Jumpstart the World

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  I said, “Yeah. He’s probably just too stubborn and ornery to die.”

  I got to bring Toto home a few days later. Friday. But there was a catch. He needed antibiotics twice a day. And I wasn’t sure I could handle giving that cat a pill.

  Of course Frank volunteered to help.

  Which was very nice of him. Obviously. And it was just that sort of niceness that I’d always liked in Frank. And the least I could do was be grateful. And I was. In one very real way, I was. But I had mixed feelings about having him knock on my door twice a day. And I felt like eighteen different kinds of garbage for not wanting to see him.

  It’s not that I didn’t appreciate his help. And it’s not like I was judging him for his life choices. It’s more like … If I could just have more time to swallow things. Or maybe have things hit me in smaller pieces. I felt like life was always pushing too much down my throat too fast.

  It was giving me serious indigestion.

  He showed up for the first pill on Saturday morning. Not long before Wilbur was supposed to come over to get dressed and made up for our big photo shoot. He looked and sounded perkier than I felt.

  “Pill time,” he said.

  “Thanks.” I had Toto’s antibiotics in my hand. “I’m sorry you have to do this.”

  “I don’t mind. I told you I didn’t mind.”

  But I sort of minded. Having to do this twice a day. And unfortunately, we’d both heard that. In the way I’d said it.

  Toto was hiding in a cardboard box in a big kennel cage. Frank and I had set it up that way, so we could always catch him to give him his pill. Frank had carried the big collapsible cage home from work on the subway. I’d put a soft towel in a cardboard carton and stuck the box in there on its side. It didn’t seem fair to not even give him someplace to hide. It was important to him, to hide.

  I opened the cage and reached in and pulled the box out, and Frank got hold of the scruff of his neck. Then I held him down in the box by his shoulders and Frank gently opened his mouth and put the pill way back in his throat. Then we just sat there with him for a minute, with Frank holding his mouth closed and stroking his throat downward until he swallowed.

  Toto was a stubborn cat. It took him a long time to swallow.

  Frank said, “We’re going to get past this, right?”

  I felt a little stunned. I hadn’t known we were going to talk about “it.”

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  “Because I don’t want to see our friendship go anywhere.”

  “Me neither,” I said.

  And I meant it. I really felt it when I said it. Like I was just in a place of remembering how good it felt to be friends with Frank. And like all that other stuff was gone. But I knew better than to think it would stay gone forever. Or even much longer.

  “If you ever have questions about—”

  “No,” I said. Too fast and too loud. Cutting him off too rudely. I didn’t want to go into anything detailed. “No, it’s not about having questions. It’s not about not accepting you. It’s …”

  Yeah. Good one, Elle. Finish that sentence.

  “I know what it is,” he said.

  Which had to be the most deeply uncomfortable and embarrassing thing anybody had ever said to me. Ever.

  Thank God Toto finally swallowed.

  “I’ll come back this afternoon,” Frank said.

  I was so completely mortified that I didn’t even walk him to the door. I didn’t even say goodbye.

  I’ve thought about that a lot since. That simple sentence. I’ll come back this afternoon.

  Nothing special about that. Right? No reason to doubt him. People say things like that all the time. You never question it. At the time, it never occurs to you that they could be flat-out wrong.

  NINE

  Right?

  I walked out of my building with Wilbur, on our way to the park.

  He was wearing a tight fishnet top with white pants. You could see his whole chest and shoulders right through the shirt. He was slim but kind of fit-looking, too. And his skin was dark.

  Maybe Wilbur was Latino. Or part, anyway. I’d never really thought about it.

  He was fully made up, but not in an extreme style. I mean, on a woman it wouldn’t have been extreme. There was nothing exaggerated about it. The long top part of his hair had been pulled back into a tiny short pouf of a ponytail, which made the rest of his hair look sleek and flat. It was a more dramatic look, like when a woman skins her hair back to go formal.

  I knew that a big part of my challenge would be to take photos that were about something bigger and more important. Just shooting the fact that Wilbur was feminine for a boy wouldn’t be good enough. I had to go underneath that. Find something deeper and more to the point.

  I just had no idea how.

  About a dozen times in the past few days, I’d been tempted to go over and talk to Molly about it. But I kept getting hung up in the idea that Frank might be home. So I guess I was on my own with this. I’d have to figure it out from scratch.

  Maybe everybody had to.

  Maybe it’s one of those things that can’t really be taught in words, anyway.

  We walked down East Drive to around Sixty-seventh Street before ducking into the park near Willowdell Arch. It was already really hot, so we sat in the shade of the dog statue. I was trying to think how you even start a project like this.

  “Any idea why there’s a statue of a dog over our heads?” I asked Wilbur. Probably just to have something to say.

  I’d seen the statue before. I’d just never bothered to go over and read the plaque and see what it was all about.

  “Sure,” he said. “That’s Balto. That Siberian husky who saved all those people in Alaska by getting some kind of medicine through in the winter. You know. A dogsled sort of a thing. He was the lead dog. The musher swears the dog found his way through the storm all by himself.”

  I wondered how Wilbur knew all that, but I didn’t ask.

  “Wow,” I said. “A dog hero.” Silence. It was time to take pictures. But Wilbur would want me to tell him what he was supposed to do. And I had no idea. “Do you like dogs?”

  “I’m a little bit afraid of them,” he said. “I’d be afraid of a big Siberian like that. My mother used to have a little Yorkie. Pepito. I liked Pepito.”

  “What happened to him?” I asked. I was hoping this had nothing to do with his stepfather.

  “He died of old age. And after he died, she never got another dog because my stepfather hates them.”

  We sat in silence in the shade for a few more beats.

  “What feels like it’s missing in your life?” I asked.

  It was a weird question. Out of nowhere and not even fully explained. Or at least it should have come off that way. But Wilbur picked it right up. As if he’d been answering questions like that one all his life.

  “Maybe feeling like I’m safe,” he said.

  “Okay, stand here in the shadow of this dog,” I said. “And I’ll see if I can find a way to see that through my camera lens.”

  But I wasn’t even sure how I’d know if I succeeded. That was the problem with a film camera. Until you developed your film, you never knew if you got what you wanted or not.

  I had him lean against the base of the dog statue. I liked the way it gave the shots the background of a hero.

  “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do,” he said.

  I lowered my camera and looked him right in the eye. “God’s honest truth? Neither am I.” I breathed deeply and thought about Molly. “Just be as close to yourself as you can possibly bring yourself to be.”

  Then I looked at him through the viewfinder again, and he was smiling.

  “What? What are you smiling at?”

  “Nothing. Really. I’m just not sure anybody ever said that to me before.”

  * * *

  Right around the time I was packing up my lenses, Wilbur said this to me:

  “I thought you’d be
happier now that the cat is okay.”

  I didn’t answer right off.

  It was pretty clear what he was saying. It was an opening to talk about what was bothering me.

  If I wanted to.

  I’d been hoping it wasn’t obvious that something was bothering me. But to Wilbur I guess it was.

  I wound a whole roll of film back into the cartridge and popped it out of the camera before I said anything.

  “If I tell you something, who all are you going to tell?”

  “I don’t gossip,” he said.

  “Nobody says they gossip. People just pass on what they’ve heard and at the same time they continue to think of themselves as people who don’t gossip.”

  “When’s the last time you heard me talk about anyone?”

  “Good point,” I said.

  Another long silence.

  Was I really going to do this thing? It felt scary. Maybe even insane. Then again, a better question might be: Was I really not going to do it, ever? Hold this up all by myself forever? Not take one single human being into my confidence?

  I took a deep breath.

  “Turns out he is,” I said.

  Now, that’s another one of those statements that’s hardly self-explanatory. I fully expected him to say, first, Who? And, second, Is what?

  But it was Wilbur. Wilbur said no such thing.

  “I know,” he said.

  “You said you didn’t know.”

  “I guess I meant more like I didn’t feel the need to say what I thought. I figure what people are can just be their own business.”

  We started walking together. Back out onto East Drive.

  I never answered.

  So, he’d pretty much thought so, too. But I figured I shouldn’t be mad at him. After all, he’d kept his mouth shut.

  Maybe I shouldn’t be mad at any of them.

  After all, they were right.

  “Why does it bother you so much?” he asked. “Is it because you have a crush on him?”

  “Oh, God. Is it that obvious?”

  “Not obvious, really. I just figured you did.”

  “Yeah. I guess that’s why.”

  “Okay. Because you don’t strike me as the type who would get all weirded out about a thing like that. I mean, you get along fine with me.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do.” He was even starting to feel like a friend. “Are you trans?”

  “Not really. Not the way he is. I mean, I don’t want to have surgery. I don’t need to be a girl. I’m just this.”

  Then we walked without talking for a while.

  “I won’t tell anybody,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I’m not the most trusting soul in the world. But I believed him.

  We walked the rest of the way home together. Being with him as a friend was starting to feel more comfortable. It was the last time anything would feel comfortable for a very long time.

  Just before we turned the corner onto my street, the shriek of an ambulance hit us, just out of nowhere, and very close. Not like it had come from far away, getting louder all the time. Like the ambulance had just pulled away from the curb and turned on its siren. Right around the corner.

  Right on my block.

  I winced as it streaked by us. Man. Those things are really ear-splitting up close.

  We turned the corner and saw a crowd still gathered. Right in front of my building. That sort of aimless ending point in the gathering of a crowd, when there’s no real reason for them to be gathered anymore, and they almost miss their reasons. Like they’re waiting to stock up the energy to go back inside.

  There was blood on the street.

  “Somebody must have got hit by a car,” I said to Wilbur. At least, I hoped it was something accidental like that. I guess somebody could’ve been shot, but my brain didn’t want to go there.

  “Do you know any of your neighbors?” he asked. Indicating the gathering of people.

  Right up until he said that, I hadn’t really looked at them as my neighbors. They were just a bunch of strangers to me. The only neighbors I knew were Frank and Molly. I scanned the crowd for them and came up empty.

  “Nope. Not a one.”

  I waited nervously in the doorway of my building while Wilbur talked to two very old women. I was wondering how he had the nerve to do that.

  He nodded about four times, then walked to where I was waiting. Or hiding, as the case may have been.

  “Something about Crazy Harry,” he said. “He came up behind some guy and started yelling. Startled him right out into the street, and the guy got hit by a cab.”

  “Jesus,” I said. Then I wondered if Wilbur was a Christian. I thought I’d seen him wear a little gold cross once. Maybe I’d said something offensive. “Did they say who it was?”

  Which was something of a stupid question, of course. I didn’t know any of my neighbors. So why would one name be different from any other?

  “They didn’t know. They just said a young man. Which, you know … to them …” He looked over his shoulder at them. They were still gathered. Looking down at the blood and shaking their heads. “Could be fifty.”

  “Oh. Well …” It felt weird to say goodbye to Wilbur and be alone. But I wasn’t sure why. Definitely something about the blood on the street in front of my building. Someone could have been killed for all I knew. “Thanks for walking me home.”

  “You okay?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  Part of me hoped he would hear the lie in that, and stay. But it was Wilbur. Wilbur takes people at their word.

  It took me about five minutes to decide to knock on Frank and Molly’s door. Or, at least, to get up the nerve to do what I’d decided.

  I mean, one of our neighbors had been hit by a car right outside our front stoop. If I couldn’t put my issues aside at a time like that, what would it say about me?

  Maybe they would know who the poor guy was. And if he was going to be okay.

  Maybe Frank would want to play Scrabble. Just like the old days.

  Maybe Molly would cut up some organic fruit and feed us.

  Maybe George and Gracie would rub up against my legs and purr.

  Maybe then I wouldn’t have to feel like this.

  I knocked. I waited. I waited some more. I knocked again. I waited even longer.

  I was stunned by the depth of my own disappointment. Turned out I had needed them to be home. Badly. And I hadn’t even known it.

  Until they weren’t.

  It seemed funny that they weren’t home on a Saturday. Frank’s day off. Usually he’s tired and really happy to just take a nap on the couch on Saturday. But I guess there are a million places that people can be.

  I gave up standing in front of their door, but it was hard. I went back inside my own apartment. Climbed outside on my fire escape. Sat looking down at the blood.

  The crowd had dispersed.

  Funny, but the cars were all going around that spot. The blood was still fresh-looking and red, and they had just taken down the police tape, but the street hadn’t been hosed off yet and nobody wanted to drive through it. I guess it was just a normal human reaction to a thing. Even if they had to stop and wait for a spot to open up so they could drive around it. It was like the wrong end of a magnet, only redder.

  Near one side of the red patch, I saw something. Something I hadn’t seen from the street. Maybe somebody’s feet had been blocking it.

  Maybe I just hadn’t wanted to look too close.

  From my fire-escape perch, it looked like a pair of glasses.

  At first, it didn’t hit me. Then it did.

  I ran straight down the fire-escape stairs to the street. Telling myself lots of people wear glasses. Maybe one person in every three or four. Right? Well, who knows what the statistics are? Who cares? But lots.

  It didn’t mean a thing.

  Right?

  The ladder wouldn’t go down. It was all rusty and old.
So I jumped. Landing on the sidewalk hurt like hell, mostly in my shins and on the bottom of my feet. But I didn’t stop to pay attention to any of that.

  I stepped out into the street and looked down at the glasses. I remember my insides going numb, but not much else about how I felt. You know what? You want the truth? I didn’t. I didn’t feel. At all.

  I reached down and picked up the round wire-rimmed glasses.

  Frank’s glasses.

  One lens was broken. But I picked them up just the same. At the time I reached for them, I wasn’t focused on the fact that they had been lying in the blood. But then a drop of it fell, hit the street near my foot, and splashed onto one of my favorite old lace-up boots.

  In slow motion.

  That’s how I knew I felt something in the middle of all that nothing. Because that drop took forever to hit the street. I felt like I could recite the Gettysburg Address while I was watching it fall.

  Weird thing is, I had no idea why I picked up the glasses. Maybe I thought Frank would want them back again. Broken lens and all. Because there would definitely still be a Frank to want his glasses back.

  Right?

  TEN

  Clothes. And Control.

  I have no idea how long I sat in that position. My back against Frank and Molly’s door. The broken glasses hanging from my left hand. My head leaned back. Staring at a scuff on the wallpaper, right across from me.

  It’s possible I might even have dozed off briefly. Because it definitely got late while I was sitting there.

  I would tell the truth about what I was thinking if I remembered. And if I were sure I was thinking.

  It was late when I heard them come up the stairs. Somehow I knew it was them, even before they came up onto the landing. I knew this was what I was waiting for. My head said it could be any neighbor who lived on this floor. But this little spot under my sore stomach said, No. This is it.

  When they came into view, it was Frank, alive and on his feet. But barely. On one side of him was Molly. On the other side, a woman who looked about fifty, with long, thick white hair. Somebody I had never met.

  I tried to jump up, but my muscles didn’t move. I tried to say something, but nothing got said.