The Art of Feeling

by Laura Tims

  “But he doesn’t feel pain,” I say stupidly. It was a bad excuse when Eliot used it, too.

  Gabriel scowls at me. “He can still be damaged. He wouldn’t know he needed to be in a hospital until it was too late; and even if he did, he probably wouldn’t go—he’d spent too much time being poked and prodded as a child. I think he felt like a science experiment. Now he thinks he’s invincible, because whenever people find out about his condition, that’s how they act.”

  “He doesn’t care what people think.” It doesn’t matter to him if the whole school hates him—if I protect him, you don’t need to take him away.

  He laughs. “Never trust Eliot when he says he doesn’t care about something.”

  “Instead of moving so much, why don’t you just homeschool him?”

  “Ask me how many tutors he’s gone through.”

  “Maybe if you stayed at home—”

  “It takes money to relocate. Someone has to make that money.”

  “Can’t your mom give you money?”

  A shadow crosses his face. “She’s an ordinary woman, and on top of having a son with a rare medical condition, both her kids turned out like us. She’s as involved as she can handle. Which isn’t much.”

  My phone buzzes with a text. I glance at it. Come upstairs.

  I shove it back in my pocket. “You wouldn’t have to do all these weird mind games with Eliot if you were just—nice to him.”

  “Try being nice to Eliot when he wants a reaction out of you and see how well he takes it.”

  Another buzz, and I can’t help but check my phone. If you’re not upstairs in the next minute I will assume Gabriel has killed you and will take it as permission to kill him back.

  Gabriel steps away like he’s releasing me from an invisible force field. He clears his throat. “Don’t get too attached. Things never stay at a baseline with Eliot. After a while, they always blow up.”

  “I’ll make sure no one touches him again.” I ball my fists desperately. “It’s just one guy who has the problem. I know him; I can convince him to leave Eliot alone.”

  His expression is unreadable. He reaches into his wallet and hands me a business card. “My email address, for emergencies. If there are any more issues, it’s my job to do what’s best for my brother, whether or not normal people understand what that is.”

  On my way up the stairs, my leg throbs, splintering my vision with broken glass. I grip my crutches hard, stunned at how dry my mouth is. A single thought bursts in me like a firework: I’m not ready. I’m not ready for Eliot to leave and for the blankness to take over again.

  I don’t know which room is Eliot’s, but one door is slightly ajar, ukulele music trickling into the hall. I step inside. He’s rigid in front of the window, back to me, playing some jarringly happy pop song.

  I’d pictured his room like the rest of the house, barren as a monk’s, but it’s strewn with the corpses of ex-hobbies: beakers crusted with dried liquid, an aquarium too scummy to tell if there’s anything inside, scattered books about astrology, Slavic root languages, World War II airplanes . . . and Myers-Briggs personality types. There are several unfolded butterfly knives on the carpet.

  “Eliot, you can’t feel pain and you have knives on your floor.”

  He plays on, ignoring me.

  “We’re going to have to talk about the knives.”

  He tosses his ukulele suddenly on the bed. “You two really hit it off. The only people who talk to Gabriel that long are lawyers—he loves suing people, especially school districts. I assume he’s not suing you.”

  I remember what Gabriel said about being nice to Eliot when he wants a reaction. “We were just having a . . . nice chat about you,” I say as calmly and politely as I can.

  He tosses himself next to the ukulele. “Stop.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Patronizing me.”

  I kneel awkwardly on my crutches and gather the knives to hide my mounting irritation. “I’m not, I’m—”

  “Ten minutes and he has you talking to me like I have two functioning brain cells. Where’d he install the chip, and do I need a scalpel or a drill to remove it?”

  I fill my lungs with air. “I had to talk to him about—”

  “Had is inaccurate. Chose to is better. ‘Hey, Gabriel, people at school think Eliot is weird, he doesn’t eat, he needs round-the-clock supervision, and also what did the doctor say is wrong with his brain?’” he mimics.

  I should have known he was eavesdropping.

  He keeps going. “‘Dear responsible Gabriel, your mutant brother needs to be examined and analyzed and picked apart until we can figure out how to make him easier to deal with—’”

  I bang a crutch against the floor like a gavel. Gabriel was right—niceness is not the way to go. “Can you shut up? Of course I said something to him; it’s the normal thing to—”

  “Oh, the normal thing!” he barks. “Why should the normal thing apply to someone like me? You just had such a nice chat about what a freak I—”

  “I don’t think you’re a freak!”

  Eliot goes silent. He plucks one of the ukulele strings. “Then what do you think I am?”

  The same question Gabriel asked is in his voice, only reversed. And I’m so annoyed, I don’t even know the answer. Why do I like him? He’s abrasive and dramatic and tells me exactly what he thinks, and it throws me off because everyone else has treated me like I’m made of glass since the accident.

  I guess that’s my answer.

  “Why do you have to be something in particular?” I ask. “You’re just Eliot.”

  “That’s what people do. They decide what other people are.”

  “Then . . . you’re an idiot.”

  He relaxes a little. “Fair enough.”

  Downstairs, a door opens and closes. I glance out the window. Gabriel’s fancy car rolls out of the driveway and down the street. “He didn’t stay long.”

  “He’s going to eat at the most expensive restaurant he can find around here, and then he’ll be back. The more annoyed he is, the more he eats and the more his hair falls out. My goal is to make him fat and bald.”

  “You hate him that much?”

  “Of course I do. He’s my brother.”

  I sit on his blanket and trace the cigarette burns. “He said you moved here because things were bad at your old school.”

  He grunts.

  “He said you might have to move again. To a place where no one wants to punch you.” I hope my voice sounds casual. What I want to hear from him is “Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Anywhere there are humans is a place people will want to punch me.”

  Then I’ll have to defend him from Anthony and his friends since he’s clearly not interested in defending himself. If anyone can find a way to hurt someone who can’t be hurt, it’s Anthony.

  I shift, and pain uncoils in my leg. The Vicodin is wearing off. I stretch my leg away from me like it’ll stop the poison from spreading to my brain.

  “What does it feel like?” Eliot asks. “When your leg hurts.”

  I pick at the rubber on my crutches. “Shitty.”

  “Your attention to detail is astounding.”

  I look at him, but he’s staring at my leg like he can see the ugly scars under my jeans, his brow knit. It must be frustrating for someone so determined to understand people not to understand this fundamental thing. But you can’t make someone fathom what they’ve never felt. It’s an uncrossable gulf between him and the rest of the world.

  “I don’t know,” I mumble. “It just hurts.”

  I want to ask him what it’s like not to feel pain, but I’ll never be able to know that either. It’s just some magic in his skin that isn’t in mine. He’s full of magic that isn’t in me.

  To get my mind off that and his eyes off my leg, I point at the stuff on his floor. “Why didn’t you just unpack everything when you were unpacking all this?”

  “Those a
re things I’ve gotten since we came.”

  “You went through all these hobbies in six months?”

  He shrugs. “When I get bored, I move on. People spend their whole lives wasting time on things that started boring them years ago.”

  “Uh-huh. So what’s next after the Myers-Briggs phase?”

  “You,” he says, and I can’t tell if he’s joking.

  If not, how long until he gets bored and moves on from me?

  Chapter Six

  THAT NIGHT, I LIE IN BED LOOKING AT THE calendar, haloed in the blue-white glow of my phone. In three days it’ll be Monday, exactly two weeks since I stopped Anthony from beating up Eliot behind the Dumpster, and Anthony’s suspension will be over.

  My leg pulses quietly in the dark. I’ve memorized all the different kinds of pain: climbed-stairs-too-fast pain, knelt-too-long pain, did-nothing-but-fuck-you-it’s-hurting-anyway pain. Ibuprofen barely helps with I-walked-too-much pain. I could take another Vicodin, but that goes over my daily limit, and what if I’m one extra pill away from turning into Rex?

  But there’s broken glass in my heart, and I’m exhausted from pulling the white fog over myself to suffocate what the pain brings back.

  Abruptly I remember Dr. Brown’s homework assignment.

  My notebook’s on my desk, across the room. She said it could help with the anxiety. I swing my legs over the mattress, reaching for the crutches leaning on my bedside table, but then I let my hand drop.

  Even in the dark, it’s obvious that my leg looks wrong. It’s more rigid, twisted slightly to the side below the knee. An infection in my bone, they said, that never healed. That’s where the pain comes from, something secret deep within me.

  “Come on, Sam,” the physical therapist had said approximately five seconds before I collapsed on the floor in a sobbing heap. “Just two steps without the crutches. You can do two steps.”

  I stand and balance on one leg, wiggling my bare toes in the carpet, feeling the roughness of buried crumbs. It’s a maroon shag—Mom bought it for me on my fourteenth birthday despite Lena’s protests that shags were impossible to clean.

  So far so good. With the closet door as my goalpost, I sink my weight onto my bad side and take a step.

  You’re a leg. Do your job.

  My leg declines. Pain scissors up my shin and thigh, and I cry out, toppling sideways, my cheek resting on the shag, crumbs gluing themselves to my skin. I imagine snipping through the neurons that connect my leg to my brain, severing each one with tiny sewing scissors. Eliot wouldn’t even feel this. But the connection is as strong as ever, and it funnels the memories to me: black pavement, shattered glass glinting white—

  I haul myself onto my desk chair, scrabbling for a pen. I write without thinking, the pain bleeding up my leg and through my brain and out my fingers.

  The daughter is getting a ride to a lacrosse game from her mom. It’s sunny out, but it should be raining. Car crashes make sense when it’s raining.

  The daughter has two working legs. Her mom has a working heart. The body parts of everyone in the car are doing exactly what they’re supposed to.

  The daughter worries that the sun will blind her during the game, but she doesn’t worry too much, because she’s really good at lacrosse. She doesn’t know the importance of the time she’s wasting—there are questions she should be asking her mom, stories she should be hearing. Instead they’re discussing neck pillows.

  “I saw a nice one on Amazon. You microwave it,” her mom tells her. “I’m concerned about his neck, with all that slouching.”

  “Rex eats ramen packets without cooking them; he’s too lazy to microwave a whole pillow,” the daughter says. Her delinquent brother’s birthday is next week. “He has everything he needs: couch and TV. He’s like his own ecosystem. Plus he says nineteen is a stupid birthday and he doesn’t want a present.”

  “Not turning eighteen, not entering your twenties,” her mom agrees. “It’s an in-between year.”

  They’re ten minutes from the school. The daughter is pretty confident she’ll score the winning point against Northton. She’s making it a tradition, scoring the winning point, especially when her mom comes to the games. She’s usually busy having talks with the brother. Or quietly worrying about the brother. Or consulting friends about the brother. The daughter feels bad that he causes her mom so much stress—to her, her brother is just doing what her brother does—but it’s okay, because her sister has made it her new project to take their mom’s mind off the issue. She schedules her for lunch dates, nail painting, free art shows. She invites the daughter, but the daughter has practice, and after-practice parties, and after-party sleepovers; and she can’t ditch her new social world to hang out with her stressed mom, because she’s never had a life like this before, never been so close to earning herself a place. Her siblings absorb all their parents’ energy and so she’s learned, out of politeness maybe, to absorb as little as possible. That’s why she turned out boring. She is liked at school, but not loved or hated. Her brother might be starting an in-between year, but she has an in-between life. Only now she’s good at something, really good at it, and it gives her form and purpose. For the first time she can remember, she’s not disheartened by the prospect of being Sam Herring for the rest of her life.

  “When Rex says he doesn’t want a present, he’s just testing to see if we love him enough to get him one anyway. We have to get him a present,” her mom says with that weird, firm certainty she’s always had about the brother’s needs and the sister’s needs but never, it seems, her needs. “He’s done it every year since he was nine.”

  “That’s silly.”

  “People are silly, but that’s all right. We love them anyway.”

  After, the daughter wishes that those were her last words. They’re solid enough, as last words go. But instead, her mom asks her to remind her to pick up paper towels on the way home, and however hard the daughter tries to pretend that her last words were about her fondness for humanity and not Bounty, it feels like cheating.

  The lack of paper towels becomes a problem, after. The neighbors bring tuna casserole and lasagna, but it doesn’t occur to anyone to offer paper towels. But paper towels have a specific niche of necessity. Toilet paper coats the countertop in furry white bits, and there’s only so long you can wipe things with the same hand towel before it just makes them dirtier. Eventually the absence of paper towels stops being about forgetfulness and turns into purposeful suffering. Privately the daughter swears never to use them again, but after a couple months, the sister breaks the unspoken code and buys them in bulk at Costco.

  At the other end of the street, a silver Jeep turns

  I drop the pen, and it flies across the room. I guess I technically threw it.

  I notice I’m crying. I rub my eyes hard until my brain reassembles, and then I stare down to find two full pages of writing.

  A silver Jeep . . .

  It’s the first detail I’ve remembered about the accident. Now it’s laser focused in my mind: a silver Jeep, the last of the summer heat rising in glinting waves off the hood.

  “Any detail will help us catch them. Can you remember the type of car?” the police officer had asked me in my hospital room, and later at the station, over and over again.

  The neck of my T-shirt is drenched with sweat. The walls of my room press in on me like a cocoon, inviting me to curl up again for months so the blankness can wrap me in layers of insulation. If I kept writing, would I remember the answers to all the police’s questions? A license plate? The face of the driver?

  I’m hyperventilating. I slam my notebook shut and propel myself one-legged back into bed, crawling beneath the blankets until everything is black emptiness, and I’m safe as long as I can’t see.

  I spend the rest of the weekend in hiding, muttering excuses about homework until finally it’s Monday morning and I have to go downstairs and have breakfast with Dad.

  Every time he asks about school, he acts like
he’s afraid of the answer, like he forgets I’ve said “fine, good, great” every time SMD. Grief is a tapeworm chewing holes in the brain, making it so you don’t remember things like that and silver Jeeps.

  “School’s great.” I smile like a Colgate ad. I want to tell him about what I wrote Friday night, but what if he wants to tell the police about the Jeep and they hammer me with all the same questions until I wear down to nothing? It took so much effort to block them out the first time that everything stayed blocked out for months.

  Dad stirs his breakfast mac ’n’ cheese with the wrong end of his fork. A worse sign than pancakes, but a better sign than gummy dinosaurs. Tito sits under his chair with a paw on his foot like he’s weighing him down to earth. He can always tell when Dad’s floating more than usual.

  “When Lena was here Friday afternoon, she said she thought it was time for you to go back to physical therapy,” he blurts out of the blue.

  When my leg still hurt a month after surgery, they told me I needed physical therapy. When the physical therapy made it hurt more, they told me it was because I wasn’t sticking with physical therapy.

  “The doctor said the pain won’t always be that bad—”

  “But it’s good to save on the co-pays, right?” I say. That’s not fair, and he stirs his mac faster, but he drops the topic.

  The silence is like airplane pressure. I ache to be honest for once, about anything—about the silver Jeep, about how pain makes me picture broken glass, about Eliot and how he makes me feel awake for the first time in months. But even BMD, I didn’t know how to be honest with Dad. I was supposed to be the easy kid.

  Tito trots into the living room and hops onto the couch. I point. “Remember when Mom bought that couch? It smelled horrible.”

  Dad chuckles absently, carried away by the memory before he can be scared of how I’ll handle talking about Mom. “She always said that secondhand furniture came with a piece of the previous owner. If she liked the owner, she brought it home.”