But the old tom would not leave Markus alone. It had wound around his legs even in the middle of the street and now was trying to block his way along the alley that led to the school’s back parking lot. It drove him mad. It really did. Before he knew it, he clutched a broken piece of concrete in his hand, the cat pinched in the tight cradle of his other arm, and he’d shut the thing up but good.
He did not remember asking, but Clark produced a buck knife, and, without hesitating, as if he done this kind of thing every day of his life, Markus went to work, his head hot, his hands shaking with urgency. Man, was he pissed! When he was done, the knife went back to Clark, just like that. He wiped the blade on the ball-field grass and slid it away so neatly Markus couldn’t say just where Clark kept it. He bent too, to swipe his own stained hands through the grass, but they remained sticky and oddly sore.
How had they landed back on Fuller, back on that sidewalk, which now seemed far less magical to Markus, more like a rope twisted around him, yanking him forward?
One of them—was it him?—proposed they take a little drive, see if anyone was around walking the streets like they were.
“I got a van,” Markus said. He choked the words out as if they’d been hidden within him.
But he did have a van. He’d just remembered it. He’d found it parked off a dirt path with keys in the ignition on their last excursion. He’d gone for a piss. GF and the Brit didn’t even know. He’d pocketed the keys and found his way back to it the next night, parked in exactly the same spot, no one around. He’d taken that as a sign and driven the van to the abandoned mill lot, not so long of a walk on a summer’s night with an old friend who carried a bottle he shared without the slightest hint of rancor.
“You mind walking?” he asked Clark, catching his own sour breath.
“Absolutely not,” his new friend replied.
But first Markus had to dart into an alley for a moment. Was it the beer or the bottle? The damn cat? A smell itched his nostrils, made him nauseous as hell. It was worse than the pulp mill, worse than the putrid reek of his new van, worse even than the constant underlying rotten-egg stench of sulfur. It was all around him, like his clothes were saturated. He pulled off his T-shirt and flung it away from him.
Clark, leaning on the opposite wall, seemed unperturbed as, bare-chested, Markus began first to retch against the cinder-block wall in front of him, then a little too dramatically to flail at the cinder bricks as if battling that adversary he’d been waiting for all night. His hand went into his pocket to find something, a soiled napkin, a scrap of paper to wipe his face, but his fingers met only rocklike fragments. The coins! Of course, the gutter coins. But as he pulled his treasure from his pocket, the brother saw he’d picked up not coins, but broken bits of teeth, one whole yellowed incisor, cracked down the middle, and two sharp sticky nails. Holding them in his bloodstained palm, he heard something snap, some part of him, followed by that distant wheezing again, his own sobs.
“Don’t worry,” he thought he heard his new old friend say. “You’ll get used to it.”
THERE IS A CRACK IN EVERYTHING
In the kitchen, my mother dabbed pork chops with a paper towel before dredging them in flour and milk and cracker crumbs and forking them into a blistering fry pan. She’d never acknowledge the heat. Potatoes boiled, the window behind the sink steamed, sweat ringed our faces, but by God, my mother would put a real dinner on the table. She made twice the normal amount, as if we were having invisible dinner guests, and then wrapped half the supper up straightaway in tinfoil.
“You’ll take that to Bryan and Ursie tomorrow, okay?” she said as she put her tinfoil bundles in the refrigerator. She clucked her tongue, and I heard a long conversation in that sound, which all at once berated Trevor Nowicki, mourned Junie, and warned me to keep clear of any trouble Bryan might be sifting through.
For a while, the kitchen churned with purpose. It was the high spark of the evening. Soon, we would eat in a kind of a hush, the little kitchen fan’s beat dwarfed by the evening wind arriving through the open window, rising first with a welcome breeze barely tinged with smoke before escalating into a more malevolent, heavy rush that would whip my mother’s work folders off the counter and turn the tablecloth inside out. Then we would rush around to ease the western windows down, allowing only a few inches of open screen, so that the heat did not reclaim us.
After dinner, my mother left me to clean up the kitchen while she checked on Lud. By the time I finished, the little television on his bureau would be tuned into a romantic comedy from the 1970s, the sound so low, you’d have to be one of my mother’s shelter dogs to hear a thing. Uncle Lud didn’t care. Alone, he slept on, not even waking when I wiped the corners of his mouth, which had gone rheumy, with one of my father’s cotton handkerchiefs.
I sat with him for a few minutes longer, watching the muted romance on the television and imagining Tessa and me in that TV Land city, leaning against a skyscraper, kissing intently while crowds surged by without a second look. Maybe that’s all Tessa needed, I thought: both privacy and witnesses for safety. If Uncle Lud had been awake, he would have seen the longing in me and wiggled his eyebrows in my direction as if patting me on the shoulder from a distance. I might have stayed with him longer, watching the old movie and dreaming up Tessa dialogue, but a rustling down the hall made me uneasy.
In my room, my mother was sitting at my desk, staring at my computer screen.
“You need a better password,” she said. “I figured it out in two seconds flat.”
She went on. “This is terribly slow, isn’t it?”
Just then the computer dinged, and my mother glanced down to poke a finger at the screen, where a new e-mail now joined several unread others from Leila Chen, my physics instructor.
“Leo, you haven’t opened these.”
A new tension was rising off my mother’s velour tracksuit, this one needled by my endlessly dilatory tendencies, the constant spectre of failure, which, when it came to me, she read as outright disaster. She reached up and plucked the glasses off my face.
“You want to go blind, you’ll keep on like this,” she said as she rubbed them clean with a tissue from her pocket. Finally, she handed them back to me and pointed to the screen.
“Aren’t you going to read these?”
“It’s not important, Mum. Just promotional stuff. They’re selling more classes.”
Wrong answer.
“Oh, yeah?” she said, her fingers inching back onto the keyboard. “Like what?”
“Nothing I need,” I said.
“He’s still sleeping,” I said, trying to change the subject.
“You wore him out,” my mother said. Her eyes finally left my screen and landed on me in a way that felt even more unnerving. “It’s not good for either of you. The stories he’s telling call up trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” I wanted to know. I was on Uncle Lud’s team. Even so, I could not help thinking about Snow Woman and Marcus Nagle’s friend Clark. I wondered if with the stories’ constant retelling, Uncle Lud was summoning visitors.
My mother shook her head.
“Keep to your lessons, Leo,” she said. “These stories aren’t yours to keep, no matter what Lud says. It’s too much.
“And promise me,” she said, turning back to the screen, “that you’ll check these e-mails. Tonight. See what they’re offering. You never know. Maybe you could get even a little more extra credit this summer.”
I thought now about my impulsive e-mail to Leila Chen and wondered if I could have already failed, cast outright from a course I’d barely begun.
“If you promise me you won’t,” I said, reaching around her to click out of the e-mail screen.
Although she still seemed loath to leave the computer and the answers it might promise, my mother slowly relinquished her grip on the mouse and stood, but not before casting
one long, sharp look at the notebooks stacked far too neatly on the floor beside my bed, as if she were conducting an inventory.
For the next ten minutes as she shuttled back and forth to the living room, the kitchen, then the washroom, each time finding a way to pass my bedroom door, I pretended great interest in the blue screen before me. But it was only after her own bedroom door squeezed closed and I heard the sibilance of another television voice that I made good on my promise. As if to emphasize the trouble I was in, the sky outside my window flashed with a lightning strike that briefly sucked all the color from the room, and when I focused again it was not on the computer or the dreaded e-mail (an e-mail I would immediately need to stick in the spam file in case my mother went snooping with a new password in mind), but on Bryan’s bedazzled expression as he plotted his attack on Flacker. I felt a little jolt and noticed the loose Band-Aid on my finger. My mother had finally noticed it at suppertime. My efforts with the shovel had opened up the cut, and although I didn’t feel any pain, I was bleeding again. Fortunately—coupled with my father’s predictable remarks over the phone about my clumsiness—the burial provided an excuse my mother not only believed but felt responsible for. I’d slapped on another Band-Aid, but in fiddling with the keyboard, that too had become loosened and once again, a thin trail of blood was running between my fingers, staining the computer’s white keys as I opened the most recent of Leila Chen’s e-mails.
Give up, I said to myself before I’d read a single word. Just give up.
Even as I contemplated how relaxing, how freeing, it would be to let the world go, my finger tracing a line of fresh blood over the keyboard, another nagging voice arrived in my head, loudly interrupting.
Oh, c’mon now. Utilize some positive energy, my father demanded. Don’t waste your energy whining, son. It’s the fellows with energy, the fellows who create or corral energy who make this world turn for every single sucker, rich or poor. Don’t you forget that.
Energy. Cripes. If you’d asked me to define Energy before all this, I would have conjured images of Red Bull cans, of Norbee as a heavy-shouldered pup, leaping through the screens after an imagined cat, of Tessa’s powerful, infrequent grin and its corresponding widening within me, of Uncle Lud racing ahead on a bike down Lamplight Hill. I would not have thought of coiled springs or gunpowder or equations primed and pickled by laws that only a few might ever hear of, let alone “know,” like the Law of Conservation of Energy, which states, according to my course plan, that energy can be neither destroyed nor created and that it is the same in a closed system. Energy that is absorbed into a system must always be equal to the energy released. It made me uneasy to think about Energy the way I thought the physics course defined it, always present, a lurking swirl of potential or kinetic. One course problem after another, all rife with key words—objects of mass, transformation of energy, initial velocity, blah, blah, blah—flailed me because the ultimate questions of the physical world would end up being about Energy—what had it done, what could it do, where it was.
Dear Leo Kreutzer . . .
Leila Chen’s e-mails always began formally. Sometimes I imagined my distance-learning instructor meeting my mother, the two of them, side by side on the couch, engaged in trading calendars etched with schedules for me.
You see here, Mrs. Kreutzer, Leila Chen would say, here is where Leo Kreutzer must deliver Section B, take his midterm exam, engage in final project.
She’d likely snap open her own laptop to prove her own diligence, spooling out her steady reminders.
I’ve done my best, she’d say. You can see for yourself.
And my mother would nod sympathetically, unable, she would tell Leila Chen, to understand how I’d managed to overlook my instructor’s many kindnesses.
Oh, so easily, I would say.
Dear Leo Kreutzer.
The first few e-mails I opened were, as usual, her now-familiar, terse two-line reminders:
Dear Leo Kreutzer, Student ID# 889355,
Week Three (Four, Five . . .) is upon us, and we have not received the completed assignment pack. If you have excessive problems, contact me at your earliest convenience . . .
Excessive? Well, I was pretty sure my problems—Energy aside—weren’t excessive, and lacking a good reply, I’d managed to leave Leila Chen’s e-mails unopened for the most part. They’d been easy to push aside, up until now.
But this latest e-mail, the one that announced itself to my mother, was of considerable length, and remembering my own hasty submission earlier that day, I braced myself:
Dear Leo Kreutzer, Student ID# 889355,
I am to inform you that the answer you have provided for Question 16 (Section A-4) illustrates the obvious thought and the overall understanding of how an equation might work. However, as my scoring booklet testifies, the equivalent with which to score your answer is missing. And, too, given that this is the only answer you so attach, you must know the score—even if said answer were to be considered perfection—would not rise above the necessary passing grade for the Section A-4. And more, questions unanswered for Sections A-1, A-2, and A-3 remain.
At my advisor’s suggestion, I “double-checked” your enrollment status. I see you listed as an “independent, non-matriculated, non-degree-seeking student.” Perhaps, Professor Blankenship suggests, said designation confused you into believing requirements are less stringent to you than other participants. My job is to tell you now, Leo Kreutzer, that is not the case. To receive the grade and the possible “transferable credit,” your efforts must stretch wider. My advisor, Professor Gordon Blankenship, PhD, has suggest I work more closely with you, perhaps on a problem-by-problem basis, at least until you are “out of the woods.” He believes, you see, that you are in the woods. I do doubt that. (I think you are outside said woods, perhaps in the distant meadow, observing from the great distance both the woods that draw you and road that leads to your future.) He also believes this would be a good practice for me in dealing with a certain kind of student. Again, you should know that I do not think you are “a certain kind of student.” Perhaps you are, as Professor Blankenship also hinted, lazy or delayed, the product of the “less-than-rigorous Northern school system,” or, worse, perhaps you are playing games with me. Perhaps you, a snooper, have learned something of my own personal history. I should inform you, if that is the case, that while your intentions may be honorable, said attention is not appreciated.
But, perhaps, after all, none of the above is accurate. You may merely—merely emphasized—be attempting to take the leap ahead. I do not have access to all your academic records, but assume you did study the math and science courses previous. If so, you must know that advancement relies upon step-by-step execution of even most familiar problem sets. Professor Blankenship recommends (“heartily,” he says) that you return to Section A-1 and begin once more.
Our department and positions such as my own rely, of course, on full enrollments and student successes. Still, I must confess (and I will trust your better nature here and believe you will keep the comment confidential), I must confess that I do not believe you should either begin again or proceed. Instead, Leo Kreutzer, my advice is you must take another course, another route, that is. Physics is clearly not, as one of my other professors said, the “bailiwick” for you. I myself formerly studied poetry as you may know (it seems you do know) and completed a full year in therapy (yes, surely you’ve discovered this) in preparation for another program in psychology and social work before discovering the gift for the sciences. (I did not mention, you’ll notice, my months in the Religious Studies Department. That bears no relevance to said discussion, regardless of what your research might have told you.) No shame results, regardless what the family and society infer, to change gears, to take chances, to invoke the probability in your own life and leap into lesser-known abyss. I tell you, Leo Kreutzer, young love may be your motivation for the equation submitted, or rev
enge or despair or mischievous recklessness, but despite all potentials, your cause will not be served by the wrong path.
Should you choose to persist despite this best advice, the suggestion is made for you to begin again, in the straight path as Professor Blankenship denotes. As per, I will then put aside any grade and too begin anew.
We—Professor Blankenship and I—await your decision. Time, you must realize, may be a relative construct, but in this case, it is also a crucial aspect of your equation for success.
Most sincere,
Leila Chen
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
—L. Cohen
Forget your perfect offering. Yeah, yeah. Okay, Professor Chen. But tell me how I’d break the news to my mother. That’s how the light gets in. Would I ever have the courage of Leonard Cohen, to explain to my heartbroken mother that my physics course was, in fact, an impediment to my light-filled, imperfect future?
Forget your perfect offering.
Hey, hey, I wanted to call out, did you hear that?
Forget your perfect offering.
What a concept. Tomorrow, I could leave Uncle Lud to my mother’s cousin Trudy and her morning blender and run down Lamplight Hill straight into town to Tessa’s door and wait for her, couldn’t I? We’d walk to the corner of Fuller, and along the way, I’d say everything, imperfectly, my hands barricaded in my pockets, and when we reached Bryan’s truck, Ursie would be with him, but instead of joining them up front, she and Ursie tilting their heads together, Tessa would climb in the truck bed with me. We’d let Jackie and Ursie do all the shooting tomorrow, well away from Hana Swann and the motel, and Tessa would stay beside me as I persuaded Bryan that Flacker could not be beat, as I mapped out a full strategy for avoiding Flacker and the Nagles the rest of our days. And afterward in the bouncing truck, Tessa’s hand would claim mine. I’d stretch my arms around her and hold her tight to me, the distance between us finally breeched.
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