Why Visit America

by Matthew Baker

  Stewart gestures for him to come to the pickup. Christopher glances at me in the pickup, then at “Nate” in the trash bin. Christopher shakes his head. He’s not going to come. Stewart creeps slightly closer. Christopher hesitates. Stewart creeps closer yet, then snatches the clarinet, throws him over a shoulder, and comes lurching back to the pickup.

  Stewart shoves him between us in the cab, shuts the door, hits the lock.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be at band?” Stewart says.

  Christopher scowls at the dashboard. “Nate Vanderveen spit on Emma again today at lunch,” Christopher says. “So I took the day off from band to fight him.”

  We stare at our nephew like he’s a word with a new definition. This is a boy who likes to play with the dolls his sister keeps boxed in the basement, a boy we once found sitting on a stump in the woods singing a song he had written about “handsome elves” and the “sparkly fairy potions they keep on their shelves.” He is even skinnier than we were at his age, and on his nose has three freckles, which, as far as we can tell, outnumber his friends.

  “With a clarinet?” I say.

  “He’s two years older than you, you idiot,” Stewart says. “He’s the sort of kid who plays with knives, not his sister’s ballet slippers.”

  “Stewart,” I say, feeling othery for Christopher. Stewart is in the habit of saying things he regrets, which is why he also is in the habit of getting divorced.

  Stewart says, “He would’ve sent you to the hospital. What did you think you were doing, trying to jump a goon like that?”

  In the eighteenth century a child of Christopher’s meager size likely would have already succumbed to some minor illness—measles, whooping cough, influenza—but it is the twenty-first century and we have paid for the necessary vaccines to protect Christopher’s delicate body. In the eighteenth century Christopher also would have been blind, and thus even if he had survived his various illnesses probably would have had his fingers or his arm wrenched off by the gears of some machine in whatever factory he was working, and afterward would have lived as a beggar before starving in the snow and the filth of some gutter, but it is the twenty-first century and we have bought him eyeglasses so he can see. If Stewart is angry with him it’s because we’ve just caught him out seeking an untimely death when we’ve been working so diligently to prevent one.

  “I don’t care what he would have done. He gave Emma the nickname ‘Smelly’ and now nobody will talk to her or sit by her or call her her real name,” Christopher says.

  Stewart starts the pickup just as “Nate” squirms backward from the trash bin, holding a mouse by the tail. The boy lifts the mouse, squinting as the rodent sways back and forth, paws scrabbling at the air. We pull away from the curb, sputtering toward the lake. The trees in our state have already gone from green to gold and then gold to red, the leaves starving, growing season over. Wind blows through the branches, knocking leaves adrift.

  “And what do you mean, aren’t I supposed to be at band?” Christopher says. “What were you two doing there? Aren’t you supposed to be working?”

  “It doesn’t matter why we were there,” Stewart says.

  Christopher scowls at the dashboard. I stare at the paint-chipped cottages along the shore. The weathered docks. The bobbing sailboats. The beachgrass swaying in the dunes. Christopher mutters, “And I don’t play with her ballet slippers,” even though he knows that we know that he does.

  * * *

  One of Stewart’s dead languages has a series of words for human demeanor. The word that Stewart says describes my own personal mien is weyrey. Best translated weyrey means “demeanor-of-invisibility”; Stewart says the reason I was ignored instead of bullied when we were younger is that I have an aura of insignificance. I often think of us as a “we,” but Stewart prefers to focus on the ways in which we are a “you and me.”

  “You’re the opposite of the person who, when he walks into a room, everybody drops whatever they’re doing just to watch him, wishing that they could know him,” Stewart said. “When you walk into a room, even people who aren’t doing anything don’t bother to watch you. They’re more interested in doing nothing.”

  This is one of the things he has regretted saying. He later told me he did, although he still thought weyrey was my mien.

  “It’s not because you’re quiet. Talkative people can be weyrey too. People who think they’re social,” Stewart said.

  Stewart says his own mien is nipfay, which best translated means “irritant-demeanor.” When we were younger he was as quiet as me, wore the same secondhand sweaters and castoff jeans, but while I was ignored, he was bullied by everybody in our village with a fondness for bullying, and even by some without.

  “You walk into a room and nobody notices you,” Stewart said. “I walk into a room, and even if I don’t say a word, or even look at anyone, everyone gets this feeling that they’d hate me if they knew me. They’re irritated by my very existence.”

  As his older brother, I should have been the one to defend him from the boys who emptied his backpack out the windows of our bus—his sci-fi novels bouncing off the railing on the bridge and tumbling into the creek—the boys who broke into his locker and peed into his gym shoes, the boys who bloodied his nose with fists. I was even more afraid than he was, though. When boys would shove him at the bus stop, I would pretend not to notice, standing with a book near enough to my face to smell the pages. So instead he went to our tian, begging him for help.

  “So hit them back,” our tian said, biting a steel nail between his teeth as he spoke, pressing a measuring tape against the windowsill with his thumbs. Our sister stood nearby holding a hammer. “I’m not going to fight your fights.”

  The next week a boy Stewart’s age was throwing pinecones at Stewart when our sister, two years his younger and six years mine, tripped the boy and kneed the boy in the mouth. The boy rode to school with a cut tongue and a mouthful of blood and didn’t speak a word to Stewart for months. Stewart likewise went months without speaking to our sister, furious that she had fought a boy he had been too afraid to. In the state in which we live, a boy can grow into a man only if he is unafraid to hurt another boy with his hands. A boy who is afraid to hurt other boys cannot grow into a man; he becomes something else, something neither boy nor man, something we have no word for.

  That is why Stewart feels so guilty about what this “Nate” has done to Emma; Stewart believes that if our sister were here, she never would have allowed this to happen.

  In the same way that a trauma can leave somebody with a physical impairment—a limp, a sightless eye, a stump arm—a trauma can also leave somebody with an emotional impairment. I believe that Stewart has several. One of my first publications was hurden, a noun I defined as “a permanent emotional impairment.” When our tian was forty-something, an engine tipped off a conveyor belt and fractured the bones in his foot; even after our tian retired, his gait was still marked by a limp. Stewart’s limp is not a physical one—not a limp of the feet—but still he is marked by it. Before, he’d had one wife or another to fight for him as our sister had—to menace the plumbers and mechanics and supermarket cashiers who attempted to cheat him, to browbeat the colleagues who snubbed or belittled him. But now Stewart is Stewart alone. He wants to believe he is capable of defending Emma in a way he has never been capable of defending himself. But a hurden cannot be undone—by definition, a hurden is a thing of permanence.

  I was uneasy publishing a word based on Stewart’s suffering. But it is vital my words seem authentic. Plagiarists will skip a word that is an obvious fiction. My words must seem to serve some purpose in the English language that no other word is capable of serving. Those are the words plagiarists will copy. When the mirage seems solid.

  * * *

  The boy has no patterns whatsoever, lives by a policy of whim. Stewart scissors apart my notes and rearranges the entries, first by day of week, then by time of day. Regardless of how the notes are arranged, the boy’
s doings appear utterly arbitrary.

  By day of week:

  “Thursday October 16 eats butterscotch candy at 4:37 p.m. on bench outside of gas station.”

  “Thursday October 23 takes magazine from neighbor’s mailbox at 5:02 p.m., tears single page from magazine, deposits torn page in mailbox, departs with magazine.”

  “Thursday October 30 steals onto sailboat at 2:53 p.m. at wharf, beckons for friend (same as previous week, boy from arcade) to join him upon boat, friend refuses (seems afraid), boy climbs out of boat and shoves friend off of dock, friend flounders, swims toward shallows, boy helps friend from water, depart together into town.”

  “Thursday November 6 at 6:08 p.m. sets street on fire with aid of gasoline.”

  By time of day:

  “Tuesday October 21 attempts to take bicycle parked outside of bookstore at 5:51 p.m., caught by other high schoolers (older), flees into alley with bloody lip.”

  “Friday October 24 behind high school at 5:50 p.m. hits small dog with stick.”

  “Wednesday October 29 at 5:53 p.m. assists tian with automobile repairs in driveway, yelled at by tian for kicking tires of automobile.”

  “Friday November 7 5:51 p.m. instructs friend (same as last week, boy from wharf) to stand outside antique shop with back to windows, boy disappears into alley toward rear of antique shop, reappears on roof of antique shop (friend unaware, still facing street) and pees onto friend from roof; friend curses boy, ducks into doorway of antique shop to avoid spray, boy laughs, zips pants, disappears from roof, reappears in alley; friend is accosted by owner of antique shop for standing in doorway; boy and friend curse the owner, spit on windows of antique shop, depart together toward arcade.”

  The retired have already abandoned their cottages for the season, driven from freshwater peninsula to saltwater peninsula, to the southernmost state on the continent, if they have the money to afford a condo for the winter. The retired too poor to migrate have holed up in their cottages with firewood and space heaters and electric blankets, waiting for the snowdrifts to settle in, the dark months of rime and ice. Our map becomes overrun with x’s, marking where and when the boy has been, which by now is almost everywhere. Christopher skips marching band again, following us while we follow “Nate.” The pickup is parked at the general store, where “Nate” is inside either shopping or shoplifting, when Christopher appears at my window, bundled up in a coat and mittens and one of his sister’s pink scarves. Christopher knocks on the glass. Stewart blinks awake, mumbles, “Huh?” I lean on the crank until the window snaps through the frost and then roll the window down.

  “Why aren’t you at band?” Stewart says.

  “Because I’m following you,” Christopher says. “Are you following Nate Vanderveen?”

  “No,” Stewart says.

  “Are you going to beat him up or something?” Christopher says. “You know you can’t beat up a kid.”

  “He’s not a kid,” Stewart says. “He’s fourteen and clinically psychopathic.”

  “Fourteen is a kid,” Christopher says.

  “We’re not going to hurt him,” I say. “Just scare him.”

  “You better not tell Emma,” Christopher says. “Maybe you think that by beating him up you’ll be telling her you love her, but she’s not going to get that.”

  “We caught you trying to do the same thing, you idiot,” Stewart says.

  “All I’m saying is, if you do it, don’t tell her, because she’s going to hate you for it,” Christopher says. “Mom knew how to tell her she loved her, which is just to say it. Also, if you’re going to beat him up, I want to help.”

  Stewart looks at me and then says, “Vivixixi,” a word from one of his dead languages that best translated means “ill-advised plot.”

  “I know you’re saying in your freak language that you don’t want me to come, but too bad,” Christopher says. He climbs into the pickup, scrambling over me to sit between us. “Today he took Emma’s necklace with Mom’s ring on it and flushed it down the toilet. Just tell me when you’re actually going to get out of the truck, because I’m going to come and I’m going to kill him.” He buckles his seatbelt. “But I’ve been hiding behind that streetlight watching you for probably an hour, and my face is numb and my hands are numb and my feet are numb and I don’t want to walk all the way home on frozen feet, so for now can you just drive me home?”

  “No,” Stewart says. “We’re waiting for the kimlee to come out of the store.”

  “You two are the worst parents,” Christopher mutters. He yanks his sister’s scarf over his mouth and nose and then huddles into himself, wrapping his arms around his chest, tucking his mittens under his arms.

  * * *

  Christopher skips marching band daily, comes with us while we follow “Nate,” drinks from a mug of steaming cocoa while we drink from mugs of steaming tea. Before, our afternoons had been soundless, the noise outside the pickup—the howling of the wind, the honking of the geese, the creaking of worn brakes on buses, the clanging of chimes on porch awnings, the katzenjammer of “Nate” tossing his tian’s tools from the roof of his family’s cottage onto the driveway below—muffled from inside the cab. Now our afternoons are full of endless chattering, this from a nephew who formerly behaved toward us as if we had abducted him from his mother rather than adopted him in her absence, a nephew who had not deemed us worthy of even the most mundane updates about his life. For once he talks to us like tians instead of “not-parents”; he references what our sister would have done less every day, seeks our opinions instead.

  We sit across from this “Nate’s” cottage, slumped low in the cab so the pickup will appear empty if the boy happens to glance in this direction. The boy has crawled under his tian’s automobile, doing something to the underbody with a pair of pruning shears. Stewart and I like when the boy vandalizes his tian’s belongings—it is thrilling to anticipate the moment his tian will see what the boy has been doing, exciting to discover how his tian will react. Sometimes his tian finds the tricks funny. Other times not.

  “When can we actually fight him?” Christopher says.

  “When we’re sure he’s alone and nobody will see us,” Stewart says.

  “He’s alone right now,” Christopher says.

  “His tian’s home. That’s his automobile the boy is under,” I say.

  “Are you afraid of his dad?” Christopher says.

  “No,” Stewart says.

  “His dad is enormous,” Christopher says. “If we beat up Nate, won’t his dad come after us?”

  “We’ve already seen him come after this ‘Nate’ with a belt, a wheel wrench, a wooden paddle, and what looked like the leg of a chair,” I say. “It’s not like we want to do anything to the boy that his tian hasn’t done already.”

  “Just because he does it to Nate doesn’t mean he’ll like us doing it,” Christopher says.

  Later this “Nate” bicycles to the wharf wearing a wool beanie. He rides down the pier, making a vile gesture at each of the yellow signs that prohibit bicycling on the pier, and disappears behind the lighthouse. Stewart and I hope his friend will come—sometimes the boy and his friend meet at the lighthouse. We like when the boy and his friend are together—it is intriguing to see what new cruelties he will perform upon his friend, moving to see him and his friend reunited again after the cruelties have ended. We park between trucks with rusted motorboats on hitched trailers.

  “Would you rather stab him in the stomach, or stomp on his throat so hard that it literally crushes his windpipe?” Christopher says.

  “I am not answering that,” I say. “Stewart, do not answer that.”

  “I can’t decide which is better,” Christopher says. “Why can’t we fight him? He’s alone now.”

  Stewart gestures at the yachts and the speedboats moored along the docks.

  “We can’t jump him here. Somebody might see us,” Stewart says.

  “Fine,” Christopher says. “Would you rather punch him in t
he face until his eyes are swollen shut, or drag him across some broken glass?”

  The boy rides back down the pier, pumping along the boardwalk back toward downtown. Stewart waits until the boy has disappeared before starting the pickup. We find the bicycle dumped on the pavement outside the gas station, “Nate” prowling the aisles inside. Stewart and I hope the boy is getting candy—it is confusing to feel as we do, as if we would like to give him both candy and bruises. But we have never seen anybody as happy as this boy when he is chewing a candy.

  Instead he emerges empty-handed, gathers a handful of rocks from the alley behind the arcade, flattens against the wall. He peeks, flings a rock at a passing automobile, and then ducks back into the alley. A rock pings off the bumper of the next automobile as the brake lights flash red. The elderly driver throws his elbow over his seat, twisting around, frowning, looking for the source of the noise. The boy peeks, flings another rock. The rock cracks against the rear window. The driver curses, yanks the gearshift, and speeds away. The boy peeks again, huffing into his cupped hands, warming his fingers with his breath.

  “I can’t understand why anybody would want to hurt people like the kimlee does,” Stewart says.

  “You want to hurt him,” Christopher says.

  “I mean hurt somebody like Emma, who hasn’t done anything to him,” Stewart says.

  “You hurt Emma,” Christopher says.

  “He does not,” I say, feeling othery for Stewart, knowing he, like me, hates nothing more than seeing Emma unhappy.

  “He does too. So do you. How about when you said that our mom must have loved her boyfriend more than us if she left?” Christopher says.

  “I never said that,” I say.

  “We heard you,” Christopher says.

  I have no memory of having said it, which makes this an instance of diffiction, a noun I defined as “a memory inconsistent with the shared reality of others’ memories; something nonfictional to an individual but fictional to the individual’s society.” Diffiction is my most successful work, in that since its publication it has appeared in new dictionaries by three separate publishers, each appearance prompting a lawsuit, the lawsuits far beyond profitable.