The line was always understaffed after midnight, so I pulled a lot of lobster shifts. Within a few weeks, I had developed a little cadre of malcontents who asked for me by name, spreading the word among their morbid friends to call in and try this kid on for size. Certainly, my methods were unorthodox. It was not an advice line. It was not even characterized as crisis counseling, merely intervention. The rest we were supposed to hand off to the pros. I doubt I would have lasted a day on the lines had the supervisor not been narcoleptic.
Merry and Pauly, self-confessed pantheists who for the sake of the electorate attended ecumenical services, urged me to choose a religion. Irreligion was also an option. They were surprised when I selected Hindu, and wondered aloud whether I might not prefer an order with more ascribants in Ho-Ho-Kus, maybe even a congregation. I didn’t budge, so they bought me comic books on Brahma. It wasn’t this incarnation, creator, who interested me. I preferred Siva and Vishnu’s aspects of the triad, especially when the latter, by his title Jagannath, came crushing in his trademark car, radiant and unyielding, steadfast in the doctrine of destruction. Wasn’t subtraction of the subject the surest, shortest path to obliterating all? My ideal heroine was the suttee, the widow who devotedly ascends her husband’s pyre.
Somewhere in here I stopped wearing underwear.
Every day I went home with a more bolstered bad attitude. Although at first I tried to suppress it, I could not hide my malcontentment. I was alternately overtaken by brooding spells and fits of mania. I adopted the game junkie convention of communicating only in grunts.
Merry’s diagnosis, shouted from inside the folks’ shower: “What Eddie needs is a girlfriend.”
“He’ll be happier once school starts and he makes a couple of friends,” Pauly called back, probably from the can. His patronizing tone brewed my mounting mistrust, a malignancy which, bottled up as it was, fermented into fetid contention. If only Merry and Pauly had known what black ruminations I was entertaining about what I really needed, and how each of them were intimately involved!
I was glad when classes began, if for nothing else than another excuse to get out of the house, where I was always on the verge of causing grievous harm to contents or occupants. I enjoyed some modicum of success in physical education, managing to distinguish myself not through team sports but with gymnastics. All of those stunts that Olympians make look so easy on TV? They really were easy for me. The beam was putty beneath my broad base, and I accomplished inversions almost unconsciously. The parallel bars were a stroll around the block: I flung myself on them, did a couple of bent revolutions, and with a flourish got spat out the other end. High jumps, long jumps, and pole vaults found me nonchalantly launching myself into low atmospheric orbit, breaking all the dusty town records. Amidst classmates’ snickering at my you-know-whats, the only way I knew I had done something exceptional was by the dumbfounded expression of the patronizing instructor, who wore a bronze medal over his muscle–T for winning third place in some or another long-ago event.
To my parents’ dismay I found no allies at school. There was nobody for me to identify with in the scout troops, homecoming committees, and skate gangs of suburban Jersey. Even if there had been other delinquents enrolled at Ho-Ho-Kus High, road rats by nature don’t make friends. We do not get in one another’s way. We certainly don’t mess with each other’s undershorts. The only recourse for maintenance of my sanity was to bury myself in books and turn the black musings inward. I devoured the literature of elective death. For show-and-tell in social studies, I came dressed as a Samurai and simulated seppuku, the ancient Japanese art of auto-disembowelment. The gym teacher tried to get me to join the track team, but I was already too immersed in the after-school cynicism of arcade players.
That first marking period I thought I might have been in line for at least one A, but then misfortune struck my peaceable little oasis of the gymnasium. It was a mild day on which the morning sun, shining through arched windows, was split into beams by criss-crossing girders and illuminated long shafts of floating motes. I was sitting on the polished floor, daydreaming, waiting for class to begin, when a warm finger caressed my face and thoughts migrated to Merry. An innocent little reverie: I come home from school, the autumn breeze blowing, and she has baked something good to eat. I sit at the kitchen table, where all is bird song and sunlight and it is somehow not irritating. She bends over me with a steaming slice of banana bread and accidentally, through parting folds of blouse, I catch a glimpse of her bulging, unfettered breasts.
I shook myself out of the idle, but in my baggy yellow sweat pants a sleeping troll had stirred. The teacher was talking to me.
“What?”
“I said it’s your turn, Corrente.” About once a month, each of us was required to lead exercises, the little battery of calisthenics that opened every class. It was a piece of cake: a few windmills, some toe-touches, and ten squat-thrust jumping jacks. This phys ed teacher, a fanatic for warmup regimentation, capped his crusade by going through the roster in alphabetical order and insisting that every student take a turn as leader. Refusal resulted in an automatic F for the quarter, so even those slackers with reputations for the most uncooperative behavior invariably obeyed. I had already pantomimed my way through two such displays and with the jump of each jack been painfully conscious of the chuckled response to my superior sneakers and their resounding smack! Under the current circumstances, however, submission would leave me deeply exposed.
“There must be a mistake,” I said, bending forward and folding my arms across my lap to conceal the convulsing creature. Hadn’t we just finished the alphabet the day before?
“A couple of kids missing today. Both Athanaeleas and Bacchi are absent.”
It was beginning to make awful sense. Never had anyone been so brash as to simply refuse the task and defiantly down a round, resounding zero for the course. Still, however short and simple the humiliation of reluctantly taking a moment in the spotlight, performing a few lackluster stretches, mumbling and-a-one-and-a-twos while the teacher robustly bellowed I can’t hear you! from the back of the gymnasium, leading exercises was still considered a sufficiently sissy-like surrender. A few bullies with reputations to protect calculated ahead, kept track of their assigned day, and made a point of not showing up. The instructor had a habit of simply skipping to the next name, allowing the absentee to thereby absorb the lesser penalty of a no-show.
“It says right here,” the gym teacher, finger in the infallible attendance book, said with finality, “Corrente. Come on. Up and at ‘em.”
I cursed my irksome, newfound name. What good had it done me over the years I hadn’t known it? And now look at the ill it caused! All eyes on me, sitting Indian-style, barely concealing the poker in my pants, there was no way that I, wearing loose sweats and sans underwear, could stand in this state, the admiral at attention.
“Teach, I’ll take the F.”
When the report card came I wanted Pauly to get angry at me. I was prepared to be scolded—wished for it, even. Maybe a little friction would diffuse the familial ambivalence gradually mounting into fury. Of course you could call it hypocrisy. While conspicuously skipping classes and between shifts at suicide intervention, all I did was distract myself with virtual escapes at Adelle’s. I did not care about suburban school, which, although spread out over five days, was almost as good as Shep’s brand of concentrated education, and yet I wanted my old man to take responsibility for my indifference. After all, hadn’t fathers been put here in order to address precisely these kinds of discrepancies? I needed to be chastised, castigated, grounded, damn it! Shep would have made me stay back with the snot-nosed brats and repeat the section until I learned my lesson.
“Grades don’t matter, son,” Pauly said instead. “You’ll graduate. The important thing is PR. Just stay out of trouble: no hookers, no cybertropics, or at least”—he winked conspiratorily—“don’t get caught.”
Pauly thought he was being cool, but I saw through the
illusion to his lame, depraved manipulation of all the teachers, truant officers, and crossing guards of Ho-Ho-Kus. Who was he trying to kid? Pauly was just another pawn in Apple Jack’s game. Although the entire town might be a stage for his petty megalomania, Pauly was no more his own man than the pack masters back in the Beast.
That night I was playing doubles with Some Nerd, whipping the pants off him in a good old bout of Joust, a vintage game with pole-fighting knights mounted on flying ostriches.
“Come on, Eddie, hurry up and die already.”
“You’d still be playing, Some Nerd, if your mother hadn’t huffed so much paint thinner when you were in utero.”
“Oh yeah?” His own head full of inhalants, the twitchy kid delivered the insult that planted the demon seed: “Your old lady’s a ho.”
“What’d you say?”
“You can’t see straight even with those goofy goggles, Eddie. The mayor’s not even your dad.”
I lost my man, pushed that punk to the ground, and fled the arcade, running back across the bridge to Ho-Ho-Kus instead of waiting around to get my ass kicked by a posse of penny pickers.
Worse than Some Nerd’s aspersion was the emotion it conjured within. The net effect advanced a premise I had secretly hypothesized after getting dragged down to Jersey, only never articulated. I wished my detractor was right. It was the inverse of that longing that had pissed me off after Shep’s insult: this time, that I might actually be oblivious to the answer of my parentage. After all, Pauly really irritated me; and Merry: How else could I ever justify having the hots for her? All those years wishing and yet now preferring to be right back where I had begun, a bastard—that was the most disturbing prospect of all.
When I got home, Merry was crouched on the couch and the blue light of the TV shone through her sheer gown, showing me a skin-deep X-ray. Patiently painting her toenails red, she didn’t look up. The doyens of doubt—her petite feet— were out in the open. I couldn’t kick the sticky conviction that they were materially too flimsy to belong to anybody who could have made me. Genetically, some mortar is incontrovertibly maternal—hair fiber, for instance. Science has shown that a boy takes after his mother from head to toe, even if everything in between (“He’s got your eyes/ankles/nose/knees/ mouth/wow!”) flows from the father. I steeled my resolve and repeated what Some Nerd had said. Rather, I paraphrased, revising in the interest of euphemism. “Mom, someone at the arcade mentioned something today. I was wondering: Do you think maybe you and Dad might have adopted the wrong kid?”
“Oh! E!” Merry said, exhaling heavily. In the midst of my stupor of adolescent brooding, I could not be sure when she had started to use this sobriquet, but it was better than the cryptic edh. “It’s just another street urchin jealous of your good fortune. Bring me the cotton balls, will you?”
“I’m sorry, Mom…” I picked up the box of fluff from the coffee table. Merry was bent well over her leg so I had to approach close. “…It’s just that—muf!” Despite having her hands full, Merry managed to lock me in a bosomy embrace, pushing my head into her chest to shut me up. “Boys get jealous when a mother and son are as close as you and me, honey.”
I broke away. “Puh!—okay, whatever you say.”
Taking off my sneakers in the mud room, I noticed something funny. The star was beginning to peel off one of the tongues. However underwhelmed I had been by this pair, I was not used to poor stitching from my cobbler of choice. Upon closer examination, it became evident that someone had tampered with the uppers. There was an alien emblem underneath the star. These weren’t Cons at all, but a reviled brand: Adidas, by Zeus!
“Oh, sure,” Merry confirmed. “Daddy didn’t like any of the Converse kind. But he knew how attached you were to the idea so he had the salesman switch the logo.”
A rage rose up in me nothing short of patricidal. The wallet of no escape, the give-or-take grades, and the spiritsapping shoes—all of these configured themselves into a constellation of manipulation that Pauly was perpetrating on my person. His perversion for taking over a son’s autonomy had been overstimulated from such long dormancy. Now it was not enough that I had adopted his stupid surname. Pauly wanted to depersonalize me completely, to brainwash the individual Eddie and end up with a puppet to do his blowhard bidding and parrot his pathetic legacy.
I grumbled, “I’m going to bed.”
“By the way,” Merry said, “Daddy’s gone to a convention in Atlantic City—it’s just you and me tonight. Sweet dreams, honey.”
I was covered in honey. Or I was honey. This was not offensive to me, not even disagreeable. It was not sticky, or the stickiness was not evident. It was a warm, comfortable medium that made everything formless and delicately kinetic. I moved languorously through a labyrinthine network composed of white walls at gently beveled angles. The feeling was not claustrophobic. I was liquid. My whole golden body flowed. I held an amorphous, dripping hand to my face. It shined with light as if from inside.
A figure approached. It was my mother, or a mother— she did not resemble Merry-as-in-Christmas Corrente. All the same, I recognized her as a mother force, a potent, pungent assailant of affection, an extortionist of epileptic emotion. I was glad to see her, or anyway I was free from ambivalence about my fondness for her, for anyone, for whatever companion I might encounter in this queer environment, alternating now between maze and a vast, desolate plane. After all, I was honey. There was nothing that my mind or my body could do in transgression of any exterior code. She was moving with just as much fluidity as me, although she was of flesh and blood and wearing clothes: pants and a V-neck T-shirt, the collar plunging precipitously past the cleft in her swelling bosom. She reached her arms out and we seemed to be heading towards a slow-motion embrace. Doting devotion had molded her idyllic face into a simpering expression, with an idiot grin reciprocally palpable in my own ambrosial jaw.
She was almost upon me when a change took place. While she maintained a motherly form, her pace faltered and molecular make-up metamorphosed. She became a dense and quivering body of bees. It was beautiful, this apiarian ballet in shapely, maternal form—lovely enough so that for a moment I forgot who I was. But I was honey, and my oblivion evaporated in an instant when that buzzing air force broke ranks and swarmed, ravishing my mellifluent essence. Everything shifted into the frenzied speed of a fast feed. Mother was nowhere to be seen. The insatiable beasts were all over me. They ate my eyes that I could no more see, then no longer did I have me to be. I was not sure whether I was being transformed into or altogether replaced, atom for atom, by wax. I went from fluid to rigid. The bees had at once consumed my substance and entombed my absence in a corporeal comb. Their cocoon left what context might have been me, material or no, immobilized.
The high-pitched, howling drone of the voracious bees’ ravenous feast reverberating away in the dark, desolate bedroom, I awoke all wet, trying to thrash but merely spasming, genuinely immobilized by a tangle of soggy sheets binding my limbs. The cotton clung to my body like the coating on a cough drop. I had squirmed and wrestled for merely a moment when a blinding light burst in from the hall and I gazed up helplessly to see Merry in the doorway. I was mute, but the interval I spent in deliberating what to say was a fatal one. She jumped into my bed and threw her arms around my shoulders. Startled, not yet fully in this dimension, I cowered and let out a shriek.
“It’s okay, Eddie. It was just a bad dream.”
Not yet in control, I whimpered, “How do you know?”
“I was having trouble sleeping when I heard the cutest little squeaking noise.” She turned my head and pushed my nose into her perfumed chest. “It was so sweet! You sounded just like a puppy!”
My face pressed into the loose collar of her nightgown, I was still paralyzed, regaining my senses, when I recognized with some trepidation that those senses were now utterly flooded by her stimuli: frilly convolutions, fragrant hair, rapid breath, heaving bosom.
“I’m all right,” I said. “Please g
o back to bed.” I tasted the salt of a sweat not my own.
“But I can’t sleep. And you, poor baby, your bed is soaked. Come lie in Daddy’s place.”
Stiffening, I said, “I’ll be fine.”
“Don’t you want to tell Mommy about your dream?”
“No!” I said with a start. My desperate tone made her tighten the iron clasp around my neck. I became rigid. Over the course of childhood I had escaped from straitjacket, lobster trap, and handcuffs, but I had no idea how I was going to wrest my way out of this one. “I wasn’t having a nightmare,” I began, not knowing where I was going with this.
She wasn’t listening. “Jeez, if the sheets are this sticky, your pajamas must be sopping wet, too. How did you get so tangled?”
“As a matter of fact, I wasn’t even asleep.”
She wasn’t taking any. “Come on, get yourself out of those clothes.”
“Ma!” I cried. She waited, gazing lovingly down at me with all the patience of a cage. An exterior intelligence, speaking with my voice, seemed to have overtaken me. “The truth is,” I lied, “you’re interrupting a very important Hindu ceremony. The sheets—they’re wet for the ritual.”
“What? Oh! my baby! I’m sorry,” Merry said, loosening a little. “What’s the …what’s the ritual for?” she said with a thrill.
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