Because You'll Never Meet Me

by Leah Thomas

  I despise other people my age. Jugendlichen. Let them rot.

  You mentioned Japanese. But the glockenspiel is a German musical instrument. Can’t you speak and write auf Deutsch? I doubt you are aware, but the glockenspiel has rarely been used in hip-hop music. I pity your ears for never having been graced by Public Enemy.

  Secondly, you are correct. We will not be meeting. This has little to do with your deafening personality. I am electric. Exposure to me would floor you.

  Doubtless that hyperactive mind of yours is already jumping to outlandish conclusions: “My, is he an android? What sort of monstrosity is he, the son of one of my doctor’s old friends? What is he, that he is electric? A reanimated corpse, veins coursing with lightning? Oh boy!”

  Calm yourself. This is not science fiction. This is not fun.

  For the past five years, my heart has remained pumping only with the assistance of a small apparatus that feeds electric pulses into the lower-left chamber. If I ever met you, the electricity in my rib cage would trigger your seizures. If I shut off my pacemaker to spare you that, my blood flow would weaken. I could go into shock or even cardiac arrest. You could kill me.

  Your postscript teaser fails to impress me. I have died also, Oliver UpandFree. (I feel foolish writing that. I will call you Oliver.) Dying was not an enjoyable experience. It’s enough to say that I woke from death with an electric heart. You and I will certainly never meet.

  And yet I do have a morbid interest in continuing our correspondence. I may have chuckled once while Father read your words to me yesterday evening. If I were sickened by phones, by vehicles and amplifiers, and not merely sickened by my classmates, perhaps I would resort to babbling as well. Not that this excuses you.

  I thought I had seen EVERYTHING. But your mother is right. Your worldview is remarkable. So is your earsplitting enthusiasm. So I do not blame her for hiding in the garage.

  I am not certain that I want to share the details of my life with you. I do not trust you, Oliver. I am uncomfortable with spitting every thought I have ever had onto paper. People like you do not realize what power words have. Words are impossible to see. Words can be twisted in so many directions. Some of us are more careful with them.

  As for your questions about “secret laboratories,” I am not nearly as interested in this subject as you are. Talk about something you know about. If you don’t want to be bored, don’t bore me. There’s nothing fascinating about laboratories, in my experience.

  Tell me more about your life. If you must.

  Besides. It is more entertaining if I do not speak.

  Moritz Farber

  P.S. Yes. A man can drown in an inch of water. But in Germany we would call it 2.54 centimeters of water. The metric system is altogether superior.

  Chapter Three

  The Computer

  Well, riddle me this, riddle me that! Do you read comics? Wait. Let me rephrase that: Marvel or DC? Also, you didn’t tell me whether you like cartoons.

  Way to write a letter and tell me almost nothing about yourself, although I guess I’m impressed by your refusal to reveal your tragic past! Now I really want to know your thoughts on laboratories. But at least you know I exist!

  So you’re German? What’s that like? I’ve read a lot of history books, and a lot of fairy tales. Germans are featured in both, and not always nicely, but you probably already know that. Are all Germans as stuffy as you? No offense, but reading what you wrote felt a little like I was conversing with a Victorian gentleman, by Jove! Do you read Oscar Wilde? He was Victorian, but, like, the exact opposite of you! He was way less reserved, by gum!

  I think language is pretty awesome, so we already have something in common! But don’t you think English is the greatest? Sometimes I just sit here at my desk and chortle because but and butt sound the same. The other day I was just snickering about it in bed, and Mom got all wide-eyed because I started coughing and she thought maybe I was hysterical again, but—butt!—sometimes I need something to laugh at.

  Oh! I looked up “Jugendlichen.” So that’s German for “teenagers,” huh? Well, say what you want. I would kill (not actually, because I’m not a psychopath) to know more idiotic teenagers. I want to be one of them!

  And Auburn-Stache says you’re sixteen. You’ve got two years on me! I’m not your age, so you can’t despise me yet.

  Despite your depressing response to my awesome I-Died-Once teaser, I’ll attach Part One of my autobiography. This way Mom can keep believing that writing to you is helping me focus, helping me get better, and stopping me from standing in the driveway all day.

  Here goes:

  The Linear Autobiography of

  Oliver Paulot, the Powerless Boy

  PART ONE: SCREAMING

  When I was born, I was born screaming. It was the same for almost everyone I’ve ever heard of; if you weren’t born screaming, then you were probably born with too much optimism.

  But my scream made even the most jaded night nurses in the natal center cover their ears. The old doctor at the bedside nearly dropped me. Auburn-Stache told me that old doctor probably wanted to holler at me to “put a sock in it,” but that’s usually frowned upon. Besides, I bet the socks of a full-time doctor are even less sanitary than the socks of teenage boys, if Auburn-Stache’s grubby feet are anything to go by.

  Mom was quiet. She claims that I was making enough commotion for both of us.

  The old doctor pulled a penlight from his lab coat and aimed it down my throat. The beam shot past my empty gums and into the center of me, and finally I stopped screaming.

  The room exhaled….

  And I had my first seizure.

  Last time I asked Mom about it, it was a snowy afternoon and we were both biding time by firelight in the living room.

  “The day I was born—what was it like?” I tucked my calligraphy brush behind my ear.

  She put down the heavy tapestry she was cross-stitching, letting it drape across her legs. To me it looked like the most violent quilt known to man. Mom is always making things; she gets as bored as I do. This was her seventh tapestry or something, and it depicted a pretty gory stag-hunting scene. She jabbed her needle into the arm of the couch. It was still trailing the red thread she was using to sew the eviscerated innards of the unfortunate stag.

  “You’ve read about childbirth. Tch.”

  Sometimes Mom makes a slight clucking sound near the front of her teeth. It’s her type of sniggering. I used to wonder if it was something everyone did. Now I know it’s a family habit.

  “I was a huge pain in the vagina, I bet.”

  “Ollie.” In the half-light, the lines of her face seemed deeper.

  “It’s a medical term, Mom.” I rolled my eyes. “What else do you want me to call it?”

  “Most people wouldn’t call it anything. Most people have tact.”

  I held my arms wide apart to illustrate the vast nothingness outside our cabin. “Wherefore, Mother? Wherefore?”

  “Yes. Fine. You were a huge pain. Like I was splitting in two.”

  “Nuclear fission!”

  “I don’t know about that. But putting you on this earth was the most painful thing I have ever done. Since you asked.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Tch. I don’t think what I felt compared in any way to what you felt during that first seizure.” She grimaced. “Your face was so red. It looked as though you might burst.”

  “Nuclear explosion.” I stood up and stretched.

  “Implosion. You stayed in one piece. But something was collapsing and burning under your skin, in your skull. You know how it feels better than I do.”

  I shrugged. I’ve had enough seizures that I can’t imagine the shock of the first one.

  “You were so small,” she said, picking up her needle again. “No wonder it killed you.”

  Anytime I was conscious, I was seizing. They were all worried about my brain cells because seizures burn them up pretty rapidly. I was sedated and stuck in a
n incubator while Mom was on bed rest.

  Last spring I asked Auburn-Stache for his side of the story. We were on the back porch early one warm evening, and he was taking my blood pressure by the pinkish light of sunset over the tree line.

  “Tell me about when I was a baby, Auburn-Stache.”

  “What? Yet again?”

  “Yeppers.”

  “Sometimes, Ollie, you sound unnervingly like a five-year-old.”

  “You mean right now, or when I stamp my feet and demand ice cream?”

  He smirked and adjusted his glasses. The armband tightened on my upper arm. “Ice cream is serious business, kiddo. It renders us all five, as you well know.”

  “Once more with feeling, Auburn-Stache.”

  “Tch.” He raised a mocking eyebrow. The armband released. “You were weeks early, or I’d have been there. Already you couldn’t stay put!”

  Auburn-Stache had been friends with my dad ever since they both worked together (at the mysterious laboratory no one likes to talk about?), and Mom called him the moment she went into labor. She probably screamed at him, like anyone being split in two would. He was working as an on-call physician a few counties away. He jokes that he got out of work and on the road so fast that he left his previous patient on the table with two limbs too few. Very funny, Auburn-Stache.

  “I couldn’t stop thinking about the penlight. It left the faintest trail of hives on your skin! ‘Aha!’” He re-created his moment of epiphany, standing up from the lawn chair with his finger in the air. “Photosensitive epilepsy!”

  “Sit down, you kook.”

  He knew that flashing lights sometimes cause seizures. Many people’s auras are triggered by cycles or patterns of lights or images. Auburn-Stache bugged the hell out of the old doctor until he agreed to put me in a dark room. But I was still in an incubator, so I still got sick. I got so sick that I flatlined. Auburn-Stache resuscitated me.

  “But I never got around to actually placing the defibrillator paddles on your chest and back! The moment I held them near your diaphragm, the shock of their proximity alone somehow restarted your heart”—he clapped his hands—“and set you to seizing again.”

  “Man, sounds like it was a party!”

  “It would have been rather exciting for me, had you not been in pain.” His face went unusually still. “You should not think I’m so terrible as that, Ollie.”

  I couldn’t think of what to say. The fireflies were beginning to hover around above the grass when he said, “But you aren’t entirely wrong. There are all kinds of adventures in the world. In that moment when you woke back up, the paddle was repelled from you. It was as if you had an electric charge of your own.”

  He had me released into his care, and then he bundled me up in rubber hospital gear and wheeled Mom and me out to his Impala while the hospital staff looked on without much hope, all teary eyed. (Artistic license, okay?)

  I bet that car could have killed me all over again. Even the tiny lights that come on when the door opens could have done me in! Even the FM radio. Even automatic window switches!

  I don’t know what he and Mom talked about while he drove out of town. Maybe they talked about my dad. Once we were past the last gas station, on the brink of the forests where tourists liked to go camping, he pulled me out of the car and laid me in the ferns.

  But I still trembled, so he tore off his jacket and his phone and left them behind. He carried me deep into the woods, Mom following behind him. He asked her to wait in the car, but that just wouldn’t be like her. I bet she looked comical, stumbling over branches in a hospital gown.

  At some point under the trees somewhere, the seizing stopped. I opened my eyes.

  Mom told me later that Auburn-Stache laughed then—with joy, or relief, or the sort of mad glee that doctors and scientists get swept up in when they solve a puzzle. But Mom didn’t laugh.

  “I knew then that there were things you would always be powerless to change about your life.” She spoke softly. “And that I couldn’t protect you from all of them.”

  Bleak, Mom. Bleak.

  You can await Part Two with bated breath! I can leave out some of the finer details of my toddling years, like every time Mom burped me or the time I decided to pee on our blue Persian cat, Dorian Gray. I can be mysterious, too, all right.

  As much as I like mystery stories, it’s hard to solve them when you’re stranded in northern Michigan. The only Watson candidate I have is a cat who still resents me. I’ve read a lot of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie and a ton of Case Closed, but I’m no detective. I don’t have a pipe, for one thing. I think that’s required.

  Here are the clues you’ve given me, Moritz Farber:

  1. You have a pacemaker. Oh, and the name of your lower-left heart chamber is actually your left ventricle, or your ventriculus cordis sinister. You may win at languages, but you didn’t spend four months handcrafting a life-size model skeleton complete with clay organs, Styrofoam lungs, and hand-spun alveoli!

  2. You can’t read by yourself. Your father had to read my letter to you. But this paper was typed on a computer in, yes, real good English. So although electricity is no problem for you, there is something wrong with your eyes. But in that case, clue #3 seems strange….

  3. What the heck do you mean, you’ve “seen EVERYTHING”? Why was that part of your letter typed in capital letters? To me, capitalizing things doesn’t come across as italicizing. It looked like you were SHOUTING AT ME! ANGRILY!

  4. People have said cruel things to you in the past. This one is speculation. I mean, you hate your peers. But not just because they’re idiots, because I think idiots are probably nice people sometimes. If it’s about abusing language, I don’t have to go to school to know that words can really suck, even when they aren’t insults. I’ll do my best, Moritz Farber, not to slash at you with them. OR WRITE AT YOU IN AGGRESSIVE CAPITAL LETTERS.

  5. You typed your letter, so I know you have a computer. Don’t even get me started on what a bottomless sense of emptiness I get when I hear about the Internet, a weird electric Neverland where everyone giggles at cats and updates myyouface pages or something. I mean, when I read manuals for old Internet browsers, it feels like I’m reading a really bland cyberpunk novel, and half the time I end up falling asleep and waking up with newsprint on my face.

  Part of me wants to ask you all about it, but what would be the point? I try to be optimistic! It doesn’t do me much good to hear about things I can never have.

  But anyhow. I want to tell you about the first time I saw a computer, because it was also the first time I ever saw Liz.

  It was at Junkyard Joe’s, many years ago. Joe’s trailer is the only place within a few miles of ours. The cars in his yard are the only safe ones I’ve ever seen—dead, scattered across the lawn like rusting bones in some mechanical elephant graveyard. I used to sneak away to crawl between them.

  The little girl on Joe’s porch didn’t see me crouching behind an old pickup truck, spying on her. It was Liz, but I didn’t know that yet. She was sitting at the lopsided picnic table and biting her lip, poking away at what would now seem like a massive brick of a thing, oblivious to the strips of verdant energy that gathered around her fingertips whenever she pressed the keys. The white light of the screen was reflected in her eyes. It made me think she was staring at the moon.

  Did the screen reflect her like she reflected it?

  I knew that if I got closer to her, my stomach would knot. Veins in my temples would bulge. I would convulse and fall and hit my head on the wooden steps.

  But maybe seeing whatever she saw on that screen would have been worth a seizure.

  Thanks for writing me back. The boredom’s already shallower! I even got my lazy butt out of bed and went downstairs for a couple of hours to dig out the English-German dictionary, so Mom’ll be singing your praises soon. You know, when she gets out of bed herself.

  I’ll leave the rest to you, Moritz. (Can I call you Mo?) And I’ve wri
tten way too much again, so I guess I’ll save the questions about laboratories for later, but I hope you can start to trust me. I don’t know why you think I would ever want to say anything cruel to you.

  I mean, I’ve already given you lots to make fun of me for. If I’m ever an asshole to you, I hereby give you the right to call me a “catpisser”!

  Don’t tell me this isn’t a little fun.

  ~ Ollie

  Chapter Four

  The Fountain

  You are a difficult tic to ignore, Oliver. I cannot despise you. Yet.

  I am no Oscar Wilde and no Mo. I am an expert in oral storytelling. I have listened to hundreds of books. Dozens of authors and readers. Yet I have rarely heard a voice quite like yours.

  My father has a strong Schwäbisch accent. He is not the best reader. His voice is like gravel. When he speaks, I must lean in close to find what he means within what he says. Before he knew me, I doubt he spoke to anyone. Now he tries to be heard. For my sake. During his reading yesterday evening, I heard you. On the fifth-floor apartment balcony overlooking the cars driving across Kreiszig’s noisome Freibrücke, I discovered something about you. Something you are unaware of:

  Even if you are powerless, your words are not.

  You are a natural storyteller, Oliver. That may be why I do not trust you—your sincerity is implausible. You and I are very different. Yet you made me understand something of what it means to be you. Most people aren’t capable of making me feel anything. Let alone sympathy.

  Most people would have been angry after my last letter. I was condescending. I mocked you outright. But you respond by telling me exactly who you are. You offer me new insults to use against you? It seems cruel to withhold my story when you are incapable of doing so. It is as if I am avoiding a puppy for fear of it drooling on me.

  And your detective skills are not entirely wretched. You are right about my eyes.

  I doubt I can be as endearing about it as you are. But let me tell you who I am.