The Sweet Relief of Missing Children: A Novel

by Sarah Braunstein

  Ricky said, “Will I jump from the platform? That’s the question. Do I dare jump?”

  “You will,” said Pax, not caring at all.

  When Pax had disappeared, his mother had not hung signs. His mother had not gone to the news stations. She’d done nothing. He was gone. He had vanished. He became, immediately, a ghost, for what is a ghost but a being no one expects to see walk the earth again? It is a shock, a sign of ill nature, when one sees a ghost. No one expected to see Pax, and so no one did. Maybe he’d done it. This would explain his shame, the little knife of guilt he’d carried with him all along, on all those buses, all those roads, state by state. Our acts are waiting for us.

  “I need a cigarette,” Ricky said. “Did I hurt your feelings? You’re a wounded pilgrim. A bleeding heart. So what? I like that about you.”

  Pax said nothing. The lighter clicked and rasped. Ricky puffed.

  Had she seen fit to report his disappearance, what would his mother have told the newscaster? He was last seen wearing jeans, a plain white T-shirt. Tube socks with orange bands at the calves. An expression of the faintest concern, always. A fisherman’s bracelet of braided rope, on his left wrist. His hands were soft, slender, a bit girlish. He liked books about aliens. He liked books about unsolved mysteries, vanished ships, ESP. He liked cheesecake. He liked spice gumdrops. He was a good baseball player. He had a white scar at the base of his ribs, shaped like a dagger, from falling into a rosebush as a small child. He enjoyed sour cream and bananas. He was too skinny. He was polite. He was last seen. He is prone to. He should be approached with. He may be. But his mother made no report.

  Ricky said, “Maybe she just ran away.”

  “I think she was taken.”

  “Who knows? No one. It doesn’t matter anyway. In the long run, there’s not much difference.”

  “There’s a big difference.”

  “In the long run it doesn’t matter, I’m saying.”

  “In any run it matters.”

  Ricky blew smoke through clenched teeth. “It amounts to the same thing. For the people left behind. Not for the girl, I suppose. Yes, for the girl there’s a difference. But for the rest of us it amounts to just about the same thing, I’m afraid.”

  “You’re wrong,” said Pax.

  Ricky touched Pax’s ribs. He walked his fingers up Pax’s side, pushed his fingertips into the wet hollow of Pax’s armpit. It was what Pax feared, but it made him sink into his joints. He said Ricky’s name.

  “Yeah?”

  “Ricky,” he said it again, louder.

  “I’m right here, man.”

  Pax said, “I might need a little help figuring some things out. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Nothing’s going on, my friend. Nothing at all.” And with a yawn, “It’s hot. It better rain. Nothing else.”

  It all felt real, all of it. That was the problem. Everything felt real, including what he knew for sure wasn’t: graduating high school, the party his mother might have thrown him, a barbecue, balloons, a handful of guests complaining about mosquitoes, his loudmouth stepfather and that dude from the bar with his accordion and gym shorts and Jade Grant—why not?—in a cotton sundress, a boom box playing songs of love and good news. But there hadn’t been a party. Some things had happened and some things had not. He knew the difference.

  His skin was slick, and Ricky was touching him.

  7

  Ricky wanted, for all intents and purposes, to fuck him. On first glance, Pax wasn’t his type. But as you got to know him, his overcompensating manners, his weird, almost senseless patience—it changed your mind. He was handsome, as it turned out. He had a strong nose. He was thin, sinewy.

  They lay in silence, Ricky’s gut bloated from the beer. Electric guitar licks rang out, faded, rang again, an adolescent’s talentless tirade against his parents who would not be able to sleep in the room next door, whose father would finally rise from bed, unplug the guitar, threaten loss of allowance or love or some other privilege. Ricky wanted to fuck Pax, but he hadn’t taken Pax in for this reason. The desire had risen slowly. He’d been here five weeks. It happened over time. So many languorous evenings drinking beers and listening to ball games, so many glimpses of Pax biting his thumbnail with pinched-faced concentration, or blathering about the dead girl, or drooling on the arm of the couch in his sleep—they had the effect of softening Ricky to him, and also, conversely, making him want to throttle the guy. Pax was strange. He was rootless. He had weird fixations, and he knew nothing about himself. This endeared him to Ricky, and it annoyed him too, Pax’s lack of insight, his superhuman naïveté. The guy had to be nearing thirty. He was a grown person, bright, he’d read the right books. Age certainly doesn’t predict self-knowledge, but it usually predicts some awareness of lack of self-knowledge. Pax wasn’t aware of the fog, of that dense, ever-gathering cloud, enclosing his very head. Ricky both admired and feared this. Ricky wanted to kiss his neck, his honker of a nose, possibly his mouth.

  He regretted speaking of his sister. Why had he done that? He had not spoken of his sister in years. He had not written about her either, even when a poem seemed to demand it. He was afraid of the images that would emerge. The poem about her would be bad or, worse, it would be good.

  “You awake?”

  Pax didn’t respond.

  Ricky said, “It does matter, all right? What happens to the girl—what happened—it matters enough. Also, forget I said anything about my sister. Can you do that?”

  “I’d already forgotten.”

  “And forget about that girl while you’re at it. You want to torment yourself. You look for avenues of torment. She doesn’t exist. She can by no means be saved.”

  Pax said nothing, but Ricky perceived new gravity in his breathing, a meaning in its rhythm that wasn’t there before. Ricky put his hand on Pax’s stomach.

  He said, “I’m going to write a poem about you, but I’ll give you a different name. Yours is very cool, man, and loaded with meaning and strong and all, but it doesn’t quite fit. You’re a Jack, maybe, something classic. In my poem, I’ll call you ‘Jack,’ and I’ll say: He held his sadness the way big men hold their booze, something to that effect. And I’ll get your mouth in there too. Your chewed thumbnail. Your suitcase, I may conclude with that; it’s a strong image, that beat-up suitcase, old clothes, everything mismatched, worn to the nub. Or your fantastic shoes. Your shoes are ridiculous, by the way, with all that tape. They may really be too much for the poem. I have an old pair you can have. I may say: He was a man without a razor. I know you use my razor, Pax, and that’s fine, I don’t have a problem with that. He was a man without a razor or a bar of soap or a scrap of history. It’s fine that you use my soap as well. What’s mine is yours. But what I’m trying to get at is that I won’t mention this girl. You’re stuck on her because it suits some unwell purpose. It’s a kind of elaborate distraction. She’s a red herring. I’m saying she doesn’t belong in the poem.”

  Pax rolled over to face Ricky and, in one impulsive motion—the motion of one who’s suddenly flattered, who feels the thrill and burden of flattery, who must act in this moment if it’s to happen at all—Pax kissed Ricky on the mouth.

  For a second Ricky felt surprised, but then he thought: Why are you pretending to be surprised?

  Their teeth clicked. The sound to Ricky’s ears was the click of two glasses, the chime of a toast. Their kiss felt like that, a toast, awkward and full of appetite. Oh man, thought Ricky, oh man oh man. But he was surprised. He knew it would happen, hoped it would happen, but the Pax who was kissing him, the Pax who had made this sudden move, was not the same man who’d been whimpering next to him five minutes ago. Something had shifted between then, and Ricky was glad, but he was also aware that it could shift back just as fast. The kid next door who before strummed meaninglessly now played a hit by Roger Ranger. Pax was making these high, churning sounds, similar to laughter, close, but not laughter, Ricky realized, not laughter at all.
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  “I’ve done this before,” Pax said.

  Ricky pulled away, chuckled warily. “I thought so.”

  “With a boy.” Pax pressed his face into Ricky’s neck. “I’ve done this.”

  “I had a hunch.”

  Pax burrowed further into Ricky’s neck. Ricky thought he was trying to get closer, to declare some kind of intimacy, but then Pax said, again, sorrowfully, “I’ve done this,” and Ricky realized that he was trying to hide.

  “All right already,” Ricky said. “We’ve done it. We’re sick. We’re delicious.”

  “With Gideon Booth.”

  “Yes,” said Ricky. “I’ve done it before too. It’s okay.”

  He patted Pax’s back in what he hoped was a friendly, assuring manner, rubbed his ropy spine, his narrow waist.

  “My mother came in.” Pax spoke hotly into Ricky’s neck. “She found us. Me and Gideon. He had a rat-tail. His hair had a rat-tail I mean. He was a kid. He was a nice kid. No, he wasn’t nice. He was cruel.”

  “My mother saw me once, too,” Ricky said. “She was a spy. She looked. She asked for it. She wanted to see, no matter what she says.”

  “And Gideon said, ‘Hello Missus—’ but he didn’t know my last name. He said ‘Hello Missus, uh, Missus.’ I thought he knew my name. My mother did something stupid.”

  “Yeah, what’s that?”

  Pax rammed his lips into Ricky’s chest. “She called my stepfather in.”

  “Shit, kid. Stop biting me.”

  “My stepfather came. My stepfather broke Gideon’s neck.”

  “His neck! No shit.”

  They were still for a moment.

  Ricky said, “No he didn’t. I don’t believe you.”

  “His collarbone.”

  “Fine, his collarbone. I’ll buy that.”

  Ricky felt bracingly alert, a little nervous. He listened to Pax’s startled breath.

  Ricky said, “My mother pretended it never happened. Fine. Fine with me. My dick in Claude Sullivan’s mouth, there’s an image for the mama. There’s one for the scrapbook. But it never happened, she says.”

  “It never happened,” Pax said.

  “Never.”

  Ricky extricated himself from Pax’s hold. The air hosted a new smell: Pax’s sweat. Ricky recognized it as fear sweat, that peculiar spikiness belonging to fistfights and alleys and fucking in bars and under bridges with people whom one isn’t supposed to fuck. It was a sour, ringing smell. Ricky inhaled, pleased that he could inspire that kind of perspiration.

  “I once had a rat-tailed haircut, too,” Ricky said. “Ugly as sin.”

  The boy next door was not really playing Roger Ranger. He had turned on his stereo and, in the mirror, mimed the lead guitarist, fingers hovering above the strings. He was growing his hair out. Soon his father would confiscate the stereo. The losing baseball team’s bus was rumbling down a dark highway, moving further from the city. In dark windows the players pretended not to look at themselves.

  8

  Gideon was a head taller than Paul. This is when Pax was still Paul, sixteen, still a kid who hoarded spiced gumdrops and read books about ESP. Gideon didn’t read books. He had no sweet tooth. Olive-skinned, with wavy brown hair and a lantern jaw, he brought to mind an Olympian. He had a casual, innate grace, walked with a fast loping stride, backpack slung over one shoulder. His hair was neatly trimmed save for a wispy braid, the rat-tail, which fell nearly to his shoulder blades. Gideon had said, “Hey Paul, you want to study for that biology test together or what?” as if they often spent their afternoons together, study partners, when in fact they seldom spoke. Paul wasn’t even planning on studying but he agreed. “Your house,” Gideon announced. He didn’t smile.

  After school they walked together in silence, past the church, Gizmo’s Video Palace, the eyeglass shop, then stopped at the Come & Go for red vines and sodas. Finally they turned onto Route 22, walked on the muddy shoulder, and then stepped over the guardrail and onto the clotted path, the shortcut that led to the cottage where Paul lived with his mother and stepfather. The path was a mess. Most of its litter was Paul’s doing—soda cans, candy bar wrappers, bits of Styrofoam, crumpled magazine pages, scratch-off tickets. His English teacher called him “tenderheart” he wanted to show that he wasn’t, not at all, not at all! so he discarded a thing a day, devoted himself to this petty crime, a potato chip bag, a lollipop stick, until the trash overwhelmed the thicket. Was he tenderheart? Gideon didn’t seem to notice the litter. They walked in silence. Paul, made nervous by Gideon’s cool expression and swift pace, by the murderous way he had guzzled the soda, finally said, “So what about Jade Grant?”

  Gideon sighed. “Who the hell’s that?” Then: “What about her?”

  “I heard she’s pregnant.”

  “I don’t care a lick about Jade or her fetus.” He kept his eyes straight ahead, increased his stride. Paul struggled to keep up.

  “I don’t care about her either.” But Paul did care. He thought of her often, all the time. He wondered who impregnated her, and when and where, and imagined possessing the kind of power she did. How could Gideon not care? Everyone cared. They watched her with new attention, gave her a wide berth in the hall, studied her belly and boobs and the hold of her face. In algebra, Paul watched her sigh as she completed her equations, watched her wind a hank of glossy red hair around her index finger. She finished her worksheets before everyone else, then examined her fingernails, the veins of her wrists. Sometimes she doodled on her hand, or shoe, or just stared at the wall clock, stared hard, as if her gaze, if applied right, might set it on fire.

  The cottage was empty, his stepfather at the plastics plant, his mother at the bowling alley. They went inside. Gideon surveyed the cramped rooms. He touched each object on the mantelpiece, touched the hem of the robin’s-egg tablecloth, ran a finger along the spines of the books.

  “Who reads these books?”

  “My mom. The romances. The others are my stepfather’s.”

  “Crappy books, huh?”

  He picked up the model schooner that occupied the place of honor on the mantel.

  “My stepfather made that.”

  “It’s not very good.”

  “Yeah—well. I guess not.”

  “No one knows how to make anything anymore.” Then: “Chinese machines, they know how to make things. Robots.”

  “The sail is torn. It’s been sewn up. I ripped it.”

  He’d been punished for that. He’d been flipped over his stepfather’s knee. He’d been too old for spanking, fourteen, but it worked: he hadn’t touched the model since.

  Gideon examined it with vague disdain. “Shitty,” he said.

  It was thrilling to have a veritable stranger in the house, and for this stranger to say things that Paul himself could never say.

  “Just put it back, man, yeah? He’s funny about that thing.”

  Gideon replaced it carelessly. Its bow edged off the shelf.

  They went upstairs to Paul’s room; Gideon collapsed on the bed, his head on Paul’s pillow, like it was his own room. Paul stood by the doorway. He was embarrassed by the painting that hung over his bed—a soulful clown holding a parasol. His mother had bought it at a tag sale. Gideon didn’t seem to notice it. He said, “You got any music?”

  There were some cassette tapes in a shoebox, but Paul didn’t want Gideon going through them. He pressed Play on the tape recorder—the song was a ballad, sappy, about being stuck on a person, about a feeling down deep in your soul. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear. Gideon chuckled, pulled himself up on his elbows, said, “You like the mitochondria? You good at biology?”

  “I’ll pass it, I guess.”

  “I got a D on the last quiz. Mister Mason can fuck me sideways.”

  Paul gathered his materials together, notepad, textbook, a couple pens. He sat on the floor, his back to the wall.

  “The body,” Gideon sighed. “I guess the body’s fine. It’s when you go too far insid
e it. I like the outside stuff. I like the pores. I can go so far as the blood. But dendrites? Ribophones? Who cares about that shit. People worry way too much about what’s invisible. People want to name every last piece of dust.”

  “Ribosomes,” Paul said.

  Gideon grinned. “I knew I picked the right study partner.”

  Paul nervously started to describe cell function. Then Gideon got off the bed, sprawled out on the floor in front of him. He lay on his side, propped on an elbow—he flicked a dust bunny under the bed, said, “You got yourself a girlfriend?”

  “No,” Paul said.

  They were the same age, but the way Gideon asked the question, the effort he took to keep a straight face, the implicit mockery—Paul felt like he was being ribbed by a rude uncle. But then Gideon said, “Me neither,” and this came out earnestly, even sadly, and he put a finger on the button of Paul’s pants. He said, “Me neither, man.”

  Gideon’s finger moved from the button of Paul’s pants to the fabric of his crotch. He said, “This your dick or a nut?” It was the same toneless, vaguely irritated voice he’d used to say dendrites or ribophones.

  “My dick,” Paul whispered.

  “Cool.” Gideon glanced at his own groin, shrugged. “I got two meatballs and a cocktail wiener.”

  Paul could say nothing.

  “Let me,” Gideon said.

  Paul’s blood rushed to meet Gideon’s hand. He felt his stomach drop, felt his mouth go dry, felt—did not hear as much as feel—a series of words tumble from his mouth. The faint pressure of the words, their lightness in his throat—they emerged, one by one, to the same rhythm that Gideon’s hand worked the fabric. But they weren’t words. They were sounds, syllables, articles: oh—the—buh—ah—sah—an—the—

  Gideon went about it with a certain sighing duty, like a kid forced to clap erasers. “Wait,” Paul managed to say.

  Gideon stopped. “You gonna come?”

  Paul couldn’t answer.