Toybox

by Al Sarrantonio

  Except for the dust.

  The dust was out there, he could see it, even on this perfect night. He could not even shut the dust out now. And that made him angry and frightened, because on other nights like this, of which there were only four or five each year, he had been able to do it, to get rid of the dust, push it out beyond his circle of darkness and back away from the illumination of sixty-watt bulbs to a sulking corner deep across the room, or away and into another room entirely, where it would gather and brood and wait for the daylight to see and follow him again. But this night he could feel it within the circle, clinging to itself and knowing that it had won a new battle and followed him nearly to the heart of his most secret places. There was nowhere he could go now to be alone, except the Room in the Attic and the Secret Room (which even Mother and Father didn't know about), his special rooms where even the dust never followed.

  “Go away,” he said to the space inside the circle, where the dust lurked.

  There was a silent shifting.

  “Go away,” he said again.

  There was another shifting, a sound like many threads being drawn across wood, behind him.

  “I said go away! You can't come here!”

  Suddenly, there were memories. It was thirty years ago, and the dust was all around him. Pressing him in dryly, more dust than he had ever seen before, covering him, blocking his vision, making him cough and his eyes begin to water.

  There was laughter.

  More than one voice. A lot of voices. Out beyond the dust, not laughter like when Spike or Pauly stood on their heads and sang “I'm Popeye the Sailor Man,” but mean laughter, laughter that had been waiting below the surface to spring on him, and had only needed a bit of running away to get out at him. He was fighting at the dust with his fingers and hands, coughing and beginning to cry, trying to get out of the dust to see where he was, where the laughter was coming from, where the dust was coming from.

  There was more and more dust, blinding him now, and then he was pushing at it crazily and it was going away, finally pulling back and away from him and he could see and breathe again.

  That was when they called him Slow Ronnie.

  There were five or six of them, almost all his friends, the ones who had let him follow them around and carry their baseball equipment and, because he was so big, play touch football as a substitute in the fall after school. They had been waiting for him around the corner from Woolworths, waiting for him to meet them, to come around the corner so they could drop the sacks of dirt and dust that Pauly had rigged up above the wrought-iron sign that hung on the corner with an orange firebox light on it, and they had pulled the string and were still laughing at him.

  “Slow Ronnie,” they were screeching. “Sloooooow Ronnie!” Waving their hands and taunting him while they said it. Almost all of them his friends, except for a new one he had never seen before, taller and sharp-faced.

  “Sloooooow Ronnie,” they kept saying as he wheezed and cried and brushed trembling at the dust.

  Then he looked through his tears at the new one, the tall one with the bright sharp eyes, and a rage seized him.

  “I'm not slow!” he screamed, and then he remembered the muscles in his arms going tight and hard and the breaking of a glass window and sharp red pieces of glass. Then no more. When he was awake again he was in a hospital tied down to a white bed and Mother and Father, their faces also white, looked down from above him. Father's face was whiter, and blanker.

  The memories went away.

  “Go away!” he screamed at the dust again.

  He was within his cold circle, and the dust was trying to come at him again. He was not Slow Ronnie, he knew that; he would never be Slow Ronnie again and as long as he could keep the dust away, and the boy with the sharp hard eyes and smile, he would never be Slow Ronnie again. The boy was a long way away, in time and distance, but the dust is here and he had to keep it away or he would be Slow Ronnie again.

  “I am not Slow Ronnie!”

  The dust gathered, making a hissing noise, on either side of him. A small ball of it slid by, brushing at his shoe.

  “No!”

  He stood, making swimming motions with his arms, threatening the dust to stay back. He had told Mother and Father about the dust, and they hadn't listened to him, and now this was happening. He could see into the circle of weak amber light in front of him, and he saw that the dust, all of the dust, was forming. It was covering the floor, like whispering gray snow, clumps and bunches moving here and there across it, and it was pushing toward him. It was into the circle now, and he knew that finally, after growing in separate strength all these years, the dust was coming for him again, coming to make him gasp and scream helplessly, to fill his mouth and nose with absolute and terrible dryness, make him into Slow Ronnie once more. He could not accept that, he could not let the dust do that to him again.

  He shouted “Keep back!” and ran from the room, out into the shadows of the hallway, his shadows, toward the stairway. The dust, as his feet touched it, rose up in wavy fingers and tried to clutch at him, it he screamed and swatted down at it, and ran on. There was dust in the hallway too, flowing out of every doorway to meet in a splash at the center of the hall; Ronnie leaped over it and onto the stairs, taking them two steps at a time. Below him, the dust rose and drew together, coming up the stairs after him.

  Ronnie ran to the attic ladder, climbing it and dropping the door hind him and then frantically pulling at the door to the inner attic room, moving his arm this way and that in the darkness, searching for the overhead light cord. He found it, and the weak bulb clicked on. The room was empty, and Ronnie let out a long and shuddering breath. The room in the attic was still safe, and closing and bolting the door behind him, he sat down in the center.

  He listened.

  There were sounds, soft clicks and rustlings, but these were the sounds that were always in his room. These were the sounds of his house moving and sighing and settling contentedly about itself, and there was nothing of the dust about them. The dust did not come here, to the room; it did not belong and never had and all the sounds of the house and the house itself, had always kept it out. This was the room that Ronnie went to when he was feeling sad, or when the dust in the other rooms began to bother him too much, or when the weather wasn't cold, and shadowy like it was tonight. It was almost his favorite room in the house. There was hardly any furniture, and what furniture and storage there was was oddly shaped and threw long, deep and special shadow. Special shadows that blended with the creaking sounds and made the room always seem cold and dark. The dust never came in here.

  The dust was coming in now.

  Ronnie jumped up as he saw that the dust was sliding slowly but inexorably under the door. There was a great weight of dust behind the door, the lock was rattling heavily with the pressure of it, and there was a steady, roiling portion of it squeezing into the room and building inside.

  Building to engulf him.

  There was only one place for him to go, one place where the dust would never go because it didn't even know about it—no one knew about it, not Mother nor Father nor anyone else—and therefore couldn't follow. His Secret Room. The one that only he and the house were alive to, where he could think about anything, and the house would soothe him and the dust would not be there to watch.

  He would go to that room and be safe.

  There was a place under an old table in the Room in the Attic where the wall was not solid. Behind this was the Secret Room. On the outside of the house it showed as a tiny gable with no window, an obvious mistake of architecture. It was not even high enough to stand in, and was nearly airtight and completely dustless; one had to crouch low to get through its door, and step down into it as its floor was almost two feet below that of the Room in the Attic. There was not even a light in it, and Ronnie kept a flashlight hidden on a hook under the table by the door. The door itself was a paneled section of wood which fit snugly and undoorlike into the rest of the paneled w
all.

  It was a dark and secret and dustless place.

  Ronnie crawled under the table and lifted his flashlight from its hook. He looked behind to see the dust building massively high, roiling and blocklike, and pushing toward him. If he didn't go into the secret place, give the dust the chance of seeing where it was, it would press over him and suffocate him. It would choke him until he couldn't think and he became Slow Ronnie again. He began to cough just thinking about it.

  He turned, shaking, to the secret door to the Secret Room and pulled at the latch.

  Crouching low, his flashlight snapped on, he pulled open the door and began to step down.

  The dust was waiting for him.

  Heaving, gray, and shadowless, it filled the entire Secret Room. And the dust was pressing at him from behind, as it overflowed the Room in the Attic.

  A sudden peace came over him, a silent raging peace, as the dust pressed down and upon him, holding him to itself, and the house murmured to him, and the boy with the sharp eyes and face was there before him in the dust, embracing him.

  Outside, he heard the muffled hum of Mother and Father's returning car.

  He knew who they would find.

  FATHER DEAR

  He never beat me, but told me stories about what would happen to me if I did certain things.

  “The crusts of bread,” he told me, cutting the crusts off his own bread instructively and throwing them into the waste bin, “gather inside you. If you eat bread with the crusts still on, you will digest the bread but your body will not digest the crusts. They will build up inside you until....” Here he made an exploding gesture with his hands, close by my face. He smiled. I smiled. I was four years old, and cut the crusts off of my bread.

  “The yellow pulpy material left after an orange is peeled,” he told me another day, a bright sunny one as I remember, with thick slats of sunshine falling on the white kitchen table between us; I recall the sound of a cockatoo which flitted by outside, and the vague visual hint of green and the smell of spring that came in through the bottom of the window which he had opened a crack (I believe now that he opened that crack for effect, to accentuate the brightness of spring outside with the stuffy dreariness of our indoor habitation—he told me other things about dust and about the indoors), “will make your teeth yellow if you ingest it. With the eating of oranges which, by the way, you must eat, Alfred, for your condition, any specks of this pulp will be caught in a receptacle just to the back of your throat, just out of sight, and will creep up like an army of ants at night to stain your teeth. In time, your teeth will become the deep shade of a ripe banana; perhaps, someday, that of a bright lemon just picked.” How I remember the hours I spent whisking those orange fruits clean of pulp, examining my fingernails afterward to make sure no bits had adhered to them; O, how many other hours did I lay awake at night in my bedroom, hating him and at the same time believing him (no, that's not right; the hate came later, much later; there was only love then, and if not that at least a respect for his knowledge, for the things he was so gently trying to save me from—no, it was Love after all) and waiting, with a parched ticking at the back of my tongue where the saliva had dried as I lay fearfully waiting for those tiny insect bits of pulp to march up my mouth, dousing my gums and teeth with yellow spray from their bucketlike tails; O! How many hours did I spend in front of a mirror, trying to see, my mouth as wide as my jaw would allow it, that “receptacle” where those lemon-ants waited!

  I hate him now; came to hate him slowly, inexorably, and, in time, I have come to love that hate, to relish and enjoy it since it is the only thing I have in this world that I am not afraid of.

  He taught me nothing of value. He taught me to hate books, to hate what was in them and the men who wrote them; taught me to, above all, hate the world, everyone in it; everything it stood for. “It is a corrupt place, Alfred,” he lectured endlessly, “filled with useless people possessed of artificial sensibilities, people who respect and cherish nothing. They live like animals, all of them, huddled into cities chockablock one on top of the other; they are of different colors, and speak different languages until all their words mix in one jumbled whirr and none of them understand what any of the others are saying.

  “I know, I come from that world, Alfred. They don't know what life is. They don't know what's safe. But you know what's safe, don't you?”

  I remember grinning eagerly up at him at times like this, like a puppy; he always bent down over me, his hands behind his straight tall back, and I remember at times reaching up to him with my tiny hands, begging him, “Pick me up, pick me up, swing me, please!”

  “Swinging you will make your stomach move in your body,” he answered, smiling wanly, “and once moved, at your delicate age, it will stay in that new spot, perhaps where your lungs or pancreas should be, and will make you sick for the rest of your life. It may even turn you into a hunchback, or make you slur your words if it moves, on the high arc of your swing, into your vocal cavity. You do understand, don't you?”

  My arms lowered slowly, tentatively, to my sides.

  I was not allowed to play on the swings on the grounds, either, but would stare at them for hours through my bedroom window.

  The grounds, naturally, were beautiful, wooded and sprawling. No one, I heard it whispered among the servants, had grounds like this anymore; no one, I once heard a Chinese servant say, deserved to have such grounds. The world, he whispered to mute Mandy, my sometimes guardian (when He was away), was still far too crowded for this type of thing to crop up again; there were too many other problems to be solved without one man shutting himself up in such a way. I am sure that Mandy went straight to my father after this bit of sacrilege had been imparted, and the man, if I remember correctly, was gone the following day. Another servant, of course, was in place instantly.

  The grounds, as I say, were sprawling, but I was not allowed to make use of that sprawl. There were too many opportunities to be “hurt.” The swinging motion I have already described could, of course, be accomplished to dire effect by the swing set just beyond the Italian-tiled patio; there was also at that spot a set of monkey bars which “would upset the balance of your hormones if you were to use it, since hanging upside down by a boy of your delicate constitution would only lead your body to hormone imbalance. The features of your face would begin to move about by the action of the blood rushing to your head, and you would end up looking something like this.” He made an extremely grotesque—and terribly funny—face then, and I laughed along with him until I abruptly began to cry. If my memory serves me correctly, I ran and threw my arms around him, thanking him for saving me and asking him to promise never to leave or send me away; and, yes, remember pointedly and now as clearly as if the moment were again occurring that my teary eyes were staring at his hands, still behind his back, and I was willing them to move around toward me, to show me anything parental and physical. I believe that may be the moment when I thought something was not right between us; for a fleeting second I entertained the thought that maybe he didn't love me after all but then quickly dismissed it, knowing that it must have been me, that I may already have been in danger of contracting some vile disease, something transmitted by a touch of the hands to the head, something transmitted by a loving hold, and that he was merely, as lovingly as he could, trying to avoid exposing me to it. He was saving me from himself. I threw myself from him, aching with apology for what I had almost accomplished. I don't remember if he thanked me or just went away.

  “If you gaze at the sky too long,” he said, after catching me leaning out of an upper story window, peering at the moon, “your head is very liable to fall off or stay locked in that position at least. Never look up in the daytime.”

  “Not even to watch a bird fly overhead?”

  “Never. How old are you?”

  “Seven.”

  “Never look up again, Alfred. Until now you have been lucky, but with the age of reason comes a severity of life that you will only t
oo soon realize.”

  I never looked up.

  “If you sit in a chair for more than five minutes, your feet will begin to lose their circulation and may never get it back. If you stand for more than five minutes, too much blood will rush to the bottom of your body and your feet will become heavy, as if filled with lead.” I crouched when I walked.

  “Meat will cause you to turn red.”

  I did not eat meat.

  “Vegetables will cause you to turn their own color—yellow, green, orange.”

  I only ate vegetables when desperate.

  “Chocolate will cause you to turn black. Wheat you may take, and potatoes, and you may drink water in moderation after boiling, cooling and then boiling again. Do not drink milk: it will make you white as paper.”

  He showed me a book with these things in it, or rather read to me from one. The book, I later discovered, was Moby Dick. Such a thick book, such thick lies.

  And yet I followed his instructions and thanked him for it.

  I grew. I grew fat. Wheat and potatoes were my diet, and teenagehood found me stout and ugly. I wore glasses thick with mottled glass, because he told me a lucid pair would cause my eyes to change color and shape. My teeth hurt, and he scolded, saying that I had eaten something, possibly so long ago I could not remember, something that had gone against his wishes and was now catching up with me.