Wonders of the Invisible World

by Christopher Barzak

  “If my humor isn’t from Grandma,” I said, “then it must be from someone even further back.” My mom nodded after I said this, as if to say Of course, but quickly and without another word she looked down at her tablet, as if something of great importance had sprung up on its screen.

  I didn’t stick around to encourage any more weirdness. I’d had my fill for the day. Instead, I let that hairline-fracture-in-a-perfectly-normal-seeming-window feeling lead me away.

  I fed the cows a while later, taking time to pat a few muzzles and to rub behind a few fuzzy ears. There were only twenty in my dad’s herd, all Herefords—red body, white face—my dad’s favorite breed, and they all had names, as if they were part of our family. I could hear my dad’s truck pull into the drive as I filled the trough with fresh water, announcing his and my brother’s return. My dad and Toby both worked for the county roads department—Toby on a road crew, my dad as a crew leader—hauling coal patch to fill potholes in summer, scraping the roads clean of snow in winter. In spring, they’d get calls in the middle of the night to go out to remote corners of the county to cut up trees that had fallen across roads during storms, and occasionally I’d go with them to help out, to hold a light on them as their chain saws buzzed through limbs like knives through butter and rain spattered against their concentration-lined faces.

  When I came back in from the barn, they were already sitting at the dining room table. “Come on, Aidan,” my dad said, dinging his fork against the side of his plate and nodding at my empty seat. “I’m famished. Wash your hands and get over here.” The Lockwoods were like that: we ate dinner together like a family in a Norman Rockwell painting, only without the overly happy faces populating the table. It wasn’t that we were unhappy. We just weren’t the best examples of glee.

  The conversation during dinner that evening revolved around the roads department, as usual, since my dad and Toby were still stewing in their daily work stresses. That night their complaints centered on their boss, who my dad, in private, always called a corrupt politician. My mom didn’t join in. She never took part in these types of discussions. She’d just sit there and listen as she cut her steak or as she lifted a forkful of baked potato. She wasn’t much for talk of work, and she was even less interested in politics, which she always called “a petty game played by petty people,” in a tone that made it sound like she blamed politics for all the world’s problems. She preferred the domestic world: the house, the garden, the farm, her family.

  I never had much to say in these dinner conversations either. Like my mom’s, my life was limited to just a few social spheres. I’d go to school and then come home to do work around the farm for my dad. And because of that, I wasn’t in any after-school clubs, so I didn’t have much to add. Probably my dad thought this was normal because it was how he’d grown up. Once a month I’d attend a 4-H meeting he insisted I go to, and I’d sit in a circle of kids from local farms, listening to speakers talk about cuts of beef. This wasn’t interesting to anyone except my dad, who hoped 4-H would keep me on the farm as an adult, which I didn’t really want, to be honest, so I usually kept quiet at dinner. I didn’t want him to know how I felt. I didn’t want to invite any arguments. Arguments with my dad were unwinnable.

  That night, though, when he and Toby had finished going on about their work frustrations, my mom said, “Aidan had something interesting happen today, didn’t you?”

  I looked up at her, sitting directly across the table from me, and felt a wave of heat spread across my face. They had all stopped eating and were now staring my way, waiting to hear me elaborate on my mom’s declaration. Eventually I said, “What are you talking about?” before I looked down to press the tines of my fork into my baked potato like it was a very important thing that needed to be done at that exact moment.

  “Jarrod, of course,” my mom said. “Jarrod Doyle is back in town, isn’t he?”

  “Little Jarrod Doyle?” my dad said, turning back to cut another piece of steak. His knife sawed through the meat and squeaked against the bottom of the plate. “Haven’t heard that name in a while, have we? His poor mother,” he added, shaking his head. That was what my dad would always say and always do when Jarrod’s mom came up in conversation.

  “She’s doing better, John,” my mom said, a little exasperated, as if she was tired of constantly having to remind him. “She’s got herself cleaned up. She’s been waiting tables over at Times Square Café for a while now. Jarrod’s come home to stay with her for senior year.”

  “Wasn’t he living with his dad up in Cleveland?” Toby asked. Of course, I thought. Of course Toby would remember this, while I—apparently Jarrod’s best friend—had forgotten it.

  My dad nodded. “Yeah, Josh took a job up there after he and Libby split.”

  “Well, Jarrod’s back,” my mom said, nodding once, like that settled something. “So I imagine we’ll be seeing a lot more of him, if he and Aidan turn out to be good friends like they used to be.”

  I sat there with my mouth hanging open, stunned that my mom already knew. But something like that wasn’t unusual for her, really. My mom often knew things before other people. I mean, really knew things. Knew things in a way no person should be able to. Every once in a while, she’d wake in the morning and tell us she’d had a dream that she knew was going to come true, and sometimes it did. At other times, she’d stop whatever she was doing to look out a window or to stare down at the floor with lines of concentration etched into her face, and after a moment she’d look up to say, “John, play the lottery tomorrow.” Which my dad would do, and he might win a thousand dollars. At times like that we joked that my mom was psychic, but she’d always shake her head and say, “All those words people use to label each other are silly. Besides, psychics are fakes. I’m just a lucky one. That’s all.”

  But to sit there and hear her tell everyone about my day when I hadn’t told her a thing about it? Psychic, I thought. She has to be psychic.

  “How did you know that?” I asked.

  She looked up from her plate, her face blank as a sheet of paper, and said, “Jarrod’s mom called, honey. An hour ago, while you were out doing chores. She said she hoped you and he could spend some time together. He’ll be needing friends here again, naturally.”

  I nearly sighed with relief to hear a rational explanation. And then I immediately started to feel stupid for being so paranoid. But it wasn’t as if my day had been completely ordinary in the first place. “Yeah,” I said now, nodding, trying to resume a normal tone. “I saw him today. Gave him a ride home, actually.”

  And that was when my mom laid her last card on the table.

  “Oh really?” she said. “Well, why didn’t you mention that earlier when I asked how your day went?”

  She pinned me with her gaze, and I felt like I was shrinking. Right then and there, I turned into a little kid with my chin barely making it over the lip of the dinner table and my legs swinging as they dangled from the chair.

  Weirder than the shrinking feeling, though, was how the room seemed to dim around me in that moment, and how, in the center of the table, a candle suddenly appeared, its flame dancing while my mom leaned toward it, staring into its light as if she were hypnotized by its flickering. And then, where my dad and Toby had just been sitting, there was nothing but their empty high-backed chairs.

  I blinked several times, and finally the room came back into focus: the candle disappeared completely, and then my family was back again, Dad and Toby still waiting for me to answer my mom’s question. Why hadn’t I told her about Jarrod Doyle? their befuddled faces asked.

  “I guess,” I said, “I guess I forgot to mention it.”

  “How do you forget something like an old friend coming back out of the blue, Aidan?” my dad said. He squinted as he shook his head, his lips twisting in this way that made me feel like he thought I was probably the stupidest person in the world. That look was the same one his own dad wore in the photo hanging on the wall over in the living roo
m.

  “I guess I don’t have a good memory,” I said, like Jarrod had told me earlier.

  “Well,” my mom said, “that can be a blessing or a curse, depending on how you view things.”

  And after that, thankfully, she let the subject go.

  I spent the rest of the night up in my room, searching the Internet on my laptop for anything I could find on Jarrod Doyle. In the end, it was no good. Jarrod was almost completely absent from the online world. No Facebook or Twitter profiles. No blog. Not even an old trail of messages on some forgotten discussion board. I found just one lousy news article from the Cleveland Plain Dealer reporting the score of a game Jarrod had won for his high school the year before. He’d pitched a no-hitter, and the writer speculated that Jarrod would be college baseball draft material when he was a senior. Were things really so bad at his dad’s, I wondered, that he’d give up all that promise just to move back to Temperance and live with his mom? It didn’t make sense to me.

  When I hit a dead end online, I went to my bookshelf and looked through an album my mom had started for me years earlier. It held photos and documents from my life inside it. Toby had one too. And there was also the very, very thin memory album that lived on the bookshelf in my mom and dad’s room, the one that belonged to our older brother, Seth, who had died from a seizure when he was just five, long before Toby and I were ever thought of, back in the 1980s. Seth had a photo in the living room too, hanging across from the picture of my suicidal grandfather. In his photo, Seth has this real little-kid face, soft and round, with green eyes like my mom and I have. My parents barely ever spoke his name aloud, and whenever they did, tears would spill from my mom’s eyes like it was just yesterday she’d lost him.

  I opened the album with my name on it for the first time in what had to have been years. Inside was my birth certificate, an envelope that held one curly lock of dark hair from my first trip to a barber, and photos of me at different ages. In the margins of the pages, my mom had scribbled little notes with a fine black marker.

  Aidan at five was a photo of me at my birthday party at a kid’s pizza place in the mall out in Niles, surrounded by classmates I still knew because we all walked the same high school hallways. Which made me pause and wonder when, exactly, we’d stopped hanging out, because in the picture it looked like we were all having a good time together.

  Aidan at eight showed me playing catch with my dad, probably for the first and last time, since it was evident early on that sports and I weren’t really going to happen.

  Aidan at ten showed me swinging on a swing set in the park with Jarrod Doyle.

  I stopped on that page and slipped the photo out of the binder, brought it closer, smiling as I inspected the image. There we were, after all: two ten-year-olds with our hands gripped around the rusty orange chain links of the swings we sat on. Jarrod was wearing a Cleveland Indians T-shirt and jeans with grass stains on the knees. I had on a shirt with a Superman symbol in the center, but my jeans were crisp and clean. We were looking directly at the camera, smiling like we knew a secret but wouldn’t ever tell it. Not to anyone.

  I looked at that picture for a while, studying it for clues, but those boys—I could hardly remember them. And as I turned to pages farther in, I started to feel like I was looking at pieces of someone else’s life altogether.

  A photo from when I’d gone to homecoming with Caitlyn Hornbeck, who was doing a favor for her older sister, who was dating Toby at the time: the four of us all lined up on the front porch in dark suits and pretty dresses. I wasn’t really interested in Caitlyn but felt like I couldn’t refuse when Toby had already arranged things. “You need to get out more, son,” he’d said, slapping my back and smiling like he’d just given me an amazing present. “Caitlyn’s hot. Don’t mess this up.”

  I was already messed up, though. I just didn’t know how, exactly. And while Caitlyn really was hot, I felt this invisible wall between us. It was like I could see her and she could see me, but we couldn’t hear each other, could just see each other’s mouths moving in an effort to connect. We spent the night smiling politely at each other through this glass barrier that felt like it had sprung up right behind my eyes. Like I was trapped inside myself, and the me who danced awkwardly with her on the floor was this stand-in, making dumb jokes while I beat against the glass wall, beat against it with my fists and then my head, until my head really did begin to hurt, to throb hard, and I sat down at our table and rubbed my temples, started to rock and rock away the pain, until Toby pulled me up and helped me out to the car to drive me home, a confirmed mess-up.

  A blue ribbon I’d won in tenth grade for a steer my dad had made me raise: “It’ll do you good to learn how to look after something other than yourself,” he’d said, after signing me up for 4-H without asking. As I stared at that ribbon now, I thought about how wrong he was. I didn’t need to look after something else. I needed to look after myself, I realized.

  A couple of pictures of Toby and me at his graduation party two years earlier: my dad standing between us, his big arms curling around our shoulders, holding us tight. It was my mom behind the camera that day, instructing us to stand closer. Act like a family, she’d said jokingly, and we’d followed her directions like good performers.

  Here was all this evidence of my existence spread out before me, but none of it felt like it was mine. None of it felt like it said anything real or true about me. None of it felt like I had made the choices that led to those images. If I searched Google for solid proof of my life, it would probably provide even less than it had for Jarrod. We were just a couple of nobodies.

  The longer I tried to sort through things, the more my head began to pulse. At first it had just been this dull thud in the background, so I didn’t notice it right away. But after I’d spent an hour scouring Google and looking through old photos like they might hold the answer to a question I didn’t even know how to ask, the dull thud transformed, and suddenly bright white lights began to burst behind my eyes like fireworks, sending a hot blade of pain down the middle of my skull.

  I could barely stand up whenever I got like this, which hadn’t been very often of late, but I managed to make my way from my desk over to my bed, where I curled up in the fetal position and rocked myself back and forth with my arms wrapped around my shoulders, my eyes closed tight, my hands balled into fists.

  This was an ordinary migraine, according to my doctor, who prescribed meds that didn’t seem to help. The way these seemed to always happen was, I’d be doing something ordinary, like studying or—like I’d just been doing—thinking about random memories. Then suddenly my head would explode and white light would flash through my vision. After that, there was no turning back, and no pills could stop the pain until it was done with me.

  Luckily the migraines weren’t frequent—I hadn’t had a major one since the night of the homecoming dance with Caitlyn Hornbeck—but for a while, back in middle school, mostly, it seemed like all I ever did was have them. My parents used to worry that I’d die from them, like my brother Seth, so they’d keep me home from school for days sometimes, my mom hovering over me, swabbing my sweaty forehead with a cool wet towel, whispering that I needed to let it all go. I never knew what she meant by that, and when I asked once, she cupped my cheek in her hand and said, “Stop trying to hold on to it, honey. Just let it all flow out of you.”

  Maybe my bad memory was because of my migraines, I thought now. Maybe they were bombs going off in my brain, exploding my past into bits and pieces.

  By the time the pain started to dim this time, I was too exhausted to do anything but listen to the sound of my own breathing. All of my energy was gone. All of it had been given over to the pain as it bucked and bucked, trying to throw me. My breathing was slow and steady, and my heartbeat followed behind. Before I knew it, sleep had pulled itself up to my neck like a blanket, and then I was sinking down into the dark of nothingness, my mind returned to a blissfully blank slate.

  At some point in t
he night, I woke and sat up against my headboard with my brain clear as ice, already clicking away like clockwork, as if the migraine and the exhausted sleep that followed had never happened. I was sure I’d heard something, or someone, in the room with me, in the moment just before I woke. Footsteps had creaked across the floorboards, maybe, or else I’d heard something tap against the window. After a few minutes passed in silence, though, I started to think I must have dreamed it. It was only when I was about to slouch back down into my sheets, relieved to be wrong, that something did reveal itself.

  A voice called out to me. A voice called out my name.

  Not a voice, the voice. The woman’s voice that had told me not to tell my mom about Jarrod. That voice was in my room with me.

  Aidan. Aidan Lockwood, the woman said, as if she were Mr. Johnson trying to snap me out of a daydream.

  But the voice wasn’t inside me now, like it had seemed to be earlier. I heard it in the room, as if the speaker might be standing right there beside me. When I looked around, though, I found nothing but darkness.

  A minute passed quietly before the voice called again. And this time it sounded like it had moved out of the room. Now I heard it coming from a distance, as if it were downstairs in the foyer.

  Aidan. Aidan Lockwood.

  I climbed out of bed and padded across my floorboards to slip down the hall, floating past the rooms that contained my sleeping family members. Then I was downstairs, looking around for the intruder. When for a second time I found nothing, I decided to open the front door and go out into the chill of late October.