Tycho didn’t notice. He went on struggling miserably to move his arms, sweat breaking out on his forehead.
“Tycho, the rope is gone,” Jack said quietly.
Tycho’s hands shot to his nose, furiously scratching. His shoulders sagged in relief.
“He’s faking it,” Danny said. “I know what he’s like. This is boring.” He sighed and scowled at Tycho.
Tycho continued scratching ferociously. Jack wandered over to Danny’s desk, picked up the hypnotism pamphlet, and paged through it in a leisurely manner.
Tycho’s fingernails tore more wildly at the skin of his nose.
“Hey, I think his nose is starting to bleed,” Danny said, no longer so skeptical.
“Umm,” Jack murmured, slowly turning a page. “Oh, yeah … that one.” He studied the pamphlet a moment longer, then finally closed it and carefully positioned it on the desk beside Danny’s beloved plane, staring thoughtfully down at the booklet for a while.
“His nose is bleeding,” Danny said, sounding worried. “Maybe you better do something before he hurts himself.”
Jack turned vaguely toward Tycho. “Huh? Oh. Okay, the itch is gone, Tycho.”
Tycho let his hands fall limply to his sides, seemingly unaware of the drop of blood that dangled from the tip of his inflamed nose and then dropped down onto his chin.
“But now … you are thirsty.” Jack plodded back toward Tycho. “You haven’t had any water in days … days and days. You’ve never been so thirsty in your life. Your mouth feels like it’s stuffed with cotton. Oh, yeah … Your arms are tied to your sides again. And you can open your eyes now.”
Tycho’s arms stiffened. His eyelids lifted; he stared blankly at nothing. His lips parted slightly, bits of them sticking together. The tip of his tongue emerged, moving slowly back and forth.
“You are dying for a drink of water; the thirst is killing you,” Jack recited in a monotone, as though reading from a book.
Tycho’s throat contracted with a sick, rasping choke.
“You will do anything for a drink. But,” Jack mentioned, “your hands are still tied. You can’t turn on a faucet or pick up a glass. And you are dying of thirst. You are so thirsty that—”
Even Jack was startled when Tycho bounded from the chair and dashed out of the room. Danny raced after him, and Jack actually managed to sort of lope along behind.
They found Tycho in the bathroom, kneeling beside the toilet, his head thrust deep into the bowl, his arms at his sides. His mouth was immersed in the water, making gurgling and splashing sounds as he desperately lapped and gulped it down. He kept it up until Jack granted Tycho the information that his thirst was quenched. Tycho immediately pulled his head out of the toilet bowl.
“I guess he’s not faking it,” Danny had to admit when they were all back in his room, Tycho docilely seated in the chair again.
“There’s a final proof,” Jack said, after taking his time to consult the pamphlet once more. “Okay, Tycho, listen carefully,” he instructed him. “After I wake you up, you will forget everything that happened while you were asleep—except one thing. Whenever anybody says the word window, you will pick up the nearest object you can find and throw it to the floor. Do you understand?”
Tycho nodded.
“You will forget everything that happened except for that one instruction. Okay?”
“Okay,” Tycho repeated.
“Now I’m going to count to three,” Jack said. “And when I say ‘three,’ you will be fully awake. Here we go. One … two … three.”
Tycho blinked. His eyes focused on Jack, then on Danny. “Why did you turn the light back on?” he asked. “Aren’t you going to hypnotize me?”
Tycho was confused when Danny burst into laughter. “What’s so funny?” he wanted to know. “I don’t get it. Why didn’t you hypnotize me?”
“We just decided not to,” Danny said. “Jack, I think you should open the window shades.”
Tycho stood up, walked over to Danny’s desk, picked up the beautiful model plane, and hurled it to the floor, smashing it to pieces.
Danny did not share Jack’s mild amusement. “Tycho!” he howled. “How could … Why did …” He smacked Tycho hard across the face, then sank mournfully to the floor, gathering up the ruined plane.
Tycho put his hand to his cheek. But he seemed more upset about the plane than the slap. “I’m sorry, Danny,” he cried, on the verge of tears because of the terrible thing he had done. “I don’t know what happened! Really. All of a sudden I just had to do it.”
“You’re faking it!” Danny screamed at him. “You’re just pretending it was because …” He bit his lip, looking down at the plane again, wondering.
“Danny, something made me do it,” Tycho piteously and hopelessly persisted. “I don’t understand it. I’m so sorry. Please believe me. I know it sounds crazy. But … but …”
“Forget it, Tycho,” Danny snarled at him in frustration. He glared up at Jack. “If he’s not faking it, then it’s your fault,” he said. “Maybe you better—”
“Come on now, kids! Time for Jack to go home,” Mom called from downstairs. She had just come back from a long, hot day at work, and her tone of voice indicated that she was not to be argued with. “And would you try to hurry, for a change? I’ve got a lot of things to do.”
Danny and Tycho went along for the ride, Tycho in the front seat. Danny fuming and Jack smiling remotely to himself in the back. As Mom irritably waited while Jack made his way up the front walk, she said, “It’s hot, Tycho; roll down the window.”
Tycho grabbed Mom’s handbag, sitting open beside her on the seat, and threw it to the floor of the car, scattering most of its contents.
“Tycho, you monster!” Mom screamed. “Are you nuts? Pick it all up this instant!”
Tycho obeyed immediately, not holding back his tears now. Danny wasn’t amused this time either.
They were both abnormally quiet during supper. The rest of the family chatted away as usual.
Mom talked about her job. She was a pediatrician for the public health department, working in free clinics for poor people in the inner city. “A woman came in today who lives in that terrible Pruitt–Igo project,” she was saying. “She has five kids and lives in a two-room apartment on the eleventh floor. She has to keep her kids inside all day long because of the toughs in the playground. Even if she could watch them from the window, she wouldn’t be able to—”
Tycho picked up his plate of spaghetti with meat sauce and smashed it on the floor. Mom shrieked; Tycho wailed in apparent bewilderment.
It was Dad, who could usually be counted on to remain calm in moments of stress, who noticed how uncomfortably Danny was cringing in his chair. It was Dad who patiently got the whole story out of Danny. Mom had wiped the spaghetti sauce off the floor and served dessert by the time Danny finished.
“Well, can’t we just hypnotize him again and tell him not to do it anymore?” Dad asked him.
“I think it will only work if Jack does it,” Danny said. “He’s the one who hypnotized him and gave him the suggestion. And … he didn’t say anything about how to make Tycho stop doing it. Maybe … he can’t stop,” Danny added in a hushed voice.
“But Jack didn’t hypnotize me,” Tycho insisted. “Nothing happened. I didn’t drink water out of the toilet. I’d never do that!”
“If that’s the case, then you must be making these messes on purpose,” Mom accused him.
“But why would I get in trouble on purpose?” Tycho asked her, sounding completely innocent.
“Tycho just doesn’t remember being hypnotized because Jack told him not to,” Danny explained.
“Well, even if I was hypnotized, why would Jack tell me to break things just because somebody said a certain word?” Tycho wondered.
“Like … window?” Vicky suggested experimentally.
While Vicky cleaned up Tycho’s bowl of ice cream and chocolate sauce, Mom got on the phone. Jack’s mother dro
ve him over right away.
“But this is fantastic!” she said.
“It’s not fantastic at all. It’s called post-hypnotic suggestion,” Dad told her.
“Well, I’m sorry,” she said. “I hope Jack can undo it. It would be kind of inconvenient never to be able to say win—”
“Stop!” Danny shouted.
But it was too late. “—dow,” she had already finished.
This time it was the beautiful ceramic ashtray my college roommate had given Mom that was closest to Tycho’s reach. Jack’s mother swept up the pieces while the three boys made their way up to Danny’s room.
But now Tycho chose to be obstinate. “I don’t want to be hypnotized anymore,” he grumbled, pouting. “What if you make me drink toilet water again?”
“Shut up, Tycho! You’re going to be hypnotized, period!” Danny ordered, lunging at him with raised fists.
Jack took one step, planting himself stolidly between Danny and Tycho, fixing Danny with his calm gaze. Danny growled, but he backed off.
Jack remained rooted in place, thinking for a long moment. “Uh … wait outside, Danny,” he finally said, in his usual measured tones.
“You don’t need me to hold the flashlight?” Danny objected.
“I can manage,” Jack said. “We’ll both be in trouble if Tycho doesn’t stop. It won’t take long. And then … then I’ll tell you a secret.”
“But I don’t want to be hynotized,” Tycho protested again. It was strange; you’d think he would have been eager to stop helplessly breaking things.
“It’ll be worth it, Tycho, I promise,” Jack assured him. “You’ll see. We’ll be out soon, Danny.”
Danny was too impatient to stand there doing nothing while he waited out in the hall—and even at that age, he loved to invent experiments. He thought for a minute, then quickly placed a chair just outside the closed door of his room. He put Tycho’s prized Mickey Mouse alarm clock on the chair, making sure it was the only object that would be within Tycho’s immediate reach when he came out of the room.
A few minutes later, Tycho and Jack emerged into the upstairs hall. “Window!” Danny instantly shouted.
“What are you talking about?” Tycho asked him. “And what’s my clock doing here?” He picked it up carefully and took it back to his own room.
“You want to hear that secret, Danny?” Jack asked him, beckoning him back into the hypnosis chamber. They were in there for about ten minutes.
It was just around this time that Danny began to stop picking on Tycho. We all assumed that Danny’s abuse of Tycho came to an end simply because Tycho was getting to be Danny’s size.
But I thought I noticed, on a couple of occasions, Tycho uttering the word door just when Danny was about to attack him. And, oddly enough, as soon as Danny heard the word, he would stiffly turn away and leave Tycho alone.
The Séance
The houses in our middle-class neighborhood were all set well back from the street. Most of the other people on the block, concerned with appearances, concentrated their gardening energies on the front lawns, to impress the neighbors. But Dad didn’t care much about the front yard, where we never spent any time. He worked harder on the backyard lawn, which our family could enjoy in privacy. And so when we wanted to run around under the sprinkler, which created mudholes in the grass, we did it in front, where it didn’t matter because only the neighbors could see it.
We did have a sort of playground in the backyard, a paved area where there had once been a garage. On the left was a great mound of sand, where we made miniature cities and used the hose to create lakes and rivers.
The neighborhood cats and dogs loved the sand, too, but for a different reason. Once Dad’s boss and his wife came to dinner, and the wife, a sweet elderly lady, said gushingly to Vicky and me, “Oh, what a lovely sand pile you two children have to play in!”
“That’s not a sand pile,” said Vicky, who was five. “It’s a shit pit.”
Next to the shit pit was a 500-gallon army water-storage tank, which was our swimming pool. It was a hideously ugly round black rubber container about ten feet in diameter and three feet high. You couldn’t exactly swim laps in it, but we weren’t into swimming laps; we were into cooling off in the hot summers, splashing each other, doing underwater somersaults, and skinny-dipping with our friends when our parents weren’t home. The water froze in the winter. Before sliding around on it ourselves, Vicky and I would plop Danny or Tycho down on the ice first, to see if it was strong enough. In spring we would watch with fascination the thousands of mosquito larvae floating just below the surface, breathing through their tiny proboscises, soon to leave this ideal breeding ground and take over the neighborhood.
There was nothing in the large space to the right of the swimming pool until the day before Vicky’s sixth birthday, when she found Dad’s present to her there—a pile of lumber. He was going to build her a playhouse, he told her, the best playhouse in the world. “Oh, how wonderful! Can I have my party in it tomorrow?” she naively asked him. He cautioned her that it might not be finished by then.
Eight years later, he had completed the foundation, the floor, and three walls. It wasn’t only that he was the world’s greatest procrastinator. He also did everything with extreme thoroughness. The playhouse foundation alone, Mom used to say, would support the Empire State Building. Dad never finished it, but what there is of that playhouse will probably still be standing long after the house itself has collapsed.
Vicky never did have a birthday party in the playhouse. Instead, it was the setting for the séance I conducted the summer after ninth grade.
When I was in grade school, Mom had organized many creatively weird parties for me, the best ones being Halloween parties. These parties took place in my room in the refinished attic on the third floor. It was the perfect setting for a Halloween party because Mom had allowed my friends and me to paint a mural on one entire wall. Several of us participated, but the most gruesomely effective sections had been done by my friend Nicole. She was a shy, plump girl who was a brilliant artist. The central figure was a rather glamorous witch standing behind a bubbling cauldron. She was surrounded by all manner of grotesque creatures—bats, demons, imps, octopus-like things with claws.
For the Halloween parties, the rest of the house would be darkened; no one would be at the front door to greet the guests. Instead, there was a series of posters to show the guests the way up, painted by Nicole. They weren’t grade-school work; they were very professional. We used the same posters at every Halloween party for years, and they are probably still somewhere in the house. The first one, posted beside the front door, showed a man hanging from a noose, obviously dead because the angle of his head indicated his neck was broken. But one of his bony hands was pointing inside the house. And written underneath in scraggly letters was the instruction: Walk in. Follow the spooks.
The only lights inside illuminated Nicole’s other posters, located at strategic intervals to indicate the way up the creaky stairs. One showed a Frankenstein monster, holding a dead child in one hand and pointing with the other. The next was a hideously decayed corpse, rotten flesh dangling from its face as it rose from a coffin, one arm outstretched. Finally there was a leering skeleton in a moonlit graveyard, gesturing at the flight of steps up to the attic.
We did some of the conventional Halloween things, like bobbing for apples and carving pumpkins. Nicole’s pumpkins were always the most unusual and the most intricately and delicately executed.
Then, with the candlelit pumpkins arranged around the room, Mom would read aloud a couple of truly horrifying ghost stories about haunted houses, nightmares coming true, people being followed by ghouls. Often a terrified guest or two would call their mothers to be taken home at this point, which was too bad because the best part came next—fortune-telling.
Mom wrote the fortunes before the party, typing them on little pieces of paper, and folded them up and placed them in a bowl. Each kid would pick one
and read it, and they were all horrible—things like: You will work hard for many, many years and finally earn a million dollars—and then it will all be stolen from you by your children, and you will die penniless. Or You will develop an incurable neurological disorder and spend the rest of your life as a gibbering idiot in an insane asylum. The best fortune, every year, was I’m sorry, my dear, but you have no future.… I remember when Nicole got that one. She just smiled and carefully folded it up and kept it.
Naturally, these Halloween parties were a big hit with the kids in fifth and sixth grade, and that meant I was (conditionally, at least) accepted by all. In elementary school, it wasn’t social death to be associated with someone, like me, who was a little different.
But things changed in junior high. Suddenly we were surrounded by older kids, teenagers, who had very rigid rules of dress and speech, which were hopelessly confusing to me. Before we became deliberate nonconformists in high school, Vicky had been on the verge of being accepted by the popular kids in junior high. I, on the other hand, never had a chance with those people; I never had the right clothes, I was lousy at sports, I couldn’t catch on to the slang, and the tuft of hair on the back of my head wouldn’t lie flat. I was always an oddball, a nothing in the eyes of the ruling clique.
I’ll never forget the time in seventh grade when I was just getting to be friends with a guy named Dave Solomon. He lived in another neighborhood but one day rode home with me on the school bus. A popular kid named Steve Kamen asked Dave what he was doing on this bus. “I’m going over to Bill’s house,” Dave explained. Kamen looked at me, then back to Dave. “You sap,” he told Dave, and walked away.
But despite Steve Kamen’s disapproval, Dave became my good friend in junior high. Like me, Dave played the piano and was more interested in music and literature than in sports. Unlike me, Dave had a chance to be popular at the beginning of seventh grade—he was naturally better at sports than I was, despite his lack of interest, and at the start of the year a lot of the girls considered him to be very cute. That changed when he was suddenly struck by virulent acne, which persisted throughout his teenage years and left him with scars that were not merely physical.
Oddballs Page 4