Gray Matter

by Gary Braver

  He didn’t care about the boyfriend, who had climbed up the drainpipe onto the porch roof and into her bedroom. Brendan was only interested in Nicole.

  Nicole DaFoe.

  He liked to stretch the syllables like sugar nougat.

  Ni-cole Da-Foe

  DaFee DaFi DaFoe DaFum

  I smell the blood of a Yummy Yum Yum

  Nicole DaFoe.

  Everybody knew her name because it was in the newspapers all the time about how she made the honor roll at Bloomfield—a precious little prep school for rich geeks—how she got this award and that, how she was at the top of her class two years in a row and won first place in the New England science fair, how she was nominated for a Mensa scholarship for her senior year and was going to some fancy genius camp this summer to study biology and astrophysics. But not how she danced naked for her boyfriends. And not what they all said: Nicole DaFoe: the Ice Queen who fucked.

  Next time, he told himself. And up close and personal.

  At this hour most of Hawthorne was asleep. Brendan had slipped out in his grandfather’s truck and driven the fifteen miles to Nicole’s house. From his perch high in an old European beech elm, he watched a blue-white crystalline moon rise above the line of trees and the fancy homes that made up her street. It blazed so brightly that the trees made shadow claws across the lawns.

  But Brendan did not notice. He was now lost in the moon face—so much so that his body had gone rigid with concentration and his mind sat at the edge of a hypnotic trance. So lost that neither the electric chittering of insects nor the pass of an occasional car registered. So lost that the ancient shadows on the white surface appeared to move.

  He had nearly cleared his mind of the assaulting clutter—of verbal and visual noise that gushed out of his memory in phantasmagoric spurts—crazy flash images of meaningless things that would at times rise up in his mind like fuzzy stills, as if he were watching a slide show through gauze—other times they’d come in snippets of animated scenes, like a film of incoherent memory snatches spliced together by some lunatic editor—images of people’s eyes, their faces blurred out—just eyes—and lights and shiny metal, television commercials, green beeping oscilloscope patterns.

  And that Möbius strip of poetry.

  He liked poetry, which stuck to his mind like frost—especially love poetry, not because he loved but because he couldn’t. It was like some alien language he tried to decipher, his own Linear B.

  Maybe it was because he had banged his head earlier that day, but his mind was particularly active—and from someplace he kept seeing flashes of a big smiling Happy Face cartoon.

  It made no sense.

  Nixon.

  He almost had caught it earlier. Nixon.

  Big blue oval face and a sharp almond odor he could not identify—an odor that was distinct and profoundly embedded in his memory.

  Memory.

  That was the problem: He had Kodachrome memory, ASA ten million, and one that didn’t fade. Ever. He had been cursed with a mind that would not let him forget things. Although the Dellsies thought it cool having a waiter with total recall who could tell you the nutritional value of everything in the kitchen and remember what you ordered three weeks ago for lunch, his head was a junk-heap torture chamber. While other people’s recollection was triggered by a song or a familiar face, Brendan’s mind was an instant cascade of words and images, triggered by the slightest stimulus—like the first neutron in a chain reaction in a nuclear explosion. It was horrible, and it led him to avoid movies, music, and television. To keep himself from total dysfunction or madness or suicide—and there were many days he contemplated braiding a noose—he had worked out elaborate strategies. Sometimes he would project the images onto an imaginary book page then turn the page to a blank sheet. Or he would write down words or phrases that just wouldn’t go away—sometimes pages worth, including diagrams and stick drawings of people and things—then burn them. When that didn’t work, he would torch whole books.

  Medication also helped. But when he turned sixteen, he had to quit school because he could not take the reading, not because he couldn’t understand the material—au contraire, the subjects were stupefyingly easy. It was that he couldn’t clear his mind of what he read, and just to release the pressure, he would gush lines of memorized text—like verbal orgasms. Teachers complained. Classmates called him “freak.” They called him “Johnny Mnemonic.” They wanted him to do mind tricks like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man—look at a shuffled pack of cards, then turn them over and recite the order, or spout off the telephone numbers of all the kids in class, or the amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Stupid razzle-dazzle memory stuff. It was easy, but no fun being a one-man carnie sideshow. So he stopped reading and quit school.

  The other day he happened to walk by DellKids, and because the door was ajar he overheard that little Whitman boy, Dylan, complain that he didn’t remember something that he was supposed to. Brendan envied him that. He would kill to turn off his brain.

  But some things remained buried, like his parents. They had died when he was eight, yet he could only recall them in their last years—and nothing from his early childhood—as if there were a blockage. Also, there were things he wished he could selectively summon to the light—like that big smiling Happy Face that sat deep in his memory bank like the proverbial princess’s pea sending little ripples of discomfort up the layers … blue.

  Big blue cartoon head and big bright round eyes and a big floppy nose. Bigger than life.

  Brendan slapped himself in the face.

  Don’t be afraid …

  Dance … Mister …

  Almost. Big eyes. Funny nose. He felt it move closer.

  He slapped himself again.

  Mr. {SOMETHING} makes you happy.

  And again.

  He almost had it. Almost.

  His face stung, but he slapped himself once more … and like some night predator, it nosed its way up out of a dense wormhole toward the light … inching upward ever so cautiously, so close … so close he could almost grasp it … Then suddenly without mercy it pulled back down into the gloom and was gone.

  Brendan let out the breath that had bulbed in his chest and felt his body collapse on itself. He rested his head against the trunk and closed his eyes, feeling spent and chilled from perspiration.

  So close, he could almost see it take form out of the gloom … and hear vague wordless voices … and almost make out a room and faces … hands and lights.

  He banged the back of his head against the tree.

  A bloody membrane away.

  Brendan lit a cigarette and let his mind wander. He thought about how the tars in the smoke were filling the micropores of his lungs with dark goo that might someday spawn cells of carcinoma and how he didn’t really give a damn. How nothing in his life mattered, including his life. How different he was from others. A freak who could recite the most exquisite love poetry ever written, yet who passed through life like a thing made of wood.

  It was crazy, which was how he felt most of the time. Crazy.

  Just before he climbed down, he let his eyes wander across the stars, connecting the dots until he had traced most of the constellations he knew, then reconnected the stars until they formed constellations of his own. The arrow of Sagittarius he stretched into a billion-mile hypodermic needle.

  And Taurus he rounded out into a smiling blue face.

  “Mista Nisha won’t hurt you”.

  The words rose up in his head with such clarity Brendan gasped. Instantly he clamped down on them before they shot away.

  He had them. HE HAD THEM.

  “Mr. Nisha wants to be happy …”

  “ … Don’t be afraid …”

  “Dance with Mr. Nisha,” he said aloud. And he groaned with delight.

  Thirty feet away, Michael Kaminsky also groaned with delight as he shed himself deep inside Nicole.

  She felt the warm ooze fill the condom and kissed him. “Was that good?�
�� she whispered.

  “Ohhhhh, yeah.”

  “Would you give it an A?”

  “A-plus,” he panted. “Did you … you know, enjoy it, too?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Why? Well, because I’m never sure with you. You don’t react much.”

  She didn’t answer, but tapped him on the shoulder to get up. The clock said 12:43. “You’ve got to go, and I’ve got to get up in four hours.”

  “But it’s Saturday.”

  “I know, but my mean old history teacher wants my term paper by noon Monday.”

  “What a prick.”

  She slid her hand down his body and touched him. “I’ll say.” Then she got up and slipped on her nightgown.

  Michael peeled himself off her bed and began to get dressed. “If they ever found out, I’d be hanged at dawn.” He pulled up his shorts then sat at her desk and put on his socks.

  “Well, that won’t happen if you’re real nice,” she said, and put her arms around him. “Michael … ?” she said, glaring up into his eyes in her best pleading look.

  His body slumped. “Come on, Nik, I can’t do that.”

  “You have to, Michael. Just two-hundredths of a point.”

  He sighed. “You’ve got your A, but I can’t do that to Amy, or any other student. I can’t give her a grade lower than she deserves.”

  She squeezed his arms. “I want you to do this for me. Please.” She kept her voice low so her parents wouldn’t hear them.

  “You know these Vietnamese kids. She killed herself on her paper. I’d have to make up stuff to justify a B. It was excellent. So was yours—”

  “Then you’re going to have to make up stuff, because this American kid won’t settle for second place.”

  Michael got up and pulled on his pants. In the scant light from the fish tank, Michael looked around her room. Covering the walls were photos of Nicole as well as her various awards, plaques, citations, blue ribbons. Hanging over a chair was her Mensa T-shirt.

  “It means that much to you.”

  “Yes.”

  She watched Michael move closer to inspect the photographs. There were a dozen of them. One caught his eye: the group shot of the Bloomfield Biology Club on a field trip to Genzyme Corporation. Seven kids were posing in a lab with company biologists in white smocks. At one end was Nicole; at the other end was Amy Tran.

  “Aren’t you taking this a little hard? I mean, you’ve got a wall of awards. You’ll probably get early admission to Harvard and be in med school in four years. What else do you want?”

  Nobody remembers seconds.

  Nicole moved up to him. “Maybe I am,” she whispered. “But you have to do this for me. It means everything.” She pressed herself against his groin.

  “I don’t think Mr. Laurent had this in mind,” he said.

  “Fuck Mr. Laurent.” Her voice was void of inflection.

  The Andrew Dale Laurent Fellowship was a prize that went to a member of the incoming senior class whose sheer determination and effort had “most demonstrated the greatest desire to succeed,” as the write-up said. It was the most prestigious award at Bloomfield Prep, not because of the thousand-dollar prize, but because the benefactors stipulated that it went to the student with the mathematically highest grade-point average going into the senior year. It was the only award based purely on grades. And although the school did not publish class rank, everybody knew that the recipient was the eleventh-grade valedictorian. Number one.

  “Numero uno,” as her father said.

  “Numero uno.”

  “Never settle for second best,” Kingman DaFoe once told her years ago. And he had reminded her ever since: “Who remembers vice presidents? Who remembers silver-medal Olympians? Who remembers Oscar nominees? You’ve got number-one stuff, Nicole, so go for it!”

  Daddy’s words were like mantras. And ever since she had entered Bloomfield ten years ago, they were scored on her soul right down to the DNA level.

  Nicole DaFoe had a grade point of 3.92, and Amy Tran had a 3.93. She knew this because she got Michael to check the transcripts. If Michael gave Amy a grade of B in his U.S. History course, she would drop to 3.91, leaving Nicole in first place. Which meant the Andrew Dale Laurent Fellowship was hers. And everybody would know.

  “Michael, I’m asking you to do this for me.”

  “I’ll think about it,” he said, and headed for the window.

  She pulled him back. “Michael, promise me.”

  “Nicole, I think your obsession with grades is a problem.”

  “Say you’ll do it.”

  “This is bad enough, but now you’re asking me to compromise professional ethics and downgrade another kid so you can get an award.”

  “It’s not just the award.”

  “That’s what bothers me. See you Monday and get that paper in.” He pulled his arm free and slipped out the window.

  In a moment, he was climbing down the drainpipe as he had done before.

  “Fuck your professional ethics,” she whispered. “And fuck you, Mr. Kaminsky.”

  When he was out of sight, she looked back in the room—at the bookcase on the far wall. She walked to it and reached up to the second shelf and moved aside some books to reveal the small wireless video camera. She rewound it, pressed Play, and watched the whole scene from the moment Michael climbed through her window.

  Then she looked at the photos on the wall. The shot of the Biology Club on a field trip. There was Amy Tran with the flat grinning face, the greasy black hair and chipped tooth, the stupid slitted eyes, the breathy simpering voice and ugly ching-chong accent that charmed the teachers who thought it wonderful how she took extra English courses and worked around the clock because she was a poor and underprivileged foreigner.

  Nicole hissed to herself and gouged out Amy’s eyes with a razor knife.

  Nobody remembers seconds.

  15

  “Hey, look at the tiger,” Dylan hooted. On the far side of a small water hole was a long-legged cat pacing back and forth, his eyes fixed someplace in the far distance.

  “That’s not a tiger, it’s a cheetah,” declared Lucinda, pointing to the sign in front of Dylan.

  A couple of the kids giggled at Dylan’s mistake.

  “C-H-E-E-T-A-H,” Lucinda said. “Can’t you read?”

  “I can read,” Dylan said weakly.

  “No you can’t,” Lucinda said. “You can’t read anything.”

  “Besides, tigers have stripes,” said Lucinda’s friend Courtney.

  Lucinda shook her head at him in disgust. “You must be taking stupid pills.”

  Sheila and Rachel were maybe ten feet behind them, but Rachel heard the comment and instantly saw red. From the look on Dylan’s face, he was clearly wounded. Rachel’s body lurched, but she caught herself, exerting every fiber of self-control not to fly at Lucinda and smash her fat little self satisfied face.

  “Lucinda!” Sheila cried and grabbed her daughter by the arm. “I don’t want to hear that kind of talk from you ever!” she growled, wagging her finger in her face. “Do you understand me, young lady? Do you? DO YOU?”

  Lucinda’s face froze in shock at her mother’s reaction.

  “You do not talk to other people that way,” Sheila continued. “I want you to apologize to Dylan right now.” Sheila steered her toward him.

  Rachel half-expected Lucinda to begin crying at the humiliation, but instead she turned her face to Dylan. “Sor-reee,” she sang out.

  Dylan shrugged. “That’s okay.”

  But Sheila wouldn’t let go. She had taken Lucinda’s arm and pulled her aside. “Say it like you mean it,” she snapped.

  “That’s fine,” Rachel said, wanting to stop her from dragging out the incident.

  But Sheila persisted. “Say it properly.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lucinda said in a flat voice.

  Sheila started to insist her daughter affect a tone of remorse, when Rachel cut her off. “We accept your
apology, right?” she asked Dylan.

  “Sure,” he muttered. He was beginning to squirm from the attention. He also wanted to get back to the others enjoying the cheetah. Then in all innocence he added: “I am stupid.”

  “No you’re not,” Rachel said. “You’re not … Don’t even use that word.”

  He and Lucinda moved to the group of kids.

  “I’m really sorry about that,” Sheila said. “Really. That was uncalled for.”

  Rachel nodded and looked away, wishing that Sheila would drop the subject. Her overreaction was making it worse—as if Lucinda had called a paraplegic a “crip.” Because he was young, Dylan would repair. But on a subconscious level he must have absorbed something of the message. How many times must you be told you’re a dummy before you internalize it?

  The rest of the morning passed without other incidents.

  Later, on the bus, Rachel could hear Lucinda challenge the other kids to an impromptu spelling bee, then an arithmetic contest—mostly who could add or subtract numbers in their heads. She was clearly the Dells power kid, always pontificating, always needing to show how clever she was, how much more she knew than the others. And even though most kids were too young to rank each other, Lucinda had already established the mind-set that Dylan was at the bottom of the hierarchy: the one to pick on—the class dope.

  Throughout the ride, Rachel tried to keep up conversation with Sheila, but her mind was aswirl with emotion. By the time the bus arrived back at the Dells, she had put away the anger, resentment, and envy, leaving her with an overwhelming sense of sadness not unlike grief.

  When she got home, Rachel found a voice message from Martin saying he would be getting home late that night and would have dinner in town. So she dropped Dylan off with her sitter who was free and headed to an afternoon exercise class at Kingsbury Club just outside of Hawthorne. It would feel good to throw herself into some mindless technomusic aerobics just to work off the stress.

  The place, a large structure tastefully designed and nestled between an open field and conservation area, was a full-service fitness center with tennis courts, full-length pool, a workout gym with all the latest in exercise equipment. Shortly after she had joined, she convinced Sheila to do the same.