by Chase Novak
Oh. A little shaggy white dog with rabbity red eyes and askew ears, panting eagerly, the way dogs will when they think they have found a friend, and with an odd urgent air about him, as if he has someplace important to be and he’s running late. Alice reaches for the dog, who cautiously moves a little closer to her. Instinctively, Alice pounces on him and closes her fist on his scruff. Eat. It is not really like thinking; it’s more like hearing a command uttered by a creature who lives inside of her, not a girl or a boy, not a human or an animal, just a creature, something alive, the essence of life, really, life before it was divided up into kinds of life. She stares at the squirming little dog. His pink belly is scored with scratches; his fur is dingy, dusty, with so many twigs and leaves stuck to him that it’s a wonder birds don’t lay eggs on him. His penis, aroused by fear, emerges moist, glistening red from its sheath of flesh. Alice brings him closer and closer to her mouth; she can practically taste him. “No, no, no,” a girl’s voice says, and it takes her a moment to realize that the voice is her own. With a cry of anguish she drops the dog. He lands on his side, scrambles upright again, and, rather than running for his life, reapproaches Alice, rubbing the side of his face against her arm, making little high-pitched imploring whimpers.
He runs a few feet away, stops, turns toward her. She understands: he wants her to follow him. She crawls out from behind the bush and by then the dog is twenty feet away from her. She thinks of all the dogs, large and small, that have passed through their house. She imagines her immunity to that grief to be like a scab over a cut, a cast-iron crust that would never again allow that part of the body to bleed.
The white dog, sensing that she has slowed down, stops, looks over his shoulder at her, and proceeds to run again, with Alice close behind, winding this way and that, deeper and deeper into the darkness of the park.
Xavier hears the sound of his mother’s stiff broom sweeping and sweeping the floor of their apartment on Máximo Gómez. Stop, stop, it will never be clean, he wants to shout at her, but he is somewhere—where?—and his eyes are shut, screwed closed so tightly that, try as he might, he cannot open them. Her sweeping, her infernal, mad sweeping seems to surround him.
Por favor, he whispers to her, but she must not hear because the sweeping only becomes faster, louder. Now it seems she has taken another broom in hand and is somehow sweeping double—no! In triplicate! How many brooms can this woman manage? And what kind of broom—what kind of mother—would blow such foul wind in his face? Blindly, he tries to push her back and feels the wet of her demonic open mouth. Has she come to devour him? In the mad logic of this feverish state, it is not inconceivable, though it was always his father who most disapproved of Xavier, his mother who loved and protected him.
He smells shit. Has he disgraced himself? Is that why she is sweeping him away, out of her life, into the hard street?
His eyes finally open, but it is like trading one darkness for another. But gradually this second darkness becomes the lesser darkness. Not so solidly black, just a deep, sad gray. And through that gloom comes the quizzical glare of red eyes staring at him. The sweeping turns out to be the sound of panting. An animal.
A flash of memory: the upside-down world streaming by as he is carried down the street…
He scrambles to a sitting position, backs up, and feels the cold crisscross of the cage into which he has been locked. With him are eight dogs, some large, some small, his companions in captivity. Frightened, he tries to back up even farther, pressing himself against the chain-link fencing. His feels something soft flattening out under one of his palms, and something pebbly and hard beneath the other: shit and kibble. The dogs move closer, panting, wagging, whimpering. Xavier has never owned a dog, never wanted to, doesn’t really like or understand them, but one thing is clear: these poor trapped things are looking for help.
“Hey, what the fuck! Help. Someone. Down here.” Xavier shouts with what little strength he can muster—the effort of it sends pain shooting through his body in every possible direction. And it’s all for nothing, really. He can feel the deadness of his cry. This place, wherever he is, has been soundproofed to the max—studio foam, sound-absorbing curtains, acoustic tiles. Calling out down here is like crying yourself to sleep with your face pressed into a pillow.
With the white dog gone, it is as if her world is empty—she has nothing to follow, nowhere to go, and a sudden crushing aloneness comes over her, as heavy and real as rain. She stops, hears something.… She makes herself stop panting so she can hear better—a kind of rolling, growling, grinding noise. A couple of hundred feet away, skateboarders are using the stone steps of the staircase leading to the Bethesda Fountain to practice their moves. Likewise, they use the sides of the benches and the rounded concrete borders of the walkway to mount their wheels upon and to conduct their ceaseless arguments with gravity and good sense. There are ten of them, tall and short, skinny and broad. Though she knows none of them and is naturally shy, Alice moves toward them—anything seems better than solitude right now. She stands at the top of the staircase near a clump of dead honeysuckle, a few white flowers frozen in place. There is a smell of horse manure in the air and the distant clop of a horse-drawn carriage, the driver in a top hat, the passengers huddled beneath heavy blankets, trying to make the best of it. When the carriage rolls closer, the dappled gray horse lifts its head, its enormous nostrils open wider, and it whinnies, high-pitched and crazy.
The skateboard kids are like no other teenagers she has seen. Their jumps are wild, reckless, and almost every one ends in a fall, a real tumble, a skin-tearing skid along the cement, a bone-shattering thud—though none of them seem to get hurt. Or is it that they all refuse to show any sign of having been hurt? A few of them seem almost to fly, holding on to the edges of their boards as they crouch down, howling with excitement as they rise and fall.
Her heart pounds with anxiety as she is compelled toward the skaters. Her need to be with others is almost a mania; she struggles for contact as if solitude were a sea that could swallow her forever.
Adam! Where are you?
A long line of benches flanks either side of the walkway, with a space of four or five feet between each bench. Between two of the benches is what first looks like a chaotic clump of blankets but on further inspection proves to be a wheelchair. Child-size. And sitting in it is a boy or a girl covered in a hodgepodge of blankets with mud streaks and dead leaves stuck to them. A ghostly white light glows from the middle of it.
“Come here,” a voice from the wheelchair says.
Alice is too frightened to go to it and too frightened to turn away.
“I won’t hurt you,” the voice says. “Like how can I? You know?”
“Who are you?”
The child in the wheelchair is silent. The blankets shift and stir and then comes the grinding whir of the wheelchair’s power being activated, and whoever it is in that chair is slowly rolling toward her.
Every fiber in her being urges Alice to run, but she wills herself to be still—as frightened as she is, she cannot bear the idea of hurting the feelings of someone unfortunate.
As far as she can tell, it’s a boy in the chair, though he is covered from head to lap, only a small portion of his face visible. The light shining from his lap is a computer, the shell of which is covered in green-gray-and-black-camouflage-patterned fabric. One small hand clasps the filthy satin edge of the blanket he wears like a monk’s cowl, moving it a little to the side so he can speak. The fingers of that hand are stiff. In fact, they are plastic. The entire hand is plastic.
“My name’s Bernard,” he says, his words slurred, blurry, hard to understand.
“Oh,” Alice says. Her heart is beating so furiously, the world looks unstable, like something reflected in a pool of water.
“What’s your name?” Bernard asks.
“Alice.”
A silence. The sound of breathing as the boy gathers himself. “Bon soir, Alice.”
“You speak French.
”
“Mother from Canada taught me some.”
Alice stops herself from asking him to repeat what he has just said; replaying it in her mind, she deciphers the words. If a cement mixer could speak, it would sound like this boy.…
“Are you cold?” she asks him, looking at the many blankets he has draped himself in.
“Come close,” he says.
“Why?”
“Close.”
She realizes that explaining the why of anything might be more than he can do, yet, still, she is proudly reluctant to come even a step closer to him. Right now, about ten feet separate them.
The boy’s other hand crawls out like a shy animal from the shelter of blankets. The hand is bony and is attached to a wrist that pokes out from a loose-fitting sweater. He pushes a button on his motorized chair and rolls closer and closer to Alice. Run, run! she tells herself, but she cannot bring herself to do so—it’s one thing to run from danger, quite another to run from the fear of seeing something ugly.
Bernard stops his chair just as the skinny, deeply grooved tires touch the tips of Alice’s shoes.
“Lap,” he says. And when Alice fails to respond he says it again, more forcefully.
She looks down and in Bernard’s lap, half hidden in the folds of blanket, is a gleaming silver tube—a flashlight. “Yeah?” she says.
“Take.”
She does as he commands, picking it up gingerly so as to avoid touching him or even the blankets. The metal is freezing cold. The flashlight itself, though small, is surprisingly heavy. She turns it on, pointing the light toward the ground—her shoes, the broad sidewalk, the scatter of fallen leaves plastered to the cement.
Bernard uses his living hand to move the plastic hand a few inches to the left, exposing more of his face, and Alice, knowing what he wants her to do, slowly lifts the beam of the flashlight until it is shining directly on him.
He has one eye, and his nose is just two slits, no protrusion. His chin is long and comes to a point, and his mouth is hideously small. His skin looks as if it had been burned, had healed, and then been burned again. One of his ears is exposed and it seems no larger than a half-dollar, and it is covered in hair… or is that fur?
“Oh,” Alice says, her voice full of pity. She hadn’t meant to say anything, but it slipped out, and now she says it again.
“Bad luck, right?” Bernard says. “Poor me.” He glances down at his computer screen, frowns, pokes at a couple of keys. His movements are swift, decisive.
Alice notices something else about his living hand. A birthmark. A red squiggle, just like she has, and Adam has too.
“Look,” she says, thrusting her hand toward him.
One of the skaters breaks off from the pack. He seems to have noticed Alice’s presence and he rolls noisily half the distance between the two of them. He stops, dismounts, and steps hard on the back of the board, flipping it up, catching it, and continuing on with it resting on his shoulder like a rifle. He is tall, rangy, and he looks about fifteen and uncared-for. His clothes are dirty and would not serve for a cool day in September, much less this cold November night. His hair is long, matted, and he carries an aroma of wind and rain and smoke and bad food. Instinctively, Alice steps back, and she feels her shoulders hunching up and her hands tightening and bending, as if to claw at him if he makes a threatening move.
“Hey, Bernard,” the boy says.
“Hi,” Bernard says, his voice somehow communicating friendliness and respect. “You guys were doing no-heads.”
“More to skating than hotdogging, old friend. So?” He cocks his head toward Alice.
“You’re the best.”
“Nice of you to say so, Bernard. Hey, does your mother know where you are?”
“Maybe.”
“Well,” the boy says, shifting his skateboard from one shoulder to the other, “she probably does. The thing about your moms is she knows everything.” Turning toward Alice, the boy asks: “How old are you?”
“Almost eleven,” Alice says, “and you better not bother me.”
“Eleven?” He sniffs noisily. “No wonder.”
“What?”
“I think you’re one of us, and if you’re only eleven.…” He laughs. “Then you don’t even know it. First you gotta bleed.”
“Shut up, that’s disgusting.”
“You’re still a child,” he says. “Your time will come, and it’s going to be great. Are you close yet?”
“What are you talking about?” Alice nervously looks around, wondering which way she will run if this boy makes her any more afraid.
“Downtown,” he says, tapping the fly of his jeans. “Or uptown,” he adds, slapping his chest. He sees the look on her face. “Don’t be afraid,” the boy says. “I’m just asking. But when it happens, you’ll see, you will definitely understand.” With a complicated set of movements, like a West Point cadet on a parade ground, he moves his skateboard from his shoulder onto the pavement, mounts it, and skates to Alice’s side.
“She’s okay, brother,” Bernard says.
“What are you doing here?” the boy asks, his voice less harsh now. “You running?”
“My dad’s going to come and get me in a minute,” Alice says.
“I’ll bet.”
“Well, he is.”
The boy looks deeply into Alice’s eyes, squinting and frowning, like a lawyer reading a contract’s fine print. “You’re mad afraid of your father.”
“No, I’m not.”
“And your mother too, right?”
“You don’t even know them.”
“So maybe I don’t and maybe I do. But I will tell you one thing about them—they are hairy bastards, right?”
Alice doesn’t have the will to further insist. She lowers her gaze, shakes her head.
“Eli, Nell, Oliver, Djuna.” The boy counts the names off on his fingers. “Chelsea, Kim.” He ends in a shrug. “I’m pretty young to have so many dead friends.”
“I guess.”
“You know what happened to them?”
“How should I know?”
“You could actually guess, if you thought about it.”
But Alice does not want to think about it. She shakes her head.
“Think.”
“I don’t even know you,” Alice manages to say.
“Their fucking parents killed them.”
“Yeah, right.”
“It’s true. Ask Eli, Nell, Oliver, or Djuna. Ask Chelsea. She was six. Ask Kim. We lost him two weeks ago.” The boy reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a wrinkled photograph of a golden-skinned boy with long floppy hair, wearing jeans and a blue-and-white sweatshirt that says I ♥ SLOVENIA.
“Is that him?” Alice says, her voice shaking.
The boy puts the picture back in his pocket and pulls out a cell phone, which he flicks open like a switchblade. He steps back and takes a picture of Alice. “In case you disappear,” he says.
“Can I use your phone?”
“Do you have any food?” he asks.
“I don’t walk around with food.”
“My name’s Richard, but everyone calls me Rodolfo.”
“I’m Alice.”
“Do you have any money, Alice?”
“No.”
“Honest?”
“Honest. Can I use your phone?”
Rodolfo is silent for a few moments. Finally, he pats Alice’s shoulder. “Hungry? Come on, we’ll show you how to get food. You like to hunt?”
He turns toward Bernard. “Go home, Bernard. Your mom’s a nice lady and if she wakes up and sees you’re not there she’s gonna freak out.”
“What about your phone?” Alice says.
“My parents cut off my service a year ago,” Rodolfo says.
Michael gropes for his wristwatch, which he had placed on the coffee table, thinks for a moment that it is somehow ten past six until he turns the watch the correct way and sees it is twenty minutes before one, which makes more s
ense. But still: Who could be ringing the buzzer at this hour?
He decides to do nothing, at least not right away. It could be one of his neighbors making a mistake, or it could be some dopey kids screwing around in the lobby. He sits up, leans against the arm of the sofa, waits. A few moments go by and he is about to make another attempt at sleep when the phone rings. Startled, Michael grabs it immediately.
“I know it is late,” says Rosalie, Xavier’s sister. “But I wait for Xavier and he no here.”
“He’s not there?”
“No. I wait.”
“What the fuck?”
“Yes. Me too, What the fuck?”
The buzzer sounds again, this time in a series of short bursts that seem to convey furiousness on the part of whoever is downstairs.
“This might be him, Rosalie. I’ll talk to you later.”
“I’m calling police,” Rosalie says as he hangs up the phone.
Michael decides to meet fury with fury and when he speaks into the intercom, his voice is ragged with irritation. “What in the hell do you want?” he says through clenched teeth. “Is that you, Xavier? Where’s your key?”
“This is Alexander Twisden, Mr. Medoff. My son is in your apartment, and I have come to take him home.”
Michael cannot immediately rid himself of the idea Adam planted in his mind—that the Twisdens are in Canada, and Adam and Alice have been left alone. “Who is this?” Michael says into the intercom, gruffly, though not quite so aggressively as a moment ago.
“Would you like me to come back with the police?” the voice says.
Rather than answer, Michael buzzes the lobby door open. He quickly climbs into his trousers, pulls a cotton sweater over his undershirt, and jams his feet into his shoes, dispensing with socks. The thought of being seen even remotely undressed in this small apartment with one of his students—one of his boy students, no less—asleep in the next room fills Michael with waves of panic, as if he is descending a staircase in the dark and suddenly finds a step missing.
