Originally published in MungBeing.
It was snowing hard the day of the annual Winter Parade. I met Harald in the park after church. He had already staked out a good spot underneath a big elm right next to the sidewalk. It was our tradition to dive for candy tossed from the floats; we had given up on trick-or-treating years ago, but we kept this one up. Thick, wet flakes hissed through the thick branches and the few stone-dead leaves. Harald turned his head up to the sky and laughed.
“Weatherman said it’d be almost fifty today,” he said.
“Never sunny on Sunday,” I said. “You’re always on about the weatherman.”
“He’s cooler than God, man,” said Harald. “The weatherman doesn’t hide from his responsibility. He doesn’t apologize for his inaccuracies, but he stands up the next day as if nothing was wrong and he tells you to dig out your umbrellas, folks. He’s a liar, but he trusts you enough to know that he ain’t always right. God don’t want you to know when he’s wrong.”
“Selfish punk,” I said, without really meaning for it to go one way or the other, sarcastic or funny. Harald didn’t take either.
The first floats began to chug past, balanced in the beds of old Datsuns. The martial arts school put on a roving display, but it didn’t look right because all the students were wearing these big black slippers. The food bank tried to mix things up by holding open grocery bags and inviting the onlookers to toss in non-perishable items. Harald tossed one of his shoes at them, and said: “Real leather!”
A ripple of sighs preceded the Junior Miss float. Three girls sat on tiers, as though they were spirits of wedding joy reclining on a cake. At the top, alternating hands in her princess wave, Adrianna Telco beamed at the crowd. She was a year behind us, but there wasn’t a girl in our grade that matched her for looks. She crossed preference boundaries; if you dug Asian chicks, you’d still like Adrianna; if you had a bit of a porker fetish, your eye would follow her anyway; if you were a girl, you’d count her up there with Angelina on the list of women you’d go gay for.
Emma had been my type, but I always had trouble tearing my eyes away from Adrianna. She had mocha skin and hair like a fall of cherry juice. Emma had always been interested in my reaction to Adrianna, but never jealous. As the float passed our tree, I glanced away.
Harald noticed. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “Emma’s not watching.” I knew if I challenged him, he’d rise to the occasion. It’s the way he fought. I was a little tired of hearing his voice, so I turned back to the float. Adrianna was looking right at us, smiling wide, her lips the shape of a bow ready to be shot. She and Martha had tried to be friends, once. Birthday invitations were traded, and Martha went to one of Adrianna’s parties. She brought a doll as a present, but didn’t feel like wrapping it. Adrianna’s parents had chuckled and thanked Martha for the gift.
The next day at school, I was out on the soccer field and lunch when I saw Adrianna come up to Martha, holding the gift. They traded some words, and then Adrianna held the doll out. Martha took it back. Then Adrianna threw her arms around Martha and hugged her like girls do.
She was waving at me, and I waved back. Someone screamed, wordless, and I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. It made me think of a bird that flies into the path of a car, but it wasn’t a bird. It hit Adrianna’s face and changed it in an instant, breaking her skin and drawing up blood without any passage of time. As if it were a subliminal message in a movie, a single frame that clicks out of place as quickly as it appeared, I thought that blinking might change things back to normal.
Someone had thrown a rock. Adrianna put her fists to her face and got blood on her dress. The other princesses struggled up from their seats and the float stopped, though someone yelled: “Keep going! Keep going!”
Another rock sailed high over the float, and now the crowd was turning on the man who threw it. I caught a glimpse of the young lawyer from Martha’s funeral; he was stabbing his finger at the air, at the float, and yelling about something. I caught my cousin’s name, ripped high out of the lawyer’s throat.
Harald and I both rushed to the float, to see if there was anything we could do. I ran into football players and the chess club president, all setting themselves up as a human shield while the driver of the float yelled for everyone to sit down so he could move. Harald bent to the asphalt and retrieved the first rock. He hurled it back toward the lawyer. The lawyer ducked, but I saw other Brigades around him, all curled into themselves, fists and faces.
The sidewalk became a battle line. Some of the adults were screaming at us kids to calm down; others, like the lawyer, were trying to break across the asphalt and run us down. I heard somebody scream: “It’s your family that remembers! Your family remembers!” I added my voice in: “Martha was my cousin!” There wasn’t room for anything but the simplest of arguments, like a static battle. Pick one defensible position and stay there. My counterpoint was swallowed in the swell of rough confusion.
Parents on one side were ordering their children to cross the street. Children burst with profanity, seizing upon its quick power to cut the tethers of their parents. Harald climbed to the top of the float and thrust his fists in the air. “Fuck you and your God!” he cried. “Martha’s with the weatherman, now!”
The lawyer and the other Brigades had just needed an excuse. They charged and their momentum carried the rest of adults onto the pavement. The hands of working fathers met the wet necks of sons; the shrill voices of mothers knifed into the ears of daughters. It looked like a Hollywood brawl, but completely one-sided, like maybe some natural born killers versus the Buttercream Gang.
With the other juniors and seniors, I avoided most of it. It was the freshmen and sophomores that took the brunt of the assault, while we older kids rallied around the float. I hung around the back, out of sight of the young lawyer. I thought about tactics and war games, and, without even trying or meaning to, imagined myself in the thick of battle. The imaginary me made a feint around the float’s tailpipe and took out Martha’s great aunt Judy, who was yelling about soap and superstition. He then danced up the tiers of the float and shielded Adrianna from the crowd. Harald kicked at him, to get back his share of the spotlight, and the two boys began to fight dirty, mouths and fingers both.
What really happened was great aunt Judy got her hand on the driver and yanked the keys out of the ignition and two police officers showed up to help widen the distance between kids and adults. A hole in the clouds — almost perfectly round, as though God had poked his finger through — framed the sun for a moment, and Harald laughed himself sick, crowing: “Your God don’t say if he’s failing or not!”
It wasn’t as heroic, but I climbed up the backside of the float so my eyes were level with Harald’s sneakers. I hissed at him. “You ever read Ecclesiastes?” Now he was kicking glitter at the police officers. I made two fists and drove one each into the backs of his knees. He lost his balance and crashed down to the second tier, breaking off a plywood bundle of lace and foam.
I slid down to the pavement as fast as I could. When Harald got to his feet, I was around the other side of the float and getting suspended from school for a week. When Adrianna was loaded, sobbing, into an ambulance, I didn’t bother her with any sympathy.
#
The whole world settled down after that: no snow, no fights, a couple lawsuits that sparked and faded like fireworks. The new year came and went. A new semester got underway, and Harald and I didn’t share any classes.
I started to feel sick during baseball practice; running the bases made my legs cramp up and the tendons under my groin began to feel like frayed wires, pumping bad current. I toughed it out for a couple of months, and then told mom. She got me an appointment with our physician, and he quickly passed me up the ladder to a specialist.
The specialist asked me if I had been playing near any hazardous chemicals. I told him about the asbestos in our walls at home, but that I wasn’t much of a guy for playing right up against walls. He asked me if I were sexually active, and I told him: “Yeah, I were.” He wanted to know how long ago, so I told him about Emma and me. He wanted to know if Emma had been displaying any similar symptoms, and I told him that she hadn’t been.
He did a biopsy on me, and when the nurses got me into a hospital room they shut the door and asked me a bunch more questions. Had I noticed any trouble getting or maintaining an erection? How frequently did I masturbate? What products did I use for lubricant? I answered as quietly as I could; they had to ask me to repeat a few answers.
They kept me overnight, while they waited on the results of the biopsy. The next morning, the specialist came in alongside my breakfast and told me not to eat too quickly. “It’s malignant,” he said.
“Oh well,” I said, shrugging. “Amputate it.”
It didn’t turn out to be that simple. The cancer was in my blood, and could only be killed off by radiation. The specialist told me I’d never be able to have children again, and I asked if it would hurt more than a vasectomy. He said it wouldn’t. “Kill two birds with one stone,” I said.
After that, I was in twice a month for radiation treatments, after which my whole damn body felt like burnt wiring. Each time, they let me hang out on the long-term floor, sleep all day, claim to be too tired to do homework, and watch TV when I felt like it. Mostly, I watched infomercials.
Even those got old after three months of the routine. I took to wandering the halls, smiling at people who looked like they might smile back. It was on one of these circuits of the halls that I stumbled on Edgar’s room.
He was awake, half-sitting in his adjustable bed, picking at the dirt under his finger nails.
“Hey, Steve,” I said. He looked up and, after letting my greeting echo a couple of times, gave me a big smile.
“Hey,” he said. “What are you in for?”
“Life,” I said. “May I come in?”
“Be my guest,” said Edgar.
I hobbled in and took a seat on the corner of a chair, the rest of which was populated by flowers. “You’ve got a fan club,” I said.
Edgar gave me a weak smile, but he shouldn’t have bothered. I knew he wasn’t keen on all the attention, never had been. All through high school, I had tried to shore up my self-esteem by thinking that he and I were the same in that regard. The difference was that his distaste was from experience, and mine was from its lack.
“How are they treating you?” I asked.
“Like an amnesiac,” said Edgar. “Every morning they ask me if I can remember my name, and if I can wiggle my toes, and what’s the capitol of England. They think I’m going to have a relapse.”
“Can you have a coma relapse?” I asked. “I bet they panic when you take a nap.”
“When they let me take a nap,” he said. “Always checking up on me, taking my pulse.”
“I hear you,” I said, shifting flowers and settling further back in my seat. “I hear you.”
I was in for another couple days, so I hung out in Edgar’s room as much as possible. If I was annoying him, he never let on. I started most of the conversations, but once they had momentum he didn’t try much to slow them down.
Another batch of flowers arrived, and Edgar invited me to sit at the foot of his bed so I wouldn’t have to fight with them. We talked about school and books and enough about religion for us to share a couple of self-conscious snickers. He offered to teach me the guitar, so we wasted one afternoon trying to build calluses on my fingers. He said it wouldn’t work without calluses.
When my therapy was over, I stopped by his room to tell him I’d visit. The treatments were making me feel as weak as I had ever been, as if I had to be careful breathing or I’d blow myself over.
“You going to be here a while longer?” I asked.
“Not if I can help it,” he said. Then he reached down beside his bed with a hand tethered to an IV and lifted his guitar. “Here,” he said. “You ought to keep practicing.”
“Thanks,” I said. I could barely lift the thing, and my fingers were still sore from the last practice. “You gonna need it?”
Edgar shook his head. His lips trembled, as though holding back words and breath that he didn’t want to let loose. “I used to believe that art was the highest form of human expression,” he said. “I don’t anymore.”
“So what is?” I asked. A nurse knocked on the open door and slipped past me. She fiddled with Edgar’s IV pump and checked his pulse. By the time she left, the air had cleared of all questions and was too thin for answers. I had to say something, though, not to have the last word, but to be remembered. “Martha was my favorite cousin,” I said. I regretted it all the way to the curb, where mom picked me up in our old station wagon.
I sat in the passenger seat, resting my forehead against the glass and listened to my teeth vibrating gently in my skull. Mom tried to talk to me, but I could barely keep my eyes open. I drifted in and out of sleep, lulled by the motion of the car, jolted awake by its turns. I remember cracking my eyes open, the whole world a smear of blue-tinted color as mom wheeled around an intersection.
That was it, then, the power that Edgar and Harald and Emma all shared. Art is not the ultimate expression of humanity; power is. Power becomes beautiful in display, for suicides and saints, and is both irredeemable and irreversible, unlike the creation of a work of art, which contains value and frailty. God, if there is such a creature, is an artist who bestows value on his beasts. The beasts, in their capacity for destruction, undo his effort and make it their own.
The radiation was burning in my brain. Mom had to take me around the shoulders to get me in to bed, guiding my feet and muttering: “Come on. You aren’t helpless.”
#
Three months later, my cancer was fully in remission. I had missed too much school to graduate that year, so in April I dropped out, temporarily, and picked up a job with a local plumber. My family, from the Brigades all the way across to my side of the family tree, was happy for my success in fighting off the cancer. I told them I hadn’t done much, but that the doctors and nurses ought to thanked.
Aunt Riley — who chose God over doctors — threw a dinner party soon after in celebration of my healing. I asked her to make sure God came, so I could thank him properly.
The day of the party was an anniversary of sorts for Emma and me; a year ago that day, I had first kissed her on the cheek. My lips had burned until I went to bed. Aunt Riley called at lunchtime to ask me to come up a little early, because her well was acting up again. I said I’d be right up. I grabbed my toolbox and mom drove me up. Aunt Riley greeted us at the door. She kissed me hard on the cheek, making a noise in her throat because her lips were so dry they wouldn’t smack. As mom went inside to help aunt Riley with the dinner, a breeze stirred the air around me and the kiss sloughed off my skin.
The well was out in the middle of the yard, covered by an old shipping palette to which a sheet of tar paper had been stapled. I hauled the cover off and peered down into the gloom. She had overdrawn the water, again; she kept having this problem because she pumped water so fast that the well didn’t have time to recharge. Her pump was sucking air, probably had been for a while, so I let myself drop to the platform on which it rested. The well itself was covered by a grid of two-by-fours, and went down a good thirty feet. I knelt down on the boards and flicked at the grimy switch on the pump. It coughed into silence and I shivered, a spring chill settling on my shoulders. The pressure gauge on the pump ticked down to zero and stayed there. I adjusted the feed pipe a couple inches down; aunt Riley usually had a quick enough inflow that the well would charge up again in just a minute or so, and faster if I adjusted the depth. I waited to a count of sixty, inspecting the cracks in the concrete to keep me occupied.
I switched the pump back on, and it choked like a fish on air. The pressure gauge stayed at zero. I flicked the switch again and waited another minute. I heard a car squelch over aunt Riley’s muddy drive and poked my head up like a prairie dog’s. A couple distant cousins had arrived, probably to share dinner. I waved at them and then dropped out of sight.
The pump still refused to grab water. Wasn’t nothing for it but to go down to the bottom of the well and check the intake manually. I slid the two-by-four lid off the circular hole. As I did, a bubble of silence seemed to rise out of it, expanding to fill the well housing, pressing into my ears. It was depth and solitude and came with a musty smell of earth and old water.
There was a row of rebar handholds down one side of the well. I swung myself onto them and went down, hand over hand. The bars were cold as bones. Every rung down took me further into the silence.
When I reached the bottom, still hanging onto the ladder, I felt around with the toe of one boot. There wasn’t much light down there, but there wasn’t much room to get lost, either. I could hear my boot splash lightly against water, and risked leaning a little further down. My foot hit mud before the water had a chance to seep over my sole. I let go of the ladder and got down on my haunches. The well was almost dry. I felt the walls; they were slick with moisture, and thick with clay. I fumbled around with my arms until I found the intake pipe. I slid my fingers to its end and then measured the distance to the puddle that was all that was left of aunt Riley’s water. There was about a foot of gap.
Wasn’t much I could do, at that point. I rubbed my hands together to shake off the mud and to warm them up. When I stopped moving, the silence was total. I was alone, a creature at the root of creation. The smell reminded me of Emma’s room, with all her dead leaves.
I looked up. It was mid-afternoon, but in the lens of the well’s opening I could see needlepoint stars against a royal blue sky. Someone had told me, in the tone of an urban legend, that you could see stars in broad daylight. I stared; a reverse vertigo hit me, and I leaned back against the muck of the wall. I had never thought that stars could be so beautiful; they were too far away to signify anything, or to act as anything but pixels in a giant, inscrutable screen that played for the world.
I had to close my eyes. Tears I hadn’t known were there squeezed out from under my lids and seemed to freeze against my cheeks. I began to climb out of the hole, hand over hand.
I covered the well up and crawled out of the housing; the sounds of the motion of air, of spring birds, of supple leaves scraped against my ear drums like steel wool. As the sun began to coax the cold stiffness out of my joints, I looked up. The sky was blue, like a dusting of fine powder. I could see the moon, but that was it.
Inside, I cleaned up and told aunt Riley the bad news. She’d have to drill deeper; the water table was all used up. She made a face, and then patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said. “The Lord will provide.”
A dozen or so of my extended family crowded around aunt Riley’s table. They all wished me well, and the younger ones wanted to rub my bald head for good luck after I assured them that cancer wasn’t contagious.
“Would you say the blessing?” aunt Riley asked me.
“Sure,” I said. Everyone but me bowed their heads; everyone but me closed their eyes. I couldn’t bring myself to. I stared at the downturned faces of my relatives, with their soft noses and their puffed cheeks and trimmed hair, and I couldn’t even blink. “Dear Lord,” I began. I didn’t want to say a word. I could think of thousands of them, but I wanted to shut up, to let everyone else have their turns. I thought about what my family needed —warmth and water, money, food, and fun — and I asked God for only those things. When the “amen” sounded, I went quiet. That night, I dreamed about wax and failure and standing in a crowd that stared up at the sun.
The end
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