The Bewildered

by Peter Rock

  15.

  A WEEK AFTER THE INCIDENT with the sailor’s boat, Kayla skated alone under the Burnside Bridge. This was where she did her thinking, and she had plenty of thinking to do. Her long, black hair in four braids, snaking around her head, pink plastic barrettes aclatter, she flew across the park and to the top of the concrete wall, pulling a 50-50 grind into a ten-foot board slide—the gnarled scrape of her metal trucks on the concrete, then the hollow smoothness of the sliding wood, then rocking down and the roar of the wheels again.

  Sometimes in the early mornings it sounded like ten people skating, but it was only Kayla, her wheels echoing with the roar of water. She gasped, and huffed, and softly sighed, yet she could not hear herself, she could not hear her wheels. Her headphones were tight in her ears, the Walkman on her belt playing Stravinsky’s Fireworks, but she was not paying attention to that, either; the music spun loose, lost in some distant part of her brain. Kayla was thinking too hard to listen, her mind split between skating—the concrete, her body, the air—and making sense, the remembering and the looking ahead.

  A semi-trailer full of fruit eased past, outside the fence; the driver slowed to watch, but Kayla did not notice. She popped out one end, up top, swerved around her backpack, her new platform-soled sandals—she skated in her Chuck Taylors, like always—and dropped back into a bowl. Her makeup was in the pack, and her other clothes, and her Japanese flashcards, her sunglasses, her cheap plastic bracelets and necklaces. Buried beneath it all was her notebook, full of facts and guesses about Natalie and, increasingly, notes about Leon, multiplying suspicions. The notebook showed how intertwined everything had become; on one of the last pages she’d taped in the newspaper article about the blackout they’d caused that night up by the Columbia. Thousands of people lost power; it took two days to get it straight again. And people were badly hurt: three phone linemen, working late, and nine others—a homeless kind of family living under a bridge in North Portland. Their illegal electrical lines, snaked out from a transformer box, hadn’t been able to handle the surge. The wires had exploded like a bomb, the paper said, like a flood of electricity right over them, taking them all to the ground.

  Some were still in the hospital—burned or recovering from heart attacks—and some might not make it out. As the days passed Kayla had not tried to find out more. She would not let herself; when she started to feel herself drifting in that direction, to sink, she choked it back. She would not let herself. No one knew why it happened, no one could trace the blackout’s cause, and if those people were gone they weren’t coming back. And she was here, kicking hard across the skatepark, rising up on the vertical section of the wall.

  She tried a backside handplant, an invert, but she lost hold of her board and was caught there, upside down for a moment—the board flew end over end, landed on its wheels, rolled up the far bank as if ridden by a phantom—and she could smell the concrete, see the tiny forks and cracks like fissures in bone, and in that moment it seemed she might come down on her face, but momentum carried her legs up over her head, across in an arc, and she slid down on her knees, the toes of her shoes, all the way to the bottom. Her board zinged back to catch her in the ribs, perfectly timed.

  Standing, she could feel her knees skinned, under her jeans, could feel the cool trickles of blood sliding down her shins. She tasted more blood, in the back of her throat; she spat, and the spit was clear; it just all made her think harder, and skate with more abandon, the pounding somehow bringing thoughts out of her. She climbed up, dropped in, kicked twice for speed. She shot up the wall and floated an ollie over the corner, swooping across, floating weightless in a long frontside carve across the wall, up where the Grim Reaper had been spraypainted over, where beneath the word FEAR there was only the black shape of a person, like a shadow with arms out wide. She sensed a movement behind her, and carved around, looked across to her things, where someone was now standing. Chris. He waved, watching her, his helmet loose in one hand, his skateboard in the other.

  She swooped up, skidded next to him, slapped his shoulder.

  “Been here long?” he said.

  “I think I’m done.”

  “That ollie was big.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Flipping her board over onto its deck, she began to rummage through her pack. She took out a small folding mirror, opened it, and held it up. She moved it around in a slow circle, checking every angle, then took out a black pencil and traced her eyes. Next, she unsnapped her barrettes and let them fall, a handful of pink beetles clattering on the concrete. She began to brush out her hair, straightening her part.

  “Those are your sandals?” Chris dropped his helmet so it bounced with a hollow sound, settling on the concrete next to the shoes. “I don’t really know what you’re getting at these days.”

  “We never agreed to all dress alike,” she said, lipstick in hand. Her Hello Kitty T-shirt was tight across her chest. “Anata ni do are to wa itte nai wa,” she said.

  “Hey.” Chris looked past her, pointing down to the street. “Is that Natalie down there?”

  “No,” Kayla said, at last looking away from the mirror. “That’s not even a woman—just some homeless guy.”

  “Natalie,” he said. “You never know what she’ll look like.”

  “True,” Kayla said.

  “And it’s been a while since we’ve seen her.”

  “I think we’re done,” she said.

  “Done?”

  “At least for a while. I think that’s enough wire for a long time.”

  They’d worked for eight straight nights, collecting wire after the blackout, and then not for two weeks. Natalie had taken all the equipment back from them, even the phone headset.

  “And it’s good for us to get away from Natalie,” Kayla said. “She’s pathetic, when you really think about her.”

  “Right,” Chris said.

  “Maybe we could do the wire without her. Just collect it and turn it in.”

  “But we couldn’t carry it,” he said. “And we wouldn’t know where to take it. We have to find something else.”

  “Something,” Kayla said. “Something that’ll help bring Leon back.” She checked her face one more time. “Mashi. Kirei. Nan ni shite mo kawaii wa,” she said, and then she folded the mirror and put it away. She unlaced her Chuck Taylors, stood, kicked them off, then unzipped her pants, pushed them down, and stepped out of them. She wore yellow panties. Dried lines of blood ran from her skinned knees, down her shins, marking her white ankle socks with red.

  “You don’t have to look away,” she said.

  “You can dye your hair black and paint your eyes slanted,” Chris said, his voice quiet, “but you’re not Japanese. And we hardly did anything to the sailor, nothing like the book. None of this is a real change.”

  Kayla reached into her pack and took out a short, plaid schoolgirl skirt. Red and green. She wrapped it around herself, hooked the belt. She didn’t say anything for a moment, only looked away, across the gray concrete. The day was growing lighter, the shadows sharper, the cars louder on the bridge overhead. Then she bent down, buckling the thin straps of her sandals.

  “So maybe the sailor has nothing to do with it.” She stood, gaining four inches, and looked down at Chris. “We had to try something, at least—jinsei wa no kantan na singo to kesshin de naritatte iru. It’s not like we can just do nothing.”

  “To do with what?” Chris said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Leon,” she said. “Everything.”

  “Leon? What do you mean? He didn’t even help us with the sailor.”

  “What could he have done, really?” she said. “We were enough.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Chris said. “What I meant was it used to always be the three of us.”

  “Right,” Kayla said. “Is it him, or is it us? It’s not like we can make him spend time with us.”

  “And it’s not like he has new friends,” Chris said. “Not that w
e know of.”

  “Do you think,” she said, “do you think he might be seeing Natalie on his own?”

  They had both noticed, during the last few jobs, how Natalie watched Leon, how familiar the two seemed.

  “Working for her?”

  “Or something.”

  “I guess so,” Chris said. “It’s possible.”

  “Even if he is,” she said, “that’s just a piece of it, whatever they’re doing, whether we can, too. I don’t care about her like I care about Leon.”

  “So,” Chris said, “what are we supposed to do?”

  “Help him, I guess. Try to understand what he’s going through or something. I believe he’s doing something.”

  “No,” Chris said. “Come on, like drugs? Already his parents are on him, you know?”

  “I mean really doing something,” Kayla said. “It’s not that we have to bring him back to be like us, necessarily; it might be that we have to go where he is, you know?”

  “Like following him?”

  “Kind of,” she said. “That’s part of it.”

  “Can’t we just ask him?” Chris said.

  “You know that doesn’t work,” Kayla said. “He’s either lying, or he’s as clueless what his deal is as we are.”

  “Why would he lie?” Chris said.

  “If it was me,” she said, “I’d want the two of you to try, come after me.”

  “Me, too.”

  “What did he say?”

  “When?”

  “On the phone.”

  “Yesterday?” Chris said. “He didn’t really say what he’d been doing. He was talking about maybe going to the planetarium today, or maybe Oaks Park.”

  “That rollercoaster’s a joke,” Kayla said. “You planning on getting some runs in before it gets crowded?”

  Chris picked up his helmet and buckled it on, then set his board down gently. He dropped in and Kayla stood watching him go—his elbows bent sharp and rigid, his butt out, shakier than ever. He turned an awkward 180 on the far wall and came back, trying to decide what to do next, an expression of deep concentration on his face.

  16.

  CHESTERTON SAT IN HIS SHOP, Shanghai Shanghai, one lamp casting a narrow circle of light onto his notebook. His hands were huge, and he wore a gold watch on each wrist, along with several copper bracelets. He wrote with a quill pen, a blue feather—he enjoyed the pretension, the affectation of it—and sat on a stool, hunched over next to his cash register, the notebook open on the counter. As he wrote, he listened to the police scanner, the officers bantering and serious, calling out the codes he’d memorized; he kept his ears pricked for any mention of electrocution.

  His words, he chose them carefully, laying them down for posterity, attempting to account for the slipperiness of the situation he described, to account for all that he did not know. How little he knew was apparent to him, and how quickly things could change. He moved slowly; he tried to never anticipate. These days, for instance, he’d realized that sometimes, when he talked, little bubbles of saliva floated from the tip of his tongue. This was new, as if the shape of his mouth were changing, the way he talked, or how he said the things he said, the force and feeling behind it all. Had his writing changed, at the same time? He could not tell, but he did find it a complicated pleasure, simultaneously satisfying and dissatisfying—this, he believed, was a relationship to aspire toward with regard to all things.

  The metal grates outside were pulled down; he could not see out, no one could see in. The lamp reflected off the top of his dark, bald head. The shadowy, cluttered shelves around him held dusty acupuncture charts, plaster skulls, folding fans, Tiger Balm. Oils and tinctures and potions bearing mysterious names and promises—they were little more than water and artificial colors—and dried herbs that were years old, that were mostly ground to powder. Flip-flops, dented rice cookers, chipped teapots, dried fish with startled eyes, Chinese calendars far out of date.

  He hated the New Age movement, but depended on the mystical-minded, those with a predisposition to believe. That was why he’d chosen Chinatown. Were his goods authentic? He didn’t worry about that, or even if the operation made much money. He wanted to blend in, and he left most of the ordering to Henry Yee, the Chinese man he hired to front the store. Did Chesterton himself stand out, draw attention? Certainly—tall and broad and blacker than black, he did not easily fit. The store needed an Asian face, and that was Henry, who was also good-natured, and sharp, and enjoyed the irony of it all.

  The only part of the shop that Chesterton cared about, the only section that Henry didn’t handle, were the items made of copper. The bracelets, the anklets and arm cuffs. They were sold, ostensibly, to ease arthritis and other aches and pains, to enhance clear-headedness and focus, to reverse impotence and falling hair. The wider the bands, the more powerful and expensive. Chesterton made them himself, melted down the copper wires in a cauldron upstairs, over an amped-up hot plate; he stamped the inside with “Made in China” or with nonsense ideograms or misspelled, authentic-looking palliatives: SERINETY, INSITE, MEDETACION.

  Now, writing, Chesterton paused. He thought he heard something, some motion beneath the floorboards, some hidden hinges. He paused, then continued with his argument; the three copper bracelets on his wrist rattled as he wrote.

  The shelves holding the bracelets were carefully dusted. The bracelets ranged in price from five to forty dollars, all except the ones on the far end. These were less attractive, ugly on purpose—thinner, rougher, and yet attached to the shelf by steel cables, to prevent theft. Their price was five hundred dollars. People asked him why, but he did not tell them. Not even Henry Yee understood; he believed it was a joke, a marketing strategy he could not grasp.

  There were people who did not need to ask why these ugly bracelets were different, or cost so much, who could sense this by merely touching the copper. It was these people whom Chesterton sought out. It was of these people that he wrote.

  For years he had studied them; only recently had he gained real insight, however, had he collected the beginnings of an adequate base of knowledge. His list was almost one hundred individuals long; he knew there were more, but did not allow himself to estimate.

  He listened to the police scanner. Each day, he checked the newspaper for electrical accidents, and he kept track of every electrocution. Upstairs, overhead, there were two rooms. In the larger one, he conducted his experiments; the other was full of books on electricity, its use and misuse. Articles on electroshock therapy, the victims of lightning strikes, and the currents that occurred naturally within organisms. On the walls of this room were topographic maps of Portland and the surrounding area. These maps were covered in pins with different-colored heads. White for electrical incidents, blue for injuries, red for deaths. A cluster of red, for instance, marked the spot beneath the bridge in North Portland, the most recent tragedy. The blue pins, the “Affected,” were the ones that intrigued Chesterton, that held out promise.

  It was almost too much to synthesize, to boil down and filter, and yet he knew that he must not shy from the attempt. That was why he documented his findings and hypotheses, why he took the time to write, why he allowed his writing to spur new possibilities for exploration.

  I. AN ATTEMPT AT AN INTRODUCTION

  A hidden world exists all around us, people whose motivations, desires and understandings differ from our own—perhaps this notion seems self-evident, but I write not of the fact of this difference. I write of its extent and its degree.

  I strive to humbly describe and delineate this difference, to speculate on how the lives of these people—hereafter identified as the Affected, for purposes of clarity—stretch beyond our own, and what we might learn from them.

  I must stress that the Affected are not forthcoming about their condition, that one must take what one can from them. They are not a reflective people.

  Allow me to lay out a tentative structure for these written investigations: I will begin with prelim
inary remarks, provide some individual examples, proceed to my own hypotheses and experiments and, from there, speculate about future implementations and the like. I cannot of course promise to cleave exactly to this plan. I must maintain flexibility, and follow each possibility as it demands attention or promises insight.

  Some may question how my interest in this matter was spurred, or ignited, or even how someone who is UnAffected would ever gain insight into or achieve recognition of such an insular society. Is it enough to say that I’ve always had my suspicions? I am a man who has, in my past, personally experimented with electricity, who has worn magnets in my shoes, my underwear, placed them in my mattress. I have always felt the electricity within me, the currents that enable motion, that fire the synapses, leaping gaps in my mind—and I believe there must be ways to amplify this energy, to improve me or perhaps change the tenor or kind of my experiences. So: I led myself to the Affected, in a way.

  From this suspicion arose an awareness, and awareness was the first real, substantive step. Perhaps in another, later place I will document the gleanings, the gradual piecing together; here, I seek to move with more decisive rapidity.

  Am I able to identify the Affected by sight? Their twitchiness, their indecisiveness? Sometimes, perhaps. Often the bracelets here in my store allow an easy differentiation—a browsing customer suddenly identified—and other times I have found them by other means, even by chance. Denise, Jonathon, Walter. Underground, or at remote substations, or near dams, late at night, lost in the hydroelectric hum. I think of my Victor Machado, who came to ask me for work when no one else would employ him—sometimes I wonder if the Affected are drawn to me! And Natalie, whom I first saw lurking around a power plant, whom I later witnessed tampering with neighborhood power distribution systems. I followed her for quite some time before making contact.