“I’m sorry about the coriander.”
“No you’re not, not at all.”
“No, not at all, actually.”
She carefully lets go of his hand in the darkness, but her voice still rests in his ear.
“Don’t forget to put more stones under the anchor. And ask Ted about the guitar.”
“It’s too late now.”
She laughs inside his brain then.
“Darling obstinate you. It’s never too late to ask your son about something he loves.”
Then the rain starts to fall, and the last thing he shouts to her is that he also hopes he’s wrong. Dearly, dearly, dearly hopes. That she’ll argue with him in Heaven.
• • •
A boy and his dad walk down a corridor; the dad holds the boy’s hand softly.
“It’s okay to be afraid, Noah, you don’t need to be ashamed,” he repeats.
“I know, Dad, don’t worry,” Noah says and yanks up his trousers when they slip down.
“They’re a little bit too big; that was the smallest size they had. I’ll have to adjust them for you when we get home,” the dad promises.
“Is Grandpa in pain?” Noah wants to know.
“No, don’t worry about that, he just cut his head when he fell over in the boat. It looks worse than it is, but he’s not in pain, Noah.”
“I mean on the inside. Does it hurt on the inside?”
The dad is breathing through his nose, and his eyes are closed; his steps slow down.
“It’s hard to explain, Noah.”
Noah nods and holds his hand more tightly.
“Don’t be scared, Dad. It’ll keep the bears away.”
“What will?”
“Me wetting myself in the ambulance. That’ll keep the bears away. There won’t be any bears in that ambulance for years!”
Noah’s dad’s laugh is like a rumble. Noah loves it. Those big hands gently holding his small ones.
“We just need to be careful, does that make sense? With your grandpa. His brain . . . the thing is, Noah, sometimes it’s going to be working slower than we’re used to. Slower than Grandpa is used to.”
“Yeah. The way home’s getting longer and longer every morning now.”
The father squats down and hugs him.
“My wonderful smart little boy. The amount I love you, Noah, the sky will never be that big.”
“What can we do to help Grandpa?”
The dad’s tears dry on the boy’s sweatshirt.
“We can walk down the road with him. We can keep him company.”
They take the lift down to the hospital parking lot, walk hand in hand toward the car. Fetch the green tent.
• • •
Ted and his dad are arguing again. Ted begs him to sit down, the dad furiously bellows:
“I don’t have time to teach you to ride your bike today, Ted! I told you! I have to work!”
“It’s okay, Dad. I know.”
“For God’s sake, I just want my cigarettes! Tell me where you’ve hidden my cigarettes!” the dad roars.
“You stopped smoking years ago,” says Ted.
“How the hell would you know?”
“I know because you stopped when I was born, Dad.”
They stare at one another and breathe. Breathe and breathe and breathe. It’s a never-ending rage, being angry at the universe.
“I . . . it . . .” Grandpa mumbles.
Ted’s big hands hold his thin shoulders; Grandpa touches his beard.
“You’ve gotten so big, Tedted.”
“Dad, listen to me, Noah is here now. He’s going to sit with you. I just need to get a few things from the car.”
Grandpa nods and rests his forehead against Ted’s forehead.
“We need to go home soon, my boy, your mother’s waiting for us. I’m sure she’s worried.”
Ted bites his lower lip.
“Okay, Dad. Soon. Really, really soon.”
“How tall are you now, Tedted?”
“Six foot one, Dad.”
“We’ll have to put more stones under the anchor when we get home.”
Ted is almost at the door when Grandpa asks if he has his guitar with him.
• • •
There’s a hospital room at the end of a life where someone, right in the middle of the floor, has pitched a green tent. A person wakes up inside it, breathless and afraid, not knowing where he is. A young man sitting next to him whispers:
“Don’t be scared.”
The person sits up in his sleeping bag, hugs his shaking knees, cries.
“Don’t be scared,” the young man repeats.
A balloon bounces against the roof of the tent; its string reaches the person’s fingertips.
“I don’t know who you are,” he whispers.
The young man strokes his forearm.
“I’m Noah. You’re my grandpa. You taught me to cycle on the road outside your house and you loved my grandma so much that there wasn’t room for you in your own feet. She hated coriander but put up with you. You swore you would never stop smoking but you did when you became a father. You’ve been to space, because you’re a born adventurer, and once you went to your doctor and said, ‘Doctor, doctor! I’ve broken my arm in two places!’ and then the doctor told you that you should really stop going there.”
Grandpa smiles then, without moving his lips. Noah places the string from the balloon in his hand and shows him how he is holding the other end.
“We’re inside the tent we used to sleep in by the lake, Grandpa, do you remember? If you tie this string around your wrist you can keep hold of the balloon when you fall asleep, and when you get scared you just need to yank it and I’ll pull you back. Every time.”
Grandpa nods slowly and strokes Noah’s cheek in wonder.
“You look different, Noahnoah. How is school? Are the teachers better now?”
“Yes, Grandpa, the teachers are better. I’m one of them now. The teachers are great now.”
“That’s good, that’s good, Noahnoah, a great brain can never be kept on Earth,” Grandpa whispers and closes his eyes.
Space sings outside the hospital room; Ted plays guitar; Grandpa hums along. It’s a big universe to be angry at but a long life to have company in. Noah strokes his daughter’s hair; the girl turns toward him in the sleeping bag without waking up. She doesn’t like mathematics, she prefers words and instruments like her grandpa. It won’t be long before her feet touch the ground. They sleep in a row, the tent smells like hyacinths, and there’s nothing to be afraid of.
SEBASTIAN AND THE TROLL
a little story about how it feels
Sebastian lives in a bubble of glass. This is a problem, of course, on this everybody on the outside agrees. Glass bubbles are very impractical, for example, in classrooms and at birthday parties. In the beginning everybody thought the glass was the problem, but after he’d lived in there long enough it was decided instead that Sebastian was the problem. The people on the outside say you can’t establish eye contact with him, that he seems “absent,” as if where he is somehow is worth less than where they are.
“Don’t you want to go outside in the fresh air and play ball? Wouldn’t that be fun?” they used to ask when he was little and their voices could still be heard all the way in. He couldn’t explain then that he didn’t think having fun seemed liked fun. That being happy didn’t make him happy. He can’t remember the last time any of them said something funny and he laughed. Maybe he never has, and in that case they’re probably right, the people who, for as long as he can remember, have been shaking their heads and saying, “There’s something wrong with him,” to Sebastian’s parents.
He sat close to the glass back then, reading the words off their lips. They were right. A person is supposed to think that having fun is fun, otherwise something that shouldn’t be broken is broken. Something that isn’t broken in children who aren’t weird. For years, various grown-ups came and went outside the bu
bble. Some carefully tapped the glass, others banged it hard when he didn’t answer. Some asked him how he “felt.” He wanted to tell them that it feels like feeling nothing, yet still it hurts. Some said Sebastian “suffers from depression,” but they said it as though they were the ones actually suffering. Sebastian himself said nothing, and now he can’t hear anyone at all from the outside anymore. He doesn’t know if it’s because they gave up or if the glass just got thicker.
When the bubble still had tiny openings at the top they dropped down little pills. They said the pills were supposed to make the glass thinner, but he thinks they might have misunderstood. He’s not sure they know as much about glass as they claim. The pills got stuck and blocked the last few openings. Now there’s only Sebastian in here.
He can’t sleep at night. Sometimes his parents can’t either. He can see their tears run slowly down the outside of the glass then. They sound like rain over rooftops. Sebastian knows that his parents wish that something awful had happened to him. Because then there’d be a reason for him to hurt. Then he could be understood, maybe even fixed. But Sebastian’s darkness is not just a light switch that someone forgot to flip, not just a pill he doesn’t want to take. His darkness is a heaviness and a tiredness that pulls the bones of his chest inwards and downwards until he can’t breathe. And now the bubble’s gotten bigger, or maybe Sebastian has gotten smaller. Maybe that’s what anxiety does to us, shrinks us. He sometimes falls asleep in the afternoons from exhaustion, not tiredness. Sleeps with shallow breaths and deep nightmares, just for a few minutes at a time. Until he wakes up one evening with fur in his eyes.
There is a troll sitting in his bubble.
Sebastian knows it’s a troll since he asks the troll:
“What are you?”
And the troll replies:
“A troll.”
Then you know. But Sebastian still needs to ask:
“What do you mean, ‘a troll?’ ”
The troll is busy, it’s concentrated on writing something on tiny white notes with a nice blue pen. More and more and more white notes are stacked in uneven piles everywhere, until the troll looks up at Sebastian. “Regular kind of troll,” it says, since that’s what it is. Nothing special for a troll, but special since it is a troll, of course. After all, it’s not that often you see a troll, either in a bubble or anywhere else.
“What are you writing on the notes?” Sebastian asks.
“Your name,” the troll answers.
“Why?”
“So that you don’t forget that you are somebody.”
Sebastian doesn’t know how to reply to that. So he says:
“Nice pen.”
“It’s the most beautiful pen I know, I always carry it with me because I want them to know that I love them,” the troll says.
“Who?”
“The letters.”
Sebastian’s fingertips touch the glass of the bubble.
“How did you get in here?” he asks.
“I didn’t get in, I got out,” the troll says and stretches sleepily.
“From what?”
“From you. Through one of the cracks.”
“I’ve cracked?”
The troll rolls its eyes, disgruntledly flails its paw against the walls of the bubble, kicks a threshold, annoyed. Sebastian didn’t even know there were thresholds in here.
“You see, this here shack won’t do anymore, Sebastian. The glass has gotten too thick and everything that’s in here hurts too much. In the end, there’ll be no air left and then something has to crack. Either the bubble or you.”
Sebastian’s fingers fumble over his stomach. His throat. His face. Small, tiny cracks everywhere. They don’t hurt. Sebastian thinks that maybe he’s forgotten how to do it, how to hurt in places where other people hurt in all the normal ways. Burn-your-hand-on-a-hot-pan ways. Stub-your-toe-on-furniture ways. Now he only hurts in weird ways. Ways-that-don’t-leave-a-scar ways. Ways-that-can’t-be-seen-on-an-X-ray ways.
“How did you fit inside me?” he asks the troll.
“Oh, it wasn’t hard at all. I’ve been asleep inside your heart for a hundred thousand years. Trolls get very small when we sleep. Like balloons, balloons also become very small when they sleep.”
“And when they break,” Sebastian notes.
The troll nods thoughtfully, as if this is very, very true. Then asks:
“Is there breakfast?”
Sebastian shakes his head. He doesn’t eat very much anymore, everyone worries about that, as if food were the problem instead of the problem being the problem. It’s easier to worry about food, of course; it’s understandable that the people on the outside stick to the kind of worrying they know best. The troll looks very disappointed.
“You get pretty hungry after a hundred thousand years. Breakfast would have been nice.”
“I’m sorry,” Sebastian says.
The troll nods, with sorrow in its eyes.
“I know, Sebastian. I know how sad you are.”
Sebastian reaches his hand out. The troll is soft, its fur thick.
“You’re not from my imagination. My imagination isn’t this good.”
The troll takes a deep bow.
“Thank you.”
“What do you want from me?” Sebastian asks.
“What do you want for you?” the troll asks.
“I want it to stop hurting,” Sebastian says.
“What?” the troll asks.
“You should know, if you’ve been inside me. Everything. I want everything to stop hurting,” Sebastian begs.
The troll doesn’t lie to him then. Sebastian really likes the troll for that.
“I can’t teach you how to make it stop hurting, Sebastian.”
“Then what can you teach me?” Sebastian breathes in reply.
“How to fight.”
“Fight against what?”
“Against everybody that’s coming tonight.”
“Who?”
“Your nightmares. Your weaknesses. Your inadequacies. Your monsters.”
And at night, they come. All of them.
Sebastian sees them on the horizon of the bubble. They wait for a moment, just long enough for him to have time to be terrified. They love when he’s terrified. And then they come, everyone that hurts, every nameless terror, everything Sebastian has ever feared. Every monster from under every bed and every creature from the darkest rooms inside his head. They ride straight towards the boy and the troll now, all the anxiety that there’s space for in a child. Children always have so much more space inside them than grown-ups can remember.
Sebastian turns to run, but he’s at the edge of a cliff, a hundred thousand feet high. The ground shakes; in a few seconds they’ll be here, all his inner demons. He feels their shadows and how cold they make everything. He’s cold on the inside now, the way you get when some of your skin is exposed to the air outside of the duvet on an early morning in November, just after winter has wrestled its way into autumn but before the radiators have had time to adjust. Sebastian spins around at the edge of the cliff with his palms open, like he’s looking for heat, and suddenly he actually feels it. It’s coming from below. If he jumps now he’ll land in a bed, soft and safe and full of blankets, just the right size for pulling over the head of an average-size boy. He can see it from here. The demons hiss and snarl so close to the edge that the troll has to scream for Sebastian to hear it:
“They want you to do it!”
“Do what?” Sebastian roars, leaning over the edge.
He wonders whether it’s really possible for anything to be worse down there than up here.
“They want you to jump, Sebastian!” the troll screams.
And Sebastian almost jumps. Because he knows how good it would feel on the way down, and then maybe it doesn’t hurt anymore? Down there at the end of the falling down, maybe it will feel like it never hurt at all?
But the troll holds on to Sebastian’s hand. Its paw is also soft. It
can’t be imagination, Sebastian thinks, because he doesn’t have that good of an imagination and he knows practically nothing about paws, does he? So he stays, and everything that hurts rushes straight through him, down into the abyss, laughing and howling.
“They can’t hurt you, not really, so they have to make you hurt yourself,” the troll whispers.
Sebastian stands at the edge, out of breath.
“Are you sure?” he wonders.
“Are you sure there’s no breakfast?” the troll asks.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that sometimes you think you’re sure of something, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t be wrong. You could for example see a balloon and be sure that someone dropped it, but it might actually have run away.”
Sebastian starts hurting just behind his eyes.
“So you mean that you’re . . . sure or not sure?”
The troll scratches a few different spots of fur.
“I just mean that breakfast would have been nice.”
Sebastian apologizes, the troll nods disappointedly. Everything goes quiet. Then Sebastian’s feet start moving, without him being involved. The bubble starts rocking, at first almost nothing at all but then almost immediately all at once. Sebastian closes his eyes and holds his knees with his hands, because there’s nothing else to hold on to in here. He wants to throw up, but the troll places its paw on the back of his neck and then for a long while it feels like Sebastian takes off and floats.
“Watch out,” the troll whispers, but Sebastian doesn’t react until the troll yells, “WATCH OUT!”
All of a sudden Sebastian gets water up his nose. Then in his eyes. He flails his arms wildly, feels his clothes get wet and his shoes fill up with sharp claws. Something is pulling him down into the depths as if he’s drowning. HE’S DROWNING!
“Did you push . . . you idiot . . . did you push me into . . . the ocean?” he screams to the troll, panicking with his nose barely above the surface.
“No, this isn’t an . . . ocean, it’s a . . . rain,” the troll pants.
They both gasp for air. The sky disappears behind huge waves that pound and splash them on purpose, hurt them just because they can. The troll’s fur gets dark and heavy and he is sucked into the depth. Sebastian reaches his hand out and grabs its paw, an endless storm riding in over them.
The Deal of a Lifetime and Other Stories Page 6