What other way could he think, given more often than not he found himself stood outside the house just like this, at best listening in, not participating, excluded from adult life, left out, and yet not alone, for he imagined others like him, distant children around the house, yet never seen, on the other side of the fences, on the other side of his dreams, ducked down at the bottom of that valley he felt encouraged to cross.
At least his parents were unaware he could hear them if he got close enough to the house, to the boundary marked by an area of the yard where the dirt was paved with thick slabs of rock that couldn't have come from anywhere close, blue marble flecked through with polymer strands of rose, where he liked to make white marks by splashing them from a height with chunks of brick that had crumbled from the side wall.
"Something still isn't right with him," she said.
Something.
"I'm telling you, he never looks me in the eye..."
Outside the house he could turn away, he could walk away, so that her voice faded into the background, under the song of invisible birds with blood red feet, under the whispers of gliding branches, the sound grass made when it swayed in those patches where it had grown into long strands that felt thick like shoebox lids and yet could cut his skin, becoming smaller tufts peeking from the dirt closer to the shadow of the fence.
Away from the house, he could look back over his shoulder and imagine a football spiralling his way, like in the comics, like in the old pile of video tapes, like how his father used to throw for him until a year or so ago, that one they had found ages before, in another house, which had lost its air and its shape, deflated like a good intention. The current house had been concerned not so much with games but with arguments, about him, about them, lines repeating the way he walked in a fixed pattern across the hills, lines he could only listen to for so long.
To avoid them, or to work through them, he'd begun picking up two sticks and sword fighting with himself outside, beating one branch against the other until the skin of the wood flew off and the white was revealed inside, strong and hard, a sudden surprise, as if wood had turned into bone. He'd soon learned that the older the branch, the longer it had been on the ground, the more likely it was to snap, while the newer sticks turned into tooth bristles before they broke, allowing the slick, colourless, marrow within to coat his hands, the sap on his fingers, resilient to his blows.
Lately, he used the sticks as throwing weapons, ever waiting for the next hit against the base of the tree from across the yard, and then the next twist, the rise and dip and the fall. All life in one motion. Sometimes, turning around in this way, battling himself, stick on stick, sap on sap, he would all at once feel those eyes watching him, and he'd turn, and he'd spin, and he'd be sure he'd seen, for just a moment, the darting shadow of another person looking through the fence. And even though today was not one of those days that he had heard those whispering ghosts, he struggled to get the expectation out of his head. He tensed up. Did they only come when he thought of them? Perhaps. But if they were real, if other people like him existed, where did they live if not in the shadows of his vision? Could it be up in the backwoods that came onto the circle of houses, further up the way? On the rooftops of the neighbouring properties where he would swear to have seen them once? All musings, he knew, that were the games of a lonely boy, desperate to invent a world to fight for and/or against.
It had been this way for a long time, and he had become used to it. Just like he had got used to waking up each morning in another boy's room, under sheets that spoke of dreams of space, of sport, of super powers, with another boy's posters on the wall, another boy's clothes in the cupboard, all the things left behind, smelling of mould, not fit to wear, the curtains on their windows falling apart, pots shaped like animals with useless pennies inside, sometimes paper, hopes and dreams, little stars struck on the ceiling, no longer glowing when the sun went down, more likely to drop like roaches to mark the ever-shortening days.
Now as he thought about it, he could still hear his mother from inside, even though he was way down by the big trees with the roots that had begun to climb free of the dirt around the base and reach for him. Perhaps it was just a memory of another day, another verse in the same song that she always seemed to sing, or, at least, that she sang to him, for him, about him, like he still remembered her doing when he was younger and could not go to sleep without light.
"Look at me when I'm talking to you. How many times? Is that so much to ask?"
He focused hard on his tree knot in response, and tried to picture his frustration behind that black disk that hung on the wood. He stared at it. So hard that laser beams might come out of his eyes. Superhuman hard. And he realised it wasn't so bad. He felt like he could stare at this knot all day.
For all time.
But he knew it wasn't the same as looking at a person. Human eyes were different to the void, even if they shared the black centre. For one, the knot lacked the bead of the light in a person's eye, in which was stored a glancing reflection of the rest of the world. And then there was the colour wrapping the black, not just grey like here but often startling shades -- bronze, blue, or green -- impossible to replicate, not to mention the flash of white at the edge.
He shook his head and turned back to face the house, glaring at it, baring his teeth somewhere between rage and a pitiful howl. Wanting to scream at the top of his lungs a sudden realisation that if he knew so well all the details of eyes then he must look at them. He must see them.
What was wrong with him?
The house deflected his vision and his head dropped. His feet stagnant on top of the mud, the shoes that didn't yet fit him, and he was supposed to wear in, with laces stuffed inside the tongue rather than tied, worn through at the front, toe tapping, his default position, gazing at the earth as if he longed to be it, to join it. He turned back to the knot as if going to embrace an old friend. Maybe it wasn't the black part of the eye that made it so hard at all, but the white, that flash of thick, glassy ice before the soft skin, he tried but could not conjure it on top of the tree, surrounding the hole. There was no such thing to practice on, not anything in the house or in the yard he could think to make, not even in winter when he might hope for a black stone to stand on some snow. Even then it wouldn't be so reflective. Even animals lacked that part, and maybe that's why people felt they were somehow different?
He tried to imagine people with solid coloured eyes like owls, or bears, and that was even worse, even harder to hold in his head. He started to feel his lip quiver, water on his vision, an itching that it hurt to rub, that stink of grass all at once over the top of him, that gritty bark from his hands stuck to his face from where he had held the tree for balance when he first tried to look in close. The black knot now seemed more like a mouth than an eye, yawning, calling for him to disappear inside.
He straightened up his back and refocused his efforts, not caring what the hole resembled any more, falling into it, daring it to blink, to swallow him, one and the same. And as he looked he began to see the brown edges fade away, bending under the will of dark. Stepping closer so that it grew in size, hands touching, he found it easy to do. He found it easy to stare into the abyss.
But there was something within.
He could see it now, glinting at the base. He leant forward. The black gave way to brown, became a dead star, a presence, not a space at all. He reached into it, fingers cautious at the edge, travelling through a small pool of wet that tickled his hand, then turning and taking hold. He looked down at one of the toy cars he sometimes found in the yard around the house, a metal frame with red paint that had almost gone, plastic base with small wheels that spun on a bent axle. The windshield was cracked, warm to the touch, plastic. He cleaned it as best he could on his vest and ran it back towards the house.
CHAPTER TWO
Sometimes he dreamed of groups of cars like this, of many cars, of a thing he'd never seen, of traffic: he dreamed of long lines of sunburnt
metal pursuing his eyes as they passed him on the road, of windows that trapped heroic light, of wheels leaving tar trails in their wake, laying down thick lines of rubber all over the land, thick enough to trip. He dreamed of them when he closed his eyes, when he let his head fall on his arms, and his fingers began to kneed the bed, when soap washed over his head, in the sink, in the pan, as water filled his ears, whether outside or in.
Had his father ever seen such a thing as traffic? Real traffic, not the shells they sometimes overtook as they drove lonely on the road. Had he seen it since, before, after? Had he wondered about it too? Had he tried to imagine how it would be to be one of those men of the old road they sometimes talked about, stuck like a sinner in a line of souls waiting to enter hell, driven by an ironic feeling of freedom within a cage, hands gripped to the steering column, thinking they controlled their dream, when at best they nudged it this way and that?
It must have been something to experience that snake tail of cars, winding its way, slithering, looking for prey. The closest he had seen was a long clutch of logs and other rotting paraphernalia drifting along in a dirty river near to where they once stayed, the remnants of an old wooden hut that had collapsed and sped through, like an island of broken hope, or so his parents had said. The result must have been much the same.
Perhaps when all people idled they thought of being in traffic; such a state was not beyond being a subconscious goal, what with the opportunity to sit and think and wait. He took the time to do all three now, so why wouldn't any other person do the same? Why wouldn't they daydream until they forgot thinking, until they forgot waiting, until they shuffled forward.
There wasn't much other choice: this trip had not been pre-announced. At least, his mother stayed back at home and hadn't even waved them off as they set out onto the dismantled roads. The boy put his hands onto the window frame as the car crawled down another empty street that curved like a string tied around a blind man's neck, gliding for several yards as it looped around and down, gathering momentum like a flower girl gathering cut heads, before his father tried to start the engine again, pushing the key all the way and holding it through the splutter before he let it come back for a moment and twisted hard, in what had become a gentle trick, an intricate dance, some sort of fine brocade stitched from memory, which the boy liked to picture as a scene out of the hardboiled fiction they sometimes read together, in which somewhere amongst the pipes the ignition tried to speak to the pistons over the snap snap of a cigarette lighter in a dull bar, low voice, raspy, its dry and dusky liquor breath, coughing polite into the back of the hand, offering another sip, a perfumed whiff, as it gradually, gently, repeatedly seduced a smile, then a spark, then a touch, bringing the whole engine to life, like a dog on a chain suddenly kicked.
When the car was finally running, the boy's father waited; he didn't press the accelerator right away; he let the wheels roll further on their own, all the way down to an adjoining road where he would need horses to get any further, where the tarmac became dark blue, grazed by those many memories of long dead rubber, like a deep ocean of endless depth boiled down. He pushed on the accelerator and leant forward as if to listen to the sound the car made as it half-pulled, half-pushed itself up to the crest at the top of the next road, dropped, and then began to move away from itself.
All the way along the road the boy tried to look for the glimpses of children he knew were in the area, who he sometimes saw when he was alone in the yard. He wondered if they might not hear the car driving off and come to investigate, jealous of him, like natives watching a steam train, catching sight of the boy stuck inside the car, with his father, and no one else.
He turned around in the seat, strained for a moment against the belt that drooped across him having lost its spring, no use in a crash, but nothing to crash into here, aside from the couple of rusting vehicles on the sidewalk near where they turned that looked like they hadn't been motioned for years, not worth taking, not even worth trying to see if there was any fuel. He'd learned only polished cars might have reserves, and these were cars that lived off the streets, in locked garages with large white doors under the house, down a step, that could be opened with the rap of an axe.
"Are you sure we're not moving again?" the boy said.
"We're not moving."
"But are you sure?"
He crossed hands as he turned the wheel to negotiate a gap in a metal barrier to the other side of the road. The engine sputtered. He responded by wiggling the stick without pressing the clutch.
"You'd think I'd know?"
"Swear?"
"Ok, I swear."
He swept his brow to get the hair out of his eyes. He checked the mirror. He often checked the mirror.
"Alright," the boy said.
The car joined a wider highway. Mountains started to encroach the view from out of the distance -- several peaks had hints of snow on top, which made them look like jagged teeth on a distant jaw snapping across the sky. The boy wondered what the world thought of all these roads, of the concrete ribbons that had been drawn tight all across it. Not just here, but most places, from what he had seen, across it, around it, even beneath it, as if these lanes were built to divide it up, pulling tighter and tighter each day for no reason he could see or understand.
"Did you actually think we'd just leave your mother?"
"Well where is she?"
"Back at the house..."
"But why?"
"Because... "
"Where are we going then?"
"That way," he said, pointing out of the window ahead, towards the mountains.
"Where?"
"I just wanted us to get away for a few days, you know? Give her a break. Give us a break. She's been tired of late..."
"Of what?"
"Just tired... It's a chance for us, so that we can just be together too..."
"She didn't want to come?"
He laughed.
"No. It's not like that."
"Oh?"
"I thought it was better if it was just us."
"Why?"
"You'll see."
He glanced across at something out of the right side of the car, but the boy didn't register what it was.
"When I was your age my Dad did this for me, you know, took me out to the country. We made a camp, we fished, we built a lousy fire that just smoked all night and... yeah, we almost froze. But it was good. I loved it, even if I complained all the way there t--"
"I'm not complaining."
"I know, I know. But I did."
He pulled down the driver's side sun visor, even though there was no sun. Then he pushed it up again.
"Can we fish?" the boy said.
"I guess... If we can find a spot... You brought your line?"
The boy shook his head, then he smiled. He glanced over to where scores of abandoned cars made a running tally at the side of the roads.
"Did people really just leave them like that?"
"They must have."
"But why?"
"Ran out of fuel, didn't want to drive anymore? Your guess is as good as mine."
"But you were there, weren't you?"
The boy pushed his face up on the glass. Some of the vehicles were skeletons, burned free of their wheels and seats, no sense of the type of car they once were, as if the metal and the colour that must have turned to smoke were just like skin, just like corpses out to rot. After a few more yards the cars vanished again, peeling away to leave long stretches of scrubland without anything of note, where the road relaxed and widened too, and he could see clean out beyond the brown metal barrier that had become a constant presence, away to hills that once more seemed to glide, allowing his eyes to roll along the top of them like a pair of marbles along a track, bumping over rocks feathered with white, down many gentle valleys that curved like a river turned on its side. Not a house in sight anywhere. And then again, the snap of a fresh collection of cars, this time turned into a circle, stacked up.
"
They'll get cleaned up someday," his father said.
The boy turned back towards him, with a serious look.
"Did Mom leave us?"
"No!" he took his hands off the wheel and held them open. The car began to drift until he grabbed it again and made an attempt at easing it back into the old line. "What makes you say that?"
"I heard what she said about me, the other day."
"The other day?"
"Yeah."
"What did she say?"
"She said there's something wrong with me."
"She did not."
"She did."
"What?"
"That I can't look at people."
"Oh, that."
"It's true, isn't it?"
"...she's just concerned, that's all."
"So it is true?" he turned to face his father, but he continued to stare at the road. Then he shifted in his seat as if he could feel the burn of the glare.
"What?" he said, taking his hands off the wheel again.
"Is it true that I can't look at people?"
"You are looking at me now, aren't you?"
"I know, but... Ah just forget it."
The boy's head dropped and even while staring into his lap he could tell that his father turned away from him, as if it was easier to focus on the mountains than face another person. Maybe that was the real lure of driving.
The Lanyard Page 2
