By this time, I had lived either on a porch, or in a shed, and then in a cabin, for over a year. And though I hung out with Mona much of the while, it was another thing to walk into a house and shut the door at night and know it was yours, forever, and legal.
Now you might suppose this was the best thing that anyone ever did for me. And I guess it was. But the human mind is a treacherous critter sometimes, and I felt other things besides being grateful.
I felt guilty, for one. Here was me, this dumb little kid, and everyone else in the Forties had fought and struggled for a place to call home when their own homes and families spat ’em out. And now that very thing had been given to me. I had a job, a simple job, where Mona paid me a few dollars for driving a truck with people’s groceries in it. And that truck? Well, Jack had let me keep Bly’s pickup after he left us, so I’d been given that too.
And with all that fortune, you’d think a body would be happy. And grateful. And I was. I was. But I also wanted something more than anything else in the world: I wanted to walk down a city block again and not have to worry if my legs would give out before I got to the end. That’s all I really wanted, and I would have given you that house in the desert for nothing if you could have made it happen.
Now Dostoyevsky, him that was 1821 to 1881, he said, ‘Man is a being who can get used to anything.’ But I was not convinced of that fact.
Yet, there was one good thing. I finally won the game with Mona and Finch. I had still been reading stuff about kindness and selfishness, and I read this story in the paper in the library one day. It was about a painkiller called acetaminophen, so I knew that the people who named it had been speed-reading Greek mythology while off of their heads on crystal meth. Anyway, you might not’ve heard of acetaminophen, but that’s because that’s not the name they put on the boxes. The names on the boxes would have been things like Actifed or Benadryl or Panadol or Sinutab or Tylenol, or some other god from the ancient mythological land of Pharma. It was in over 600 different medicines, I recall that the article said, and the thing was that these researchers had found that taking it made you less kind. What they said was that people who took it ‘showed a reduction in empathy’ and that using it lowered ‘a person’s capacity to empathize with another person’s pain, physical or emotional.’
And when I told Mona and Finch about it, well, neither of ’em had heard of it before, and I shouted ‘hell, yeah!’ and punched the air and because I never had told them about my game they both stared at me and I guess they were wondering why I was so damn pleased that over-the-counter drugs were making people mean.
And time went along and still I remained part of the great clan of the Undiagnosed, and I learned that to be sick was one thing, but to be sick with something that no one knows what, well, that’s quite another.
Every six months or so, I’d go and see Dr. B, just to mess with her a little. It was my idea of fun, for a time. And it cost me some, but I still did it. By this point, I had given up hope of her having any more answers than I had, but I just wanted her to know that even if it was all in my head, it was still all in my head. And body.
One day I made up another new word. I was sitting trying to tell Dr. B that she couldn’t go on saying things were in my head forever. Now she started to tell me I had a thing they called chronic fatigue syndrome and I said, ‘And what does that mean? It’s just a fancy way of telling me what I told you, that I’m tired all the time! I could have told you that.’ And then I went on to say you may as well just say I have an undiagnosed illness but, because I was a little upset, I said, ‘I have undiagnosis!’
Soon as I told Mona that, we made that the new way we talked about when you’re sick but you don’t know what with. ‘I got undiagnosis.’ I tried it a couple times later, like when a new librarian showed up at the library. ‘I got undiagnosis,’ I said when she asked why I was wearing a mask in her library. And that sure was the end of that conversation, real quick, which was more or less what I wanted.
Back in the Forties, when folks got together, they’d still share everything and all they had to know about this thing called MCS, and what caused it, and what might be the way out of it. And I listened to it all, and sometimes, when I was feeling a little better, I’d start saying to myself, see? Dr. B’s right. It was all in your head. You was never sick, Snowflake. And then there was other times when it would all come crashing back into me and I laid up in bed for a day or three, waiting for some energy to return to my body. And my head.
One day, a bunch of folks was over at Mona’s and Harry was one of ’em. She was all excited because she’d read something and she figured it was why the electrical-sensitive folks were the way they were. Now I was glad I’d never had a problem with that, but Mona did, and Detlef and Harry, and a few of the others. And Harry had read this thing that said that they’d found that bacteria responded to electricity. That they’re stimulated by it. And so Harry was thinking that suppose you was infected by some bad bacteria. Then you come into an electrical field and they get stimulated somehow, and that’s why you feel sick. On account of all those bacteria having a party in your muscles and in your blood.
While on the other hand, Mary was saying that she thought that lots of people had problems with mold spores, and the Dead Elf agreed, but he said that he felt that toxicant-induced lack of tolerance was the real big issue. He said you had to get your body to detoxify better. And then other people said other things.
And people was listening to Harry, and to Mary, and to Detlef, and I was too but I was also thinking are these the answers? Are they my answers? Are the answers even out there? I know Stephanie said they’re always out there, but maybe they ain’t. Maybe they’re not out there, maybe they’re in, someplace.
And the time was coming when I would have to do something about that, I just didn’t want it to be in the way that Bly had done something about it.
O Bly.
What did you do?
See, the thing was this. I had been given a house and by the time Steve had moved all Jenny’s stuff out, it was emptier than a shoebox. He’d been generous, of course. He’d left me the bed and the furniture and what-you-got, but all else I had was nothing. The little more than nothing I’d had when I rolled into the Forties, plus one or two books Mona had given me or that the library was throwing out.
And it was one day as I was over at Mona’s and collecting the last things from my cabin, trying to fill my house up, and it was almost a year since Bly had gone and left us, and I realized something. I realized that I had not even looked in the direction of those two dang sheds since the night he went.
It was like I had tried to make it not have happened, by not looking at where it did. But it had. And this one day, I looked at the sheds. There was the one he died in, and Mona and Finch had cleaned that one out. But I realized that all Bly’s things were still in the other.
‘What you thinking, kid?’ Mona said and she was suddenly right at my elbow, looking up at me and worrying.
‘Nah,’ I said, ‘don’t fret none. I just thought maybe I oughta go through his stuff.’
And Mona sighed and nodded and said, ‘Yeah, we oughta.’
So we did.
I could not look in the sleeping shed. But Mona said there was nothing to see there. But the other shed, well, it had Bly’s stuff in it, and mostly that was all his pills. They sat there on a little shelf, and I wondered why they was still alive when Bly wasn’t. All the vitamins and all the minerals and herbs and all the stuff that was supposed to make him better, it had all done exactly nothing.
There were some clothes. He was neat, our Bly. The few things he had were folded up neat and tidy, and when Mona went back to hers to get a sack for stuff we was going to throw out and another for stuff for the thrift store, I stole a T-shirt that had been my brother’s and hid it in the box I was taking to mine. It was what he was wearing the day I arrived and I knew it would be big for me, but I wanted it. I don’t know why I thought I had to steal it
. Mona wouldn’t have cared, but somehow I wanted it to be a secret, so I snuck it away when she wasn’t looking.
There weren’t no books. Bly never did read much. He learned by watching and listening, and that was fair and good enough for him. The only other thing was a plastic solar-powered dancing police officer, still in its box.
Mona lifted it up and we looked at it for a good time, wondering, and then I said I guess he was gonna give it to Jenny and Mona nodded and then we both looked away from each other because it was too much to think of one dead person not getting the chance to give to another dead person something they’d intended to.
And when that passed, I took it from Mona and I said, ‘I’ll put it with the others,’ because though Steve had moved out of Mona’s he’d left me with a collection of ten thousand wiggling solar-powered bits of plastic in my yard.
And see? There was me calling the bit of desert inside my fence a yard, now that it was my bit of desert. All legal, and all for a dollar.
If I mentioned before that nothing happened for a long, long while, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. You are about to see how spectacularly non-happening a long time of nothing can be. Just a world of nothing. And, yeah, we all know now what was happening some places and elsewhere, all the stuff that was brewing and getting ready to burst, but out there in the Forties, it was like time had come to a stop. Period.
Such as.
‘The sunflower,’ Mona said one day, ‘is seen differently by everyone who sees it.’
So I said what? and Mona said, ‘The sunflower. Snowflake, are you even listening? The sunflower. To a painter, it’s the color yellow. To a farmer, it’s a crop, a source of oil. The spiral pattern of the seeds reminds the mathematician of the Fibonacci sequence. To someone in love, the sunflower is what? Loyalty, that’s what.’
‘Loyalty?’
‘The face of a sunflower follows the course of the sun. Like a lover.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Huh.’
Then because I thought it sounded rude not to reply to that any better, I took a guess and said, ‘Nietzsche, 1844 to 1900?’ because it seemed to me he said more things than all the other philosophers put together, but Mona said no, it was one of her own, which I am ashamed kinda took the edge off it a tad. But then I thought why do we think things are smart because they was said by old dead guys, and not by the breathing kind of people all around and about? And I told Mona that and she said Voltaire, 1694 to 1778, had something to say about that, which was ‘fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable.’
‘So who do you believe?’ I asked Mona and she just grinned at me until I said I guessed that the trick is knowing what to think for yourself, and she pointed her gun fingers at me and said ‘bam!’
About three weeks later, I said to Mona, ‘That thing about sunflowers?’ and she said whut? and I said, ‘What did you mean by that?’
So she said how it was all a matter of perception. Life, she meant. That what you saw depended on who you was, and since we’re all different, no one sees the same world as anyone else. Not exactly.
And I mention all this just to show the level we had sunk to.
Nothing happened. Nothing, but birthdays came and went and Halloweens and Thanksgivings and Christmases too. Cooper got older and had a couple of falls and we had to take him to the vet. But he was fine. The vet chuckled (mostly to himself) as he told us that there was life in the old dog yet and I got the feeling he said that to everyone with a sick mutt of advancing years, every damn time. And Socrates seemed to be getting dumber, which possibly meant that actually secretly he was getting smarter, but in God’s honest truth, we all doubted it.
Mona said, even if he did have borderline personality disorder, that it was only a label and he was still a goat with feelings and we shouldn’t stigmatize him for that. And I figured that was right, and I also figured that at least he had a diagnosis.
Still, he may have been a goat with feelings and a diagnosis, but that didn’t stop him being Socrates. He’d found new ways to annoy, irk, and irritate, from butting the side of Mona’s house so loud at two in the morning that I could hear it over at my place, and so could Harry over at hers. For three weeks he banged the siding at two in the a.m., as regular as a clock, and no one could figure out why he started, or why he stopped. But when three weeks was up, he did. Then he started trying to have intercourse with Mona’s little clown car every afternoon and Mona said that sort of thing weren’t supposed to happen because of how they’d had him ‘seen to,’ but maybe they forgot to tell Socrates that.
Mona stood in front of the scene one day, with her hands on her hips, while Socrates tried to mount her car.
‘Ash, did I ever tell you how Socrates died?’
So I said uh-uh and she said, ‘He was forced to commit suicide by drinking hemlock. I wonder if hemlock grows anyplace around here…’
Then, though that was a good joke, we were both quiet and I guess it don’t need saying why. Mona coughed and hummed and then I thought I better say something, because I knew she didn’t mean anything bad.
‘Why did they make him do that? Socrates? The real one, I mean.’
‘On account of how he didn’t believe what everyone else believed. The right kind of gods. That kind of thing.’
‘Jeez,’ I said. ‘They killed him for that? I thought those Greeks were supposed to be smart.’
‘Real smart about some things. Real dumb on others. But Snowflake, this was a long time ago.’
So then I said, ‘You thinking things have gotten any better?’ and Mona nodded and grinned and said, ‘My work here is done’ and pretended to call her spaceship down to Earth to collect her.
Finch finished fixing his house and moved in. Mary told her lawyer to get lost and started looking for another. And time rolled on. I can tell you that in a moment, but that don’t make no difference. Years began to stack up on one another and I didn’t get better and all that happened was I got a little older.
All things put together, I guess a massive boredom had arrived in the Forties in general, and inside me in particular.
I was no longer the noob. I was getting older and, I feared, like Socrates, not getting any smarter. I’d mostly given up reading stuff, and though from time to time something would grab me, either a book or an article, soon enough I’d be done with it and I’d sink back to being me. Which was what? I was no longer ever in the wheelchair. I had good times during which I drove a lot of groceries around the desert, and I had bad times when I did precisely nothing, unless you count laying in bed staring at the ceiling something, which I don’t.
From time to time I thought about the things I’d learned. Like Finch’s little gene, no wait, his little polymorphism, the one that meant you was born to be more kind if you had two copies of it, and less if you had none. And then I thought about my mother and why she had never seemed to want me. And I thought about Mona’s bacteria, the ones who were actually controlling us and generally ruling the world, the ones who’d be around long after we’re gone. I even tried imagining I was bacteria one day and, compared to the four billion years of my species’ existence, the life and works of mankind seemed less important and lasting than a snowflake, melting. But when you start imagining you’re a bacterium, well, that is when you truly know that you are bored. And all this time, none of us was paying attention. Not to what we shoulda been paying attention to.
I wasn’t the only one that felt the boredom. I guess that was why Detlef decided to throw his party.
As you will recall, Detlef being a national of the sovereign state of the Federal Republic of Germany, he did some things a tad different. So his Christmas party was on Christmas Eve, because that’s what they did back home. And at Christmas he ate roast goose if he could find it, not turkey. Maybe being German was why most of his diet was Twinkies and hot dogs, though I doubt it. And in midsummer, there was something else he did that we didn’t do. Early one June, when the days were
so hot you thought that time might melt and stick to the ground, he started going on about midsummer bonfires. He went on about how it was a big time for a big party back in the village he’d grown up in and how he was gonna throw a party this year. And because he’d never done this before I figured it was to relieve the boredom on all of us.
Everyone helped get ready.
The main thing the Dead Elf was excited about was the bonfire. He told us how it was the custom to have a huge fire, and how often you’d make a straw doll and burn it on the bonfire. He said the dolls were supposed to be witches you wanted to get rid of.
So then Mary said, ‘Where are we gonna get a witch from?’ and a moment later everyone looked over at Mona who said ‘very funny’ and sulked for the rest of the day.
But not longer. Mona herself said she’d make a witch and she set to with some old clothes and some of Socrates’ hay and three days later she’d made this real funny-looking lady, all ready to be burned. I said to Mona it was a bit weird burning someone, wasn’t it? Even in pretend, and she said it was no weirder than lots of things that folk did to have fun and I did not have a smart reply to that.
I drove around in my truck that had been Bly’s truck and collected scrap wood from people. Old shipping crates and offcuts from construction. A broken bookcase here, a raggedy chair there. I drove up and down the Forties and the Twenties for two weeks on end and every time I got there, Detlef would unload all the wood and add it to the pile.
Detlef was some kind of human being. He was smart, and though he had his funny ways, everything he did he did real well. So when he built a bonfire, it was not only the biggest bonfire you ever saw, it was also the neatest; somehow he stacked all that ramshackle wood into a shape like a big round drum, ten feet tall. Maybe more.
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