by Jon Cohen
Kitty turned red with anger and disappointment, and just as quickly, Louis saw relief on her face, on all their faces, because really, wasn’t it enough just to have him out here among us, let’s get used to the miraculous idea of that first, one thing at a time, whoa Nelly. In the interest of self-preservation, because that’s what it really was, let’s do this thing in degrees, who knows what will be unleashed upon us, and all of Waverly, if we get to tinkering with that hat and scarf?
That settled, Louis could concentrate on the mounting pain in his arm. Was it really pain? The flames had given him his definition of pain, and what could compare to the agony of flame, the fundamental force of energy, heat and light, reshaping the soft flesh of his sixteen-year-old face? He tried to move, but the arm stopped him, providing him with another definition of pain.
Carl said, “Hold on, buddy, let me help you up.” Carl caught Louis under his good arm, his left one, and Bert provided support from behind. “Easy now. That’s it, you’re almost there. Okay, that’s it.”
He sat up in the bed of battered tulips. He supported his arm, and looked up at his window, the window from which he had descended. There was no getting back to it, no rolling the film backwards—neighbors running in reverse, broken tulips snapping themselves upright, and he himself flying upward toward the window, ass first, and then a hesitation at the windowsill before he was suddenly gone from view. He turned and looked at his neighbors, one by one. So this is my welcoming committee, as ordinary a group of Earthlings as a monster from outer space could want. Of course, he hadn’t imagined it would go this way, when after Atlas’s death, he began to have thoughts about how he might join the world again. Or if not actually join, at least get out the front door and sniff around a little. If he did do it, and he never really thought he would, he had imagined it would be a matter of increments, step by microscopic step. He might actually get outside, in the full daylight, in a matter of a few short years. And now, here he’d gone and thrown open his window and just hurled himself, because whether he jumped or fell, it was still an act of force. The bonds were broken and he was going down, there could be no further debate, except for a brief second when he was uncertain whether he was plummeting toward the tulips or the tulips were plummeting up toward him. Maybe, he thought in that one second before he hit, maybe the world, the actual solid daylight earth, is tired of waiting, and it’s coming up to the window to meet me, since I haven’t in sixteen years exhibited any inclination to jump down and meet it. But when he hit, he got his sense back, and he understood that at long last he had made his move. Who would have ever thought it possible?
Bev filed away her condolence recipes and spoke softly to Louis. Louis appreciated her consideration, and Carl’s, even if they didn’t know they were being considerate. He needed lowered decibels, muted voices.
She said, “Gracie’s not home, is she, Louis?” That was obvious to them all now. Gracie wasn’t home, or she’d have appeared. One or two of them wondered if having his momma gone might have caused Louis to panic, for who knew the delicate condition of a mind like his, what minor alteration in the regularity of his day might cause him to fling himself from a window? With Gracie gone, their commitment to Louis, whose very existence had been something of a question five minutes earlier, continued to grow.
“She’s out with a friend,” he said. “Gracie’s with Donna Hodges.” He attempted to stand. “If you could just, kind of, help me back inside.”
Carl wouldn’t let Louis get up. “You got to go to the hospital. I can see the break in that arm.”
Hospital. That’s how it would go, that’s how it would go. Louis let out a little moan and closed his eyes. He sank to his knees, still clutching his injured arm, and began to moan louder and sway from side to side. Hospital. He should have known. The weeks in the hospital as they worked on his face, as they struggled with the fire on his skin, igniting it and extinguishing it, hour after hour, as they dressed his skin, and applied ointments, and scraped at his wounds, igniting and extinguishing. And now I go back. I have waited sixteen years, and they have waited too, at the hospital. They knew I would be back, that sooner or later I’d jump, as if the house where I imagined I was safe had actually been smoldering, sixteen years smoldering, and then it burst into flame. Trapped, I ran to the window and jumped, only it’s no good. Louis swayed and moaned, and though they didn’t realize it, all the neighbors began to sway with him, to pick up his rhythms. I jumped but it’s no good, and now Louis opened his eyes wide and saw that the flames had come with him, that he was surrounded by the heat, and the burning orange light.
“Flames!” he shouted.
All the neighbors looked where he looked, and in the mounting madness of Louis falling from the window, Louis in the tulips, Louis speaking to them, in the accumulation of so much Louis where for all that hidden time there had been no Louis, in the agitation of the moment, they gave themselves over to him. Not even Carl was immune. Louis swept over them, his vision became their vision, his flames became their flames.
“Flames,” shouted Louis, pointing to the pavement where Bev and Kitty were standing. Instantly their feet went down, then again and again, stamping at the flames that sprang up from cracks in the sidewalk.
“Flames.” And Louis pointed to the grass, and Bert ran over, and his foot went down, as he tried to smother the orange licks of fire that spread along the green of the front lawn.
“Flames!” Only this time it wasn’t Louis but Francine who shouted, because if there ever was someone waiting to leap into a hysterical episode, it was Francine. She dropped Minky and ran over to Bev and Kitty on the sidewalk, hopping up and down on the little bursts of fire, her eyes ablaze and happy, her open mouth emitting grunts of effort.
Carl leaned over Louis, to shield him, his hand out, fluttering in the air like a butterfly to keep the sparks and embers from landing on Louis. The firefighters whirled and jumped and stamped their feet. Their faces flowed red with sweat and exertion, and they made excited noises because at last they could see that they were winning, not one lick of flame had reached Louis or would now. Louis saw that from beneath Carl where he had cowered, watching in amazement as his neighbors beat back the fire. How was such a thing possible? Fire could be beaten. It had never occurred to him. Why should it have, when the evidence of its casual malevolence was there before him in his dresser mirror every night as he unwrapped himself before bed? And yet, each time his neighbors brought down their feet, the fire withdrew, lacking the energy even to blacken the soles of their shoes. At last their movements slowed to a kind of dance of victory, as they snuffed out the scattered flarings on the lawn.
When it was over, a calm passed through the little group, and they felt full and empty at the same time. Louis saw something move through their eyes, a question forming, and they exchanged looks, because it was beginning to dawn on them that they didn’t quite know what the hell was going on or what exactly they’d just been up to. Francine thought she’d just been holding Minky, yet Minky was over by the dogwood sharpening her claws on its trunk. And Bev and Kitty couldn’t figure out why they were so sweaty or how their underwear had gotten all hiked up and uncomfortable in their crevices. Bert’s legs were about to fall off; he felt like he’d run a mile. And Carl had the notion he’d been shooing away bees, because why else would he be flapping his hand around in the air?
Now they were less afraid of Louis. They’d danced away their panic, passed through the ring of fire which had surrounded him, and sensed that his terrible misfortune was not infectious. What had burned him would not burn them. And Louis, from within the ring, had felt the fire’s heat but had not been scorched. If he’d survived a fire, then surely he could manage a trip to the hospital, where in fact they had not been waiting sixteen years to torture him again. I must remember that, he told himself, and besides, what choice do I have, as the shooting pain in his right arm reminded him.
He thought, If these good neighbors extinguished the fire that th
reatened me, I can rely on them to get me to the hospital. Even Francine, for the moment, seems competent. Besides, the matter was really out of his hands. Bev and Kitty had gone off to fetch Bev’s car, and Bert and Carl were starting to help him down the front walk to the curb, and Francine was doing her arms up and down in that maestro way Louis recalled from the days she used to burst helter-skelter into the hardware store thinking she was being purposeful, which was how she thought of herself at that moment, directing Carl and Bert down the walk and to the curb as if she thought that without her orchestration such a move might not be possible. Louis felt himself being pulled forward, under the influence of the same forces that had hurled him out of the window. The trip down the walk became an extension of that original event, the sense of plummeting, leaving his window, his bedroom, his house of self-confinement, farther and farther behind.
Bev drove up, doing at least forty, a feat since her driveway was only four houses down from the Malones’, and jumped the curb. Who could blame her, they were all excited, because the magnitude of the event had begun to dawn on them. Louis Malone had leapt out of his window and into their arms.
After Carl and Bert, under Francine’s careful direction, got Louis situated between them in the backseat of the Chevy wagon, Francine ran around to the front and shoved in alongside of Kitty and Bev. They were crazy if they thought they were going to leave her behind.
Bev started off, then braked to a lurching stop. “What about Gracie? Shouldn’t one of us stay behind in case she comes home?”
It was the right thing to do, of course, but no one volunteered. Miss going to the hospital? A silence, with everybody starting to feel bad, especially Carl because he was somewhat more morally inclined than the others, though he sure did want to make the trip to the hospital. They sat there squirming, thinking about how it would be for Gracie to come home to a house without Louis—one he had occupied steadily for twenty-four hours of every day for sixteen years, what the awful silence of that might feel like. She’d think he was dead, as in suicide dead, dead in the bathtub, or hanging dead in the stairwell, some just awful kind of dead, and Gracie didn’t deserve that. So just as they were all about to volunteer simultaneously, as a disappointed but dutiful throat-clearing sound began to rise out of everyone in the car, Louis came up with a plan that satisfied them.
“We can drive by Donna Hodges’s and get Gracie. It’s on the way,” he said softly.
Of course. Yes. Perfect. Bev shifted the Chevy into drive, which wasn’t easy, since they were all crammed in there tighter than a rosebud.
“Donna lives on Oakley Crossing, doesn’t she?” said Francine after they’d gone a block.
“Yes,” said Bev. “And she has the most amazing hydrangeas. Isn’t that right, Bert?”
“That’s right,” Bert called from the backseat.
“Of course, it’s not hydrangea season,” said Bev, for the benefit of those passengers who were not as up on their gardening as she and Bert.
Francine thought about Oakley Crossing. She didn’t want to say it, but she hoped everyone knew that the Waverly police station was also at the end of Oakley Crossing, and they’d have to pass it before they took a left on Spring Street. Given the unusual circumstances, she felt that some sort of a police escort was called for. A motorcade was what she really had in mind—Francine Koessler riding in the main car right smack in the middle of a motorcade with flashing red lights. And flags would be good too, little ones flapping on the antennas. Wouldn’t that be something, going through the center of town like that?
Kitty, between Bev and Francine, sneaked looks at the rearview mirror, in which she could just see Louis’s covered face. He was sitting perfectly still, cradling his arm, Carl and Bert on either side of him. Bert rolled his window partway down and a puff of wind blew back a part of Louis’s scarf. Kitty caught a glimpse, and she winced and made a small sound. Louis’s eyes met hers in the rearview mirror. Both of them looked away.
“How you doing there, buddy?” Carl said to him. “How’s that arm doing?”
“Okay,” Louis said in a quiet voice. He could see everyone in the car lean slightly toward him: The women up front tilted their heads back, just a little, and the men next to him tilted theirs sideways. No one wanted to miss what he said.
“Hey Bev, watch the bumps,” Bert said to her. He’d seen Louis’s eyes squint when the car jostled.
“I’m trying to, honey. This isn’t a Mercedes.”
“Weren’t they the ones who had that commercial?” said Francine. “The one with the fellow shaving in the backseat while the chauffeur hit all kinds of potholes?”
“I think it was Chrysler,” said Kitty, looking at Francine. She was glad to look at Francine. She didn’t want to look in the rearview mirror anymore. Her chest still felt fluttery. She needed a cigarette. What was that she saw? Part of his nose? He could breathe through that? She thought she could hear him snuffling behind her, his breath warm and wet on her neck. “Yes,” she said again to Francine, her voice too loud, “definitely Chrysler.”
Everyone in the car nodded, and then Louis, seeing them, nodded too. Carl and Bert, seeing Louis, tacked on a few more nods. It went back and forth that way, nod for nod, until they all felt foolish and loose in the neck and brought the nodding to a close.
“That arm doing okay?” Carl asked again.
“Maybe we could kind of put some sort of sling on it or something,” said Bert. He did a quick scan of the interior of the Chevrolet for something suitable, and then his eyes came to rest on Louis’s scarf, which was, of course, the most suitable potential sling in the car. Bert swallowed once or twice, the spit suddenly thick and tenacious in his throat. “Really, I guess, though, they say you shouldn’t fiddle with an injury before you get to the hospital. Really should let the professionals take care of it. You’re holding on all right, aren’t you, son?”
“I’m fine,” Louis said, everyone in the car tilting toward him again as he spoke, listening hard. There was too much coming at him. He was out among them, among them but not one of them. Their essence swelled his brain against the confining contours of his skull. Kitty’s aqua eyeliner, glittering sharply in the sun. Bev’s hair, sprayed with something unendurably redolent. Carl’s thigh against his own. When Louis looked, though, he saw a thin space, a knife-blade-thin distance between them, so he and Carl weren’t really touching. But Louis’s skin was so alert to the nearness of Carl that his nerve endings jumped the distance, sparked through his pants and across the thin gap, and then moved through Carl’s pants to Carl’s skin, so that in Louis’s mind the shock was more intense than actual touching. A lovely feeling, and dreadful. On his right, Bert swallowed. He could practically hear the thick spit tumbling down Bert’s throat. Francine belched surreptitiously. Louis knew it was Francine; he’d seen her cheeks bulge slightly as she tried to keep it in. But she had to release it, which she did with a deflating hiss between her slightly pursed lips. The sharp fumes wafted back to Louis and landed not in his nostril, of which he had only one, but on his tongue, where her partly digested grilled cheese sandwich and Diet Pepsi lived a second life among Louis’s quivering tastebuds.
Louis’s senses were filled with his five neighbors—and if they were already brimming in the first two minutes of a car ride with five very ordinary citizens of the ordinary town of Waverly, how in God’s name would he survive when they opened the car door and released him into the world? Bev swerved to avoid a boy on a tricycle, and a jolt of pain flashed down Louis’s arm, dominating and clearing his sensory overload. He sucked his breath through his teeth, focused on his pain, and was calm. When Francine belched again, he barely noticed, and when Carl shifted and brushed his thigh, Louis felt a surge, but it passed. For a few blocks he was almost normal, centered by his pain. He was not the recluse, the monster among five normal people. He was one of six neighbors out for a May car ride along the uneventful streets of their small town.
The ride was a little too uneventful
for Francine. She’d been reaching her arm out the window and waving to the crowds as she passed by in the lead car of the motorcade of her imagination. The crowds consisted of two old men gabbing on the corner of Rutledge and Park, a woman pushing a stroller down Yale, the child on the tricycle Bev nearly ran over, and a dubious-looking teenager fingering his ear as he rested against the handle of a lawn mower. The two old men waved back, but that was it for crowd response. The Chevy definitely needed a police escort. She decided to broach the subject.
“You think maybe,” she said to no one in particular, “we should stop by the police station after we pick up Gracie?”
“Whatever for, Francine?” asked Kitty.
“Well, to report the accident,” she said. “Aren’t you supposed to report accidents?”
“Car accidents,” said Bert.
“Oh,” said Francine, her hopes for police motorcades and flags on antennas fading.
“Or suspicious accidents,” said Carl, although he wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that. “And there wasn’t nothing suspicious about this accident, was there?” Carl had intended the question to be rhetorical, but then everybody got to thinking, and a quiet fell over the interior of the car.
Louis looked down at his knees. Of course the accident was suspicious, he knew that better than any of the five witnesses. Would they bypass the hospital now and take him directly to the police station for interrogation? Under the bright lights, asking him a question, then pressing their fat thumbs on his broken arm if he hesitated.…
“So talk to us, buddy. What were you doing climbing in the window of the Malones’ house?”
“I wasn’t climbing in, I was—”
“Don’t give me that bull, you were breaking into that house.”
“That’s not true!”
They tugged at his scarf. “Oh yeah? If you’re not a burglar, whatcha doing hiding your face? What do you say we get a good look at you, creep.” The hands reaching for him…
