stove, for instance."

  "I only use the microwave, Doc."

  "Yes, well, the principle applies throughout your life. The French call it folie de doute—the doubting disease. Quite commonly such fixations arise from some unresolved problem that occurred very early in your life. Do you know what I mean?"

  How could I when he's speaking French?

  "What I'm trying to say is that often children grow up with significant anxieties and compulsions because they underwent a trauma at an early age. For certain youngsters, it's being abused in some way."

  Abused, me? What's he talking about? "I wasn't abused."

  "Sometimes teenagers or even adults don't realize they were abused."

  How could you not know if somebody took a belt to you or tried to touch you? You'd have to be crazy. "I'd know if I was abused."

  "All right, I'll accept your answer for now."

  "What do you mean, 'for n
ow'?"

  "I mean we'll have to revisit the question again, that's all, maybe after you've had a chance to think about it."

  "I don't want to think about it."

  "Thinking about it bothers you?"

  "There is no 'it,' okay? Nothing ever happened to me. Nobody ever touched me. I had a perfectly wonderful, super great childhood."

  "I see my questions upset you."

  I close my eyes and try to imagine I'm standing on Planet Pluto, looking out into the wide open universe, where nobody ever asks you stupid questions.

  CHAPTER 17

  Yesterday was Shrink Day, today is the weekly Pep Day at school, tomorrow is Friday, the beginning of another weekend of nothing to do. This is how life goes, one day at a time, one minute at a time, one little heartbeat at a time.

  The thing is, I don't know where my life is going. I don't mean whether I'll be a doctor or lawyer or anything like that when I grow up. If I'm going to be anything it will be a vet. I'd rather spend my time with animals than people any day. Animals don't judge you all the time. My dog Lucky used to sleep on my bed, and he didn't mind if I got up to wash my hands in the middle of the night. He didn't bark or look at me like I was crazy. He just yawned and curled himself over my feet again when I climbed back under the covers.

  So when I say I don't know where my life is going, I mean whether it's going forward or backwards or anywhere at all. I feel stuck, like I'm in some kind of weird quicksand that isn't pulling me under but won't let me go, either. I keep coming up with more things I have to do to make sure I stay floating.

  Like today. I walked to school in the gutter instead of on the sidewalk. The reason is that I did that on Monday because they were working on the sidewalks, and I had a really good day. So Tuesday morning when I left home I thought maybe I'd better walk in the gutter again or something bad would happen to Mom. Maybe she'd piss off some angry husband in one of her divorce cases and he'd wait outside the courthouse and shoot her. Or she'd have an accident driving home—hit a telephone pole or something. I don't know why I started thinking about her just when I left the house, but I did, and then somehow the possible bad thing happening to her got connected in my mind to the gutter. So every day I have to walk in the gutter. I suppose this is what Dr. W. wants to know, but I hate talking about this stuff. It's bad enough thinking crazy things and doing them without having to tell people about them. Besides, he'd probably just ask why it's my mother that I always worry about and not my father, like I have some complex about her.

  Maybe it's because Dad hassles me more. He's been on me a lot lately about getting out of the house. He told me that it was a new rule that I had to do something at least one afternoon or evening each weekend. I told him I was too old for rules like that. He said I wasn't. Then he said I also had to join an activity or club at school. I told him that you couldn't just join something in the middle of February, but he said to do it anyway and walked away. Another argument lost.

  So I've decided I'll go to Harvard Square again on Saturday and see if the old guy is standing outside C'est Bon with Little Sasha. I'm going to take extra money with me and I may buy the kitten from him. I haven't asked Mom or Dad yet, but they got me a dog, so why not a cat?

  For an activity I joined the Latin Club's secret project. No one knows what it is except the members. Mr. Green wouldn't even tell me when I signed up. He said the other students would show me when I came to the meeting next week.

  I guess that's improvement—I have plans. And the best thing about them is that they aren't today. It's three p.m. and I'm locking my locker for the last time and—

  "Heading home?"

  Tanya's standing next to me, swinging her backpack in her hand.

  "Yeah, I guess so. You have a club, right?"

  "Gay-Straight was canceled today, so I have nothing to do till the late bus."

  "You're in Gay-Straight?"

  "Sure. I'm treasurer."

  "What do they need a treasurer for?"

  "We raise money to send to kids who get discriminated against. They need lawyers."

  "Oh."

  Tanya pokes my arm. "So, I have an hour till the late bus. Why don't you invite me over?"

  Over—does she mean what I think she means? I close my lock with a sharp click.

  "You live close, right?"

  "Not real close. Three blocks."

  "That's close. I could come over for a little while."

  What can I say? Tanya isn't somebody you can even seem like you're disrespecting and get away with it. "My house is pretty dull."

  "That's okay."

  "I mean really dull."

  "I don't mind."

  It's pretty obvious that nothing I can say is going to change her mind. I don't know why, but she wants to come home with me. I have to let her.

  We walk down Concord Street and under the train bridge. Tanya is stomping on the edges of ice along the sidewalk, making a crunchy sound. She can walk and stomp the ice and look around at everything and talk nonstop—all at the same time. Me, I'm watching out for Alonzo. We turn up Moore Street past the Japanese restaurant, and I figure we're out of his range. Now I can breathe.

  Tanya leans against me a little. "Your parents won't be home, will they?"

  "I don't know. They work odd hours. One of them could be."

  "So what would they say?"

  "About what?"

  "Guys don't usually bring girls home unless it's their girlfriend, you know? They might freak, seeing me."

  "Because of your lip ring?"

  "That's funny. You know what I mean." She touches her face.

  "They won't care that you're black."

  "African American."

  "Sorry, African American. They're pretty liberal."

  "Maybe they're liberal about other people, but not when it comes to their own kid. That happens a lot."

  "No, they'll like you. They'll be happy I'm bringing anybody home. I could bring home Ben and he could be calling everybody Nazi and they'd say, 'It's nice you're making friends, Devon.'"

  "So I'm just anybody!"

  "No, you're not anybody—I mean, you're somebody, and they'll like you."

  Nobody's home.

  I can tell because neither of their cars is in the driveway or the garage. Still, when we get inside, I call out for them, pretending they could be there.

  Tanya drops her book bag against the hall wall. "Nice place. What do your folks do?"

  "Mom's a divorce lawyer. Dad owns a funeral home."

  "A funeral home?"

  "Yeah, he embalms people for a living. Wait here, okay? I'll only be a minute."

  She walks behind me to the stairs. "I want to see your room."

  "No ... I mean, it's nothing special—just a room."

  "I still want to see it."

  "It's kind of messy."

  She looks at me with a little tilt of her head." Your room, messy? I don't believe it."

  "I'll be down in a minute, really."

  "Is this another thing of yours?"

  A thing? I guess it is. Mom says I have "tendencies," now Tanya says I have "things." "It's just that I haven't had anybody in my room."

  "Nobody? Ever?"

  "Yeah, but it's only been two months since we moved here. The cleaner doesn't even go in."

  "How about your parents?"

  "Mom does sometimes. Dad usually stays out."

  "It's like your personal space, right?"

  "Right."

  "That's cool—I can relate."

  I start up the stairs, but hearing her behind me, I stop and turn around.

  "I'll just look from the doorway. I won't even put a toe inside. How's that?"

  We go upstairs and I open up my bedroom door. I hang my book bag on the wall hook and then sit at my desk. Usually I turn on my computer and then take a shower while it's booting up. Today I just sit there.

  Tanya's standing at the doorway. Only her head is sticking in. "This is like being in a museum wher
e they rope off a room and you can only look in."

  "I don't think anybody would want to see my bedroom, Tanya."

  "Sure they would. It's the kind of room all parents want their kid to have."

  "My dad thinks I keep it too neat. One time back in Amherst he took TV away for a weekend because I had my shirts lined up by their colors in my closet."

  "He took away TV for that?"

  "Not just for that."

  "What else?"

  I don't usually talk about this stuff to other kids. Actually I never talk about this. It's nobody else's business. So why am I now? I'll have to think about that tonight. Right now Tanya's waiting for an answer.

  "He didn't like me buttoning my shirts all the way down when I hang them up, that's all. It's no big deal."

  "You afraid they're going to fall off if you don't?"

  She asks me this seriously, as if there's a logical reason why a fifteen-year-old buttons his shirts on their hangers all the way down. Even I know there's no reason. "I just got in the habit one time, and I kept doing it."

  "How'd you get in the habit?"

  God, she's worse than Mom with her questions. I just shrug.

  "Let me see."

  I lean out of the chair and nudge open the closet door with my foot. There are my shirts, two white, four blue, three green, then the plaids, and finally the flannels, all buttoned on their hangers from top to bottom.

  Tanya shivers a little and hugs herself. "It's kind of spooky, like in the Twilight Zone, you know?... You have now entered a world where every button is buttoned, where every shirt is hung according to its color, where every object has its place."

  I slip into my own Rod Serling voice: "In this world, you must line up your shoes under your bed, sharpen every pencil, and make sure all your CDs are in alphabetical order." When I think of it as the Twilight Zone, it does seem spooky, but funny, too.