Snowflake, AZ

by Marcus Sedgwick

  He said he had another article by a doctor at MIT that said that very soon, one in two babies would be born autistic. On account of glyphosate.

  ‘And do you know what the stupidest part is?’ he said.

  So here I shook my head because it was kinda hard to understand much of anything at all, though I got the gist, as they say.

  ‘The stupidest part is, they don’t even have to prove it’s safe. If they were making a drug, they’d have to prove it’s safe. But it’s only something that’s going on all our food, so they don’t have to.’

  That much I understood, so I said, ‘But that’s stupid. They don’t have to prove it’s safe?’ and over the top of his mask Finch raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Shih-heh, righ?’ but I don’t know if he meant the EPA, or the United States government, or Monsanto. Or the rest of us dumb idiots for letting it all happen. Shih-heh.

  Then Finch said ‘shoo!’ and we left the ink on the line to keep off-gassing while we went back to the house and Finch pulled his mask off and said ‘uff’ and then ‘shoes’ again.

  While I tried to imagine a world where every other person was autistic, Finch rummaged around some more of his boxes and in the end pulled out a pair of old red sneakers.

  He held ’em up to me.

  ‘They’re yours if you want them,’ and I pointed down at my clown boots and he laughed and said ‘sold!’

  Then I couldn’t help myself because I had been seeing that everything Finch needed and wanted and used and spoke about was right there on the porch. And I had noticed a sleeping bag rolled up under a chair. And I had taken a peek through the back door and seen that there was not much of anything inside.

  So I said, ‘This is your house, Finch?’ and he nodded and guessed what I meant and smiled but there weren’t too much happiness in that smile when he said, ‘Yep, it’s my house. Can’t live in it, but it’s my house.’

  And then he explained how he’d bought the house a few months before but how it hadn’t been built to be safe for EI people so it needed a heap of work done to it to make it safe, and I said, ‘Like Reynolds Wrap?’ and he nodded and said, ‘Yeah, and a bunch of other things.’

  He told me how he’d been living in the open, or sleeping in tents, or on other people’s porches since he got sick, and how that was about twelve years, and that finally, after those twelve years, he’d got a porch of his own to sleep on, and that felt pretty darn good. And I was thinking, well, if this guy is faking being ill, he’s doing a damn fine job, sleeping in the open for over ten years. Then I looked up and Finch was talking about his house. He smiled real happy and something I didn’t understand made me want to cry and never stop. It came up out of nowhere like when you’re gonna be sick. But then it went again just as quick, and I was okay.

  We stayed a while at Finch’s, that day. He told us what he was planning on doing with his house, and Bly said that it was gonna be great. I did a lot of nodding. He told me how you couldn’t off-gas a book the same way you could hang a sheet of paper on the clothesline, so he showed me how he read books, and he did a lot of reading.

  He had this special plastic box. It was a couple feet wide and a few inches deep, made of clear plastic, so you could see through it, more or less. In one side of it, he’d cut himself two holes, and he’d attached a rubber glove to each hole and sealed them up, so the gloves reached inside the box. Then, when he got a book to read, what he did was he put the book inside, and put the lid back on, and read the book through the lid, and turned the pages with his hands in the rubber gloves. Only sometimes the pages were too thin to pick up with the gloves, so he showed me how he used the eraser on the end of the pencil to turn the pages and he was real good at that, because I thought it looked kinda hard.

  ‘I do a lot of reading,’ he said, looking at his plastic box and smiling. ‘You do a lot of reading, Ash?’ and I shrugged and said ‘a little,’ which was not the exact truth back then, but it is now, so maybe that’s okay.

  Then Cooper showed up.

  He came trotting around the porch like he and Finch was old friends, which I guess they was, because Finch was glad to see the mutt, and the mutt seemed just as happy, his tail all wagging, and Finch found him something to eat and said, ‘Don’t tell Mona,’ and I don’t know if he was talking to the dog or me and Bly.

  ‘I guess Socrates won the argument,’ Bly said and I nodded, because he sure was one mean goat that morning, at least till someone scared the legs off of him. ‘Come to visit?’ Bly said then, and that last part was to Cooper.

  Finch tickled him under the chin and stroked his beard and said how his beard was getting to be as white as the beard that Socrates had, but I didn’t know if he meant the philosopher or the goat.

  We figured we oughta take Cooper home.

  I thanked Finch for the sneakers and Bly and me and the old dog went back in the truck and I was glad the sneakers were good ones, maybe even a little cool. And as we went I thought about owning a house you couldn’t live in or it would make you sick and wondered what that was like and then I thought, well, if somewhere was making you sick you could move on and maybe you could always find somewhere else safe to go. Then I wondered what would happen if you couldn’t. I mean, if you kept running and running across the whole damn face of the world until, finally, there was nowhere safe left to go. Nowhere. What then.

  Like I said, I never did read too much, ’less I had to. But that was before what happened. (I mean what happened to me, not What Happened.)

  After, I read a lot, everything I could get my hands on. Not just stuff about getting sick, but other stuff too. Like I might read anything. Like there was one time early on when I was sitting in Dr. Behrens’ waiting room in Snowflake and the only darned thing to read in there was the book that’s like the Bible to those guys, the Latter-day Saints. The Book of Mormon. So I read that. I can’t say I understood a deal of it, but I will say this: whoever said you never start a sentence with ‘And’ had never read the Book of Mormon. Or maybe they had.

  Later, I read the Bible some too, and I found out where that whole ‘And’ at the start of a sentence game got started. People say you shouldn’t do it. But why should they go around judging what other people say?

  Like, some people say, ‘I wonder what will happen next.’ I used to know someone who said it a lot, like it was a story she was living in. I wonder what will happen next. As if something is always gonna happen next. Stories always have something happening next; that’s something I found out when I started reading. There’s always a whole heap of stuff. This thing and that thing, then another. Some business and a how-d’ye-do from time to time. But real life ain’t a story, so sometimes what happens next is nothing. And when I got to thinking about that, and about stories, I wondered to myself if you could write a book where nothing happens next. Not ever. I guess people must’ve tried to write books like that. I guess they ain’t no fun to read. And that’s why I’m skipping whole bits of this. My story. Days here and weeks there. And later, a year or five. Because in those bits, nothing happened.

  But I was talking about real life, and what happened next to me was nothing. I mean, something happened, but it led to a whole bunch of nothing.

  So here’s the last that I recall from before I got sick.

  Just after we’d got back from Finch’s, I was sitting on the porch with Bly and Mona, and the desert was out there, yonder, and I was setting, counting the clouds and there were three of them, and Mona had tied Socrates up somewhere on account of his still feeling sore about life, and Cooper was curled around Mona’s feet and she was saying how we all gotta learn to think for ourselves. She said how Blake had said that, and I thought she was talking about one of the canaries, but then she added, ‘and that was two hunnered years ago!’ so I knew she wasn’t talking about one of the canaries. Especially as she fixed me with a look and said, ‘William Blake. Him that was 1757 to 1827.’

  I mentioned to her what Finch had been reading about. It just didn’t see
m right to me. Right or fair, and she said, ‘See, we can blame the government, or the companies, or the capitalist system, or men, or the Man, or we could even blame God though no one seemed to do that before when they believed in him and they sure don’t do it now, now that they don’t. And we could blame any blessed one of these folks, but you know who’s really to blame? We are! We set around and let all this crap happen.’

  Bly was nodding his head like he agreed but somehow like he disagreed too, and I got caught up for a time thinking about that, how we can think two different things at the same time and how that might seem confusing but how most everyone can do it, if only they knew they could. And Mona went on and said how we got all this stuff about chemicals wrong.

  ‘Think about it. Tobacco, asbestos, vinyl chloride, hormone replacement, thalidomide, radiation, heavy metals, chlorofluorocarbons, exhaust gases, chlorinated solvents, and oh I could go on. Well, we got it backwards. We were so eager to have all the wonderful stuff, we didn’t like to think too much if it made us sick, and we didn’t wait around to find out. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. Right?’

  I could tell from her voice and her look that she was setting Bly up to reply and he knew it too, because he said ‘wrong!’ And then he said, ‘Sure, but people don’t know no different,’ and he said he didn’t know nothing till he came to Snowflake and Mona started explaining stuff and telling him stuff and showing him stuff and then she said, ‘The truth is, people don’t wanna know. It’s too hard and takes too much thinking about.’

  And then I opened my mouth, because there was something I wanted to say, but then I shut it again, because like I said, I was already learning that sometimes it’s better to keep your mouth shut. Then I thought: darn it, I wanna say something. So out loud I said, ‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world,’ and Bly looked at me and said, ‘Snowflake, are you feeling all right?’ and Mona looked at me and said, ‘God-dang, Ash.’

  Then she thought for a time and said, ‘You sure are one fascinating biped.’

  She made guns with the fingers of both her hands and pointed ’em at me and said, ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein. 1889 to 1951,’ and then started saying how that was exactly the point. How you couldn’t know nothing, or understand nothing, or talk about nothing, ’less you had the words to do it with.

  ‘How do you know Wittgenstein?’ Mona said to me, and I guess I shrugged and said how Mr. French (which I always found funny because he was our English teacher) was always saying it, but I had no idea what he meant or who Ludwig Wittgenstein was until we were sitting on Mona’s porch, looking at the desert.

  I don’t recall exactly what happened next. I know Bly looked at me again and said, ‘Are you feeling all right?’ again because this time I answered, ‘Well, no, I guess I caught a cold in the rain there yesterday.’ I was feeling kinda muzzy. And I had one hell of a headache, right in the front of my head, and then Bly said, ‘What’s that?’ and I saw they was both looking at my arms.

  So I said, ‘That’s just a rash I get,’ and they was looking at the red spots and red patches down my arms because I was only wearing a T-shirt. Then they both looked at each other and I said, ‘What? It’s just a rash I get. Sometimes. I had it before. The doctor said it’s nothing. Like maybe it’s stress. He said.’ And then I went and got up and went to the bathroom and washed my face because I thought that might help but I still felt kinda muzzy and on the way back from the bathroom, heading back to the porch, my legs stopped working.

  I don’t know what else to say. Even after all this time. Never quite figured it out. But my legs kinda seized up. Just like the dang goat. Well, not exactly, because I was still standing and I could still move ’em, but only just, like when you’re walking at the seashore and you walk into the waves and the water makes it hard to move your legs. It was like that, only if the seawater was made of molasses, then that’s how it felt.

  I just about made it to the porch and Bly took one look at my face and said ‘shoot’ and that is the last thing I recall because I passed out again.

  I guess everything I have told you so far, everything about Snowflake, and Mona, and Bly, and the canaries, and Finch, and everyone, all of that was more or less my first three half days out there in the Forties. And I ask myself if you’ll wonder some if I won’t spend more’n two minutes talking about the next three weeks. Because that’s what it was. Three weeks. Three weeks I spent in my bed, right there on Mona’s back porch. And I was sick.

  I had that rash, and my headache, that would come and go, but the most of it was I was tired. I don’t know if I can explain that word. Tired. Like I slept almost all the time, but when I say tired, I’m not talking about being sleepy. I mean something else, something about how I had no energy. Not for nothing. I was a rag. Limp. I was a shell, just lying there, and I don’t recall eating and I don’t recall even going to the bathroom though they told me later they’d helped me do both. Because when I say tired, I mean I could just about lift an arm, if I had to. Mostly I didn’t.

  And I know I kept asking ‘what’s going on?’ or ‘what’s wrong with me?’ but no one would say anything and I know once or twice I said something about how I had to see a doctor but I don’t recall what happened about that ’cept I didn’t go. Not then.

  What I do recall is Bly standing over me and looking down, and sometimes there was rain behind him and sometimes there was blue sky and then he seemed like the man in gold from the roof of the temple. And sometimes Mona would sit with me for hours, and sometimes she would talk to me and sometimes she would read to me and sometimes she was quiet, real quiet and for the longest time.

  The weeks went by, and there ain’t no point talking about it anymore, because you wouldn’t learn nothing from it. See, when you first get someplace new, there’s a lot to tell, because it’s all new. But when you been somewhere for a times, well, then you pretty quick get to the point where there’s no new tale to tell. And if you spend three weeks in bed, then every day is the goddamn same, and suddenly what happens is time speeds up. When every day is the same, time whistles right on by.

  So here we are now. Three weeks came and went. By the end of which I started to come out of it. I spent more time awake, though I never left my bed, ’cept I needed the bathroom, and when I did that, they set me in a wheelchair that was Mona’s from when she was first sick and real bad with it. She told me she’d kept it for years, because you never knew what was going to happen next, and I nodded, even though that was something I hadn’t started to learn yet, not really.

  Mona and Bly spent a lot of time with me. Bly would come and stand over my bed and talk. He’d talk about how he was gonna go back to the academy when he got better, and I looked at him and tried to imagine him as a police officer. Not just a cadet, but the real thing. Sometimes I could, but other times he reminded me of the guy on the postcard again and I could not get that picture out of my mind; golden in the sky.

  I had other visitors. Mary came over, and Finch, and Detlef too, who grinned and said, ‘I got you some popcorn’ like we was going to the movies. I was a regular celebrity, lying there in my bed, with my bedroom that was half house and half desert, and Cooper under the bed, sleeping. Even Socrates wandered over once in a while and tried to chew my blankets till Mona dragged him off. And people said a lot of things to me as I lay there and I didn’t understand a lot of it, so then when they were gone, I would ask Mona and Mona would explain. She explained how they’d seen this before, and probably would again, and how I was venting. She said how the body can cope with so much for so long and then sooner or later it all has to come out. She asked me about the rashes and if I had had headaches before, and I said sure they was just stress, and she shook her head and said sure it was stress but what kind of stress? And why?

  She said how I had been keeping a lid on my MCS and that just like clothes or books or stuff that needed off-gassing, my body did too. That the rashes showed I had been sick before and was on the verge of breaking. That now
I had come to a safe place, my body was letting it all out, and that my blood was full of toxins and I would go on feeling bad until I could get rid of ’em. Or most of ’em. And then I asked how long that would be, and she said ‘well, we’ll see,’ and then I said that maybe I oughta go to the doctor in town, and she said ‘well, we’ll see’ to that too. I thought ‘what?’ because I was sick, and I knew I needed a doctor. But I was too weak to argue.

  Mona said my body was venting. Off-gassing. And, boy, was I gassed-off. I lay there and wondered what the heck was happening to me. It felt like the end of something, though I couldn’t have given you a good reason for why, or what it was the end of.

  H

  Hawthorne Effect

  I said before how I didn’t never read until I got sick, and then, when I had, how I started to read everything I could lay my hands on. That started there, in my little bed, on that porch out back of Mona’s house. I don’t really know why, but maybe it felt like the end of the world. I mean, it felt like the end of my world.

  One day, way early on, I took my phone out. I checked to see that Mona wasn’t around, then I plugged it in and charged it up, and as soon as it had some charge I turned it on. I knew it was no good as a phone. Not unless someone had built a cell-phone tower overnight, just for me, and I doubted that. But it had pictures on it. Pictures of my friends, Malik and Ximeno and Mary-Beth, pictures of the guys at the shoe store, who were okay, pictures of Jack. One picture of Bly. Pictures of my long-lost parent, my mom, who I had not seen in forever. I didn’t know what that meant anymore. I mean, what it meant to me. And when I looked at the photos, somehow I knew they belonged to a different life, and a different world, and I knew that something had changed. Then I turned the phone off and put it away. And I started reading instead.

  And now? Later on, so much later on, all these years later? What about reading now? And writing? After What Happened, maybe it’s all the more reason to read, and keep reading. Or maybe there ain’t no point in that anymore. Maybe we’re done. Still, I’m gonna keep telling this story.