by Dana Czapnik
“What is that thing that Jesus says? About making a profit—”
‘ “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?’ That’s what Jesus said.”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“Sorry, Jesus, but it profits a man a lot. There are some things in the world that feel better than having a soul. I wish it weren’t true, but there it is.” Percy shakes his head. “So, I don’t know if my dad’s a good person. He’s a real shitty dad, but that’s irrelevant. I bet there are some real good people who are shitty parents.”
“No. At the very least, goodness should be measured by how well you treat the people you love.”
“My dad doesn’t love me.” Percy laughs.
“Of course he does,” I reassure him, even though it might be a lie.
“No, he doesn’t, but that’s okay. Besides, life is easier without the burden of parental love. Like, your parents love you. And they want the best for you. That’s why you feel this enormous pressure to go to a good school. You’d let them down if you didn’t. But no one cares if I fuck up. I can go to any school I want, anywhere in the world. Or not. I can just bag the whole thing. Throw on a backpack and roam. Total freedom. No one will even notice I’m gone.”
“I’d notice.”
“Don’t look at me that way, all concerned for me. It’s not a big deal. I don’t really believe love exists anyway.”
“I know. You say that whenever that word comes up in conversation. It’s a great defense mechanism.”
“Stop it. It’s not that deep.” He smiles at me, and the thin skin marked by light brown stubble on his face folds into two lines on his left side and three on his right, where a dimple that used to be pronounced when he was a kid has faded into an indentation that only appears when the corners of his mouth are upturned. He has a sweet face. He just does. A rare feeling washes over me, like there’s a chance he might kiss me. But he doesn’t. He turns his face away, and his smile fades, and the moment is over.
I lie down on the plastic chaise lounge we found on the street last month and watch as a jet overhead disappears inside a cloud. I look again at my dad’s book.
“The Vietnamese call it the American War,” I go.
“That makes sense.”
“Do you think the Koreans call it the American War too? And the Iraqis?”
“Probably.”
“I find that so depressing.”
“Once upon a time, we were the good guys. But that hasn’t been the case for a while.” Percy lies down on the roof next to me, puts his hands behind his head. “That’s why I’m not an American.”
“So what are you, then?”
“I don’t have a country. I’m my own country.”
“Interesting . . . What’s your country’s citizenship policy?”
Percy mimes a box around his body. “These are closed borders. No one’s coming in.”
How does he do that? Go through the world with so much armor. If only I could be cool and calm and untouchable like that. Instead of being a person hurtling through the world like a helium balloon that’s been pricked by a needle. Ricocheting noisily off bridges and buildings for a time . . . and then deflated. Has Percy always been this way?
He sits up for a second and takes off his button-down. Balls it up and puts it on the surface of the roof to use as a pillow. Without that baggy shirt, I can see the way his body is cut under his T-shirt. The jut of his spine, the width of his shoulders. The half-inch gap between the waist of his pants and his lower back. He lies back down and looks up at the sky.
“You know, the first time I ever came up here was when my dad brought me to see Halley’s Comet.” I close my eyes and can picture the setting perfectly. As if it’s happening in real time. The way the cold tar of the roof felt on my bare feet. The steam escaping my father’s mouth as he examined the coordinates printed in that day’s New York Times, illuminated by the small flashlight he held between his teeth. “He set up a telescope that he bought for the occasion and woke me up at, like, two in the morning to come up here. I was tired and cranky, and then we just waited and waited and waited. But we didn’t see anything.”
“Why? Too much light pollution?”
“Yeah. Like, how didn’t he realize that?”
“At least he made the effort. My dad never did anything like that for me.”
“I kept on complaining how cold it was and how I wanted to go back to bed, and he kept getting angrier and angrier with me until finally he picked up the telescope and threw it off the roof.”
“Damn.”
“It landed on a car and shattered the windshield. He left a note and paid for it, of course. But still. I think I’ve spent my whole life so far trying to figure out why he was so adamant that I see this comet. I know it only comes around like every seventy-something years, so it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but the way he freaked out was so out of proportion.”
“I’m telling you, the anger of an unfulfilled dream is powerful.”
“What? The writing thing?”
“Yeah.”
“No. Let it go. That has nothing to do with it. I think it was something else. Halley’s Comet came, like, a couple months after the Challenger exploded, and we had all watched it happen at school. And I think he wanted to prove to me that life was beautiful, you know? To give me the freedom of an innocent childhood. Can you imagine what life must have been like for our parents? When he was a kid, my dad played stickball in the streets all day in Brooklyn and watched the moon landing on TV, and he hitchhiked to Mexico by himself when he was twenty. I think that’s why he threw that telescope off the roof.”
If I had to trace my history to a moment when I began to piece together the idea that most of the beautiful and wondrous things in heaven and earth were at least partially a figment of everyone’s imagination, I’d say it was that same night, in my pajamas, barefoot on a soot-covered tar rooftop. In the span of two months, from the morning of the Challenger to the night of Halley’s Comet, I had learned that all the world promised would never live up to my expectations at best. Blow up in my face at worst.
One of our teachers had applied to be the first teacher in space. He was one of the finalists and he came back from his trip to Cape Canaveral with stories and slides that clickety-clacked through a carousel at an assembly. A student raised his hand and asked why he wasn’t picked. “I couldn’t adjust to weightlessness,” he’d said. That moment’s always stayed with me. In my warped little nine-year-old brain, with my intellectual fontanel still soft, I interpreted that sentence to mean he couldn’t mentally adjust. As though gravity were an addiction he couldn’t kick. I felt his reason to be infinitely silly. When you have the opportunity to take a rocket into space you ought to let go of whatever emotional and mental insufficiencies you have and just get over it. Later, of course, I figured out it was a physiological thing. But an idea started to congeal in me back then, when I thought his was a mental barrier. Something about a personal valuation of fear.
Christa McAuliffe was picked. Not our teacher. Pictures of her and the entire flight crew were pasted around our school next to President Reagan. It was important because there were two women, one African American man, and one Asian man on the crew. One of the women was Jewish. It was the first time students in our school had seen astronauts who looked like them. It was the Eighties, and many of the rich white families had fled the city for safer hamlets with better schools and less crime. Suddenly, a school like Pendleton was accessible to families like mine and like the Watanabes in 5B.
And all of us were crowded into our tiny gym. And we watched the whole thing happen, like every other kid in America. I have deeply ingrained memories of that assembly. The penny I was trying to rescue from in between the floorboards and that has remained there all this time under layers upon layers of poly like it’s cast in amber. The way the senior girls cried while Ms. Ellstrom strummed her guitar and sang “The Circle Game” as we waited for the telev
ision feed to play. Our class has those girls too, the ones who cry whenever she sings that song at assembly, even though now she frequently has to stop the song and cough the rust out. There will always be girls who cry at “The Circle Game.” And as chaos broke out around me and we watched footage of debris floating down to the Atlantic, I knew all those astronauts were dead. And I also knew those astronauts were aware of the risk they took. I knew then that whatever I chose to do in life, I wanted to feel that way about it. Whatever it was, I wanted to love it so much it was worth considerable risk. I wouldn’t let an addiction to gravity hold me back.
After school that day, Percy came over to my apartment, as he often did while his parents were getting their divorce. It had been snowing all week, and there was a nice buildup. My mom brought us to Central Park. There we were: having fun after having watched the Challenger explode. I’d have moments when I’d forget it happened at all and I’d be laughing, speeding down a hill on my sled. But then there were moments when I was hit with it, and I’d temporarily lose my breath, feeling how very unfair it was that those people died and here we were, living.
I stepped into a snowbank and saw that my boot compacted the snow on the bottom and left a print, but soft, unformed snow was still falling and collecting in my footprint, and suddenly I was overwhelmed by how beautiful it was and the idea that someone would risk leaving this and miss a moment of fresh snow pooling in a boot print seemed crazed to me, which was in direct conflict with what I had felt before, inside Pendleton’s gym. I’ve told Violet about it, since it was a very fraught moment, that all it took were some flurries to shatter something I’d felt so strongly just hours before. She said that inside every person is a constant war between staying and leaving and that there are some people who can decide on one or the other and eventually find contentment. And then there are those who remain restless forever.
At one point, Percy sledded down a hill and didn’t come back up. I wondered what happened to him, so I sledded down to the bottom and found him lying in the snow with his eyes closed. I stood over him, thinking for a second he was dead. My body cast a long shadow over half his face and torso. He opened the one eye that was shaded. “Why are you just lying there?” I asked him.
He closed his eye. “I’m trying to feel the earth move,” he said.
I laid down next to him and closed my eyes too. The light from the sun created strange, psychedelic patterns behind my lids. After waiting a long time and feeling some snow begin to creep under my scarf and onto the back of my neck, I turned to Percy, whose eyes were still squeezed shut, and said, “Do you feel it?”
And he said, “Yes, I can feel it move.”
And I turned again on my back and looked at the sky and said, “I wonder how many kids are doing this exact same thing right now, this very moment, all throughout the world—trying to feel the earth move.” Which was something I said a lot when I was a kid, because that idea fascinated me—that there could be a kid somewhere in the mountains of India or in the streets of Paris thinking or doing the exact same thing I was thinking or doing at that exact moment in New York, New York, USA. And Percy said, with his eyes still closed, “Maybe we’re the only ones.”
* * *
“Anyway,” I sigh. “So, you can go anywhere, total freedom.” I turn to him. We are in positions almost identical to where we were that afternoon, but this time his eyes are open and hooded. He’s stoned now, and groggy. The muscles in his face all limp. His mouth slightly open. His eyes unfocused, staring at everything and nothing all at once. “Where ya gonna go?”
“I’ve been thinkin’ . . . S-San Diego. San Diego. The weed there . . . it’s supposed to be, like . . . pure. And the girls . . .” He doesn’t finish the thought.
“What about the girls?”
“Huh?”
“The girls. What about them?”
“They’re the way . . . the way they should be . . . in San Diego.”
“What a waste of your intelligence.”
“I wasn’t getting into Harvard . . . based on my intelligence. Dad would have to, like . . . pull strings . . . Like a marionette.” He laughs and moves his arms like a puppet.
“Well, I want to go to a good school.”
“I know you do . . . the Adlers are . . . upwardly mobile.”
“And the Abneys?”
“There’s nowhere for us to go . . . but . . . dooown.”
“Okay, whatever. Go smoke your life away at a beach somewhere.”
“What are you gonna do . . . change the world?” He laughs through his nose.
“No,” I say, a bit stung, “but I don’t want to add to its misery. I refuse to become another humanoid producing trash and buying useless pieces of cotton and plastic and taking up space. I don’t want to be a . . . consumer. I want to create something, or discover something, or teach something, or save something.”
“The noble . . . will never inherit the earth.”
I ignore him.
“You know what I wanna be?”
“What do you wanna be, Lucy?”
“The Falconer.”
He sits up and squints at me, suddenly focused. “You want to raise hunting birds? You don’t even eat meat.”
“No—like the statue in Central Park. It’s not of someone famous, it’s just some kid at the height of his powers standing on top of a mountain, commanding nature, releasing a bird into the wind without any fear.”
“You can’t get a degree in being the Falconer—you know that, right? You’ll have to pick something practical, like pre-law or psychology.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Okay, just making sure,” he says, smiling with his whole body. I hold an imaginary camera up to my face. Behind him, the yellow gradient from the lights and life below blends with the dark purple of space and all thoughts dissolve into Manhattan’s orange-vapor sky. I close one eye, look at Percy through the viewfinder, and “Click.”
in space no one can hear you scream
One of Brent’s friends from college is doing whip-its in the game room. Everyone else is piled haphazardly on the modular leather couch, watching the Knicks’ home opener. There’s a small Picasso hanging on the wall over the head of the kid doing whip-its. A signed replica of Don Quixote. Or maybe it’s not a replica. Maybe it’s the real thing. I wouldn’t doubt it in the Abney house. That’s the kind of money they have. The kind that lets them hang a possibly maybe real Picasso in their game room over the head of a boy doing whip-its. No cereal in the pantry but a signed Picasso and a fully stocked liquor cabinet.
In the corner, another kid is sticking his head inside the gaping mouth of a taxidermied lion, which Brent killed on safari three years ago when he was a college freshman. The person who stuffed the lion did such a good job, you can’t see the four bullet wounds. Someone snaps a picture of the kid whose head is in the lion’s mouth. The flash goes off because the lighting in the room is dim. I bet the kid will have serious red eye when the photo is developed, but he’ll tack it to the wall in his dorm room anyway. It’ll be a cool story for him to share with his roommates back at school. When this lion showed up in their home, Percy was near tears for a week. His brother and father had gone off and killed magnificent, endangered creatures. How could he ever look at them again? We avoided this room for months, but eventually he got over it. The pool table’s in here, and what’s done is done.
Brent walks into the room with a bottle of Captain Morgan and a bottle of Coke and stands for a moment, watching his friend on the couch inhale and exhale through a blue balloon. “Where do you think you are right now, Ohio? No one does that shit in New York.”
The kid takes one last breath and lets the balloon go. The gas escapes quietly and he sits back on the couch and laughs slowly.
I whisper, “Who does whip-its?” to Percy, who’s about to break the rack in a game of pool.
“People who don’t have access to real drugs.”
“What does it do to you?”
&n
bsp; “Don’t know, never tried it.” The cue ball blasts through the triangle with a violence, sending balls all over the green felt, like planets at the birth of the universe. An orange ball with the number 5 on it falls into a pocket made of gilded rope, and Percy calls solids. I watch the kid from behind my pool cue, waiting to see what happens. But nothing does. He just leans back on the couch with a sigh under Don Quixote. It’s anticlimactic after watching him suck in that blue balloon, which is perhaps the exact sensation whip-its are supposed to give you. I shouldn’t stare the way that I am. It betrays an innocence and a curiosity I’m supposed to keep buried if I ever want to be cool. But I’m a rubbernecker. I rubberneck my way through most experiences—tragic or beautiful. Even moments only a little sordid, like this one.
“One more game, dude, then we gotta go,” Brent says to Percy, handing him a red Solo cup full of rum and Coke. He points to me and says, “What’s your little girlfriend’s name?”
