THE LAST BOY

by ROBERT H. LIEBERMAN

  Molly could feel his hand shaking in hers. Painful as it was, there was no way around it, she knew. He was going to have to go to school and negotiate social situations with other kids if he wasn’t going to grow up to be a freak. And she needed to hold down a job. It was as simple as that.

  Another set of parents with a child joined them. Then another. Before Molly realized it, they were encircled by a small but smiling crowd. The people all muttering, Daniel, Daniel.

  “You have to excuse us,” she said, and took Daniel over to the school nurse, who was the first stop.

  “Oh, this is the Daniel I’ve heard about,” she said with a big, toothy smile.“Can he really predict weather?”

  “Please,” said Molly, pointing to the papers on the table.

  “Oh, yes, of course,” said the nurse becoming all business. She put on her glasses and reviewed Daniel's vaccination records. “Let's see…he’ll need a polio and…and a triple vaccine booster this year.”

  On another line, the school secretary checked Daniel's birth certificate, recorded Molly's address and phone number, both at home and work. “We need an alternate emergency number.” She kept looking at Daniel very curiously.

  Molly gave Rosie's address and number.

  Standing tight at Molly's side, Daniel seemed to shrivel as the woman took down the pertinent data of his life.

  “Oh, come on now,” Molly tickled him under his arm, trying to get Daniel to lighten up. “Can’t you see how everyone is so happy to see you here?” But he just pulled away, looking pained and worried.

  “I think…” said the school secretary, searching through her files. “Yes, you’ll need to go to room 112. Just down the corridor and to the left. Mrs. Scocroft will be doing the interview and evaluation.”

  “I gotta take a pee, bad!” said Daniel as they walked down the corridor.

  There was a men's room and a women's, and Molly didn’t know which to choose. She didn’t dare let him go unescorted—not the strange way he was acting just now.

  “In here,” she said, holding the door for him.

  “But it says ‘Women.’ I can’t!”

  “It's okay.” One of the mothers passed around her and went into the rest room.“Come on. It's fine.”

  She took him into a stall and stood behind him as he unzipped his fly and fished out his little thing. In the next stall the woman was letting out a torrential gush, but Daniel, poised over the bowl, was so tense he couldn’t let go.

  “Can’t we go home,” he pleaded, turning around.

  “Pee already,” she said as the neighboring toilet flushed with a loud whoosh.

  When they got to the classroom, Mrs. Scocroft was waiting for them. Her face lit up when she recognized the new pupil.

  “Oh, you’re that Danny!” she exclaimed. She was much younger than Molly, had her hair tied in a pony tail, and appeared so kind and warm that Molly fervently hoped she would be Daniel's teacher.

  A father with a cute little girl in a frilly dress came into the room and stood waiting behind them. When Daniel turned, the man winked and waved. He bent down, whispered something to his daughter, and the little girl kept straining to see Daniel, who kept shielding himself in front of Molly.

  “We need to get a sense of his development for placement purposes,” explained Mrs. Scocroft. Then she turned to Daniel and smiled at him kindly.“Well now, Danny…”

  “Daniel,” he corrected, his head still down.

  “Oh, excuse me. ‘Daniel.’ Yes, that's much nicer. It's more grownup, isn’t it?”

  Daniel finally looked up at her, and Molly breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Now, Daniel, do you know your birth date?”

  “December fourteenth.”

  “Excellent! And do you know where you live?”

  Of course Daniel knew. He lived in a trailer.

  “Yes, but where is the trailer?”

  “On the planet Earth.”

  The teacher broke out in laughter.“That's very funny,” she said. “Do you know any other funny jokes?”

  Daniel didn’t know what she meant.

  “Do you like playing with other children?” asked the woman hopefully.

  “Playing? You mean like games?”

  “Well, yes…”

  “No,” responded Daniel flatly. “Not really.”

  Two other prospective kindergartners accompanied by their parents entered the room and got in line to wait their turn, and Molly could feel Daniel tightening. The cute little girl who stood behind Daniel kept waving to him, trying to catch his eye, but he would have none of it. Molly worried that if he kept this up, they would end by placing him in a group of developmentally stunted kids.

  “Danny's very smart, really,” Molly turned back to the teacher. “He's just a little shy. But he's very interested in books. All kinds of books,” she went on hastily.

  “I hear Daniel knows a lot about weather.”

  “Yes. But he's especially interested in animals. And plants. Anything to do with nature. Right, Danny?” She tugged his hand, and he nodded obediently.

  “Well,” responded the teacher, still trying to draw Daniel in. “Would you like to learn how to really read those books? You know, by the time Christmas comes you’ll know all the letters, and maybe even how to read and write some words. Now how does that sound?”

  The books became all-consuming. It was hard going, but Tripoli sat at his kitchen table working his way from one volume to the next, trying to garner some sense of it in language he was comfortable with. Though Tripoli was able to decipher the sections that were in relatively modern English, he could at best guess at the contents of those that looked to be in Middle or Old English.

  Some of the volumes, he found, dealt primarily with observations and calculation of natural phenomena: how weather patterns coalesced and swirled over the globe, predictions for the chaotic behavior of frontal systems, of wind speed and cloud cover and rain fall. There were diagrams of what looked like the jet stream with arrows indicating its seasonal movements. Tripoli had no idea what the equations and diagrams implied, but it was clear that some kind of calculus was being employed to solve sophisticated problems that modern scientists with their computer models had only begun to touch.

  In one section, Tripoli found detailed accounts of how various creatures migrated, how their senses were keyed into the angle of the sun, how pigeons utilized the magnetic field of the Earth to navigate their way home, how bees performed dances to inform the other workers in their colonies about the location of a new source of nectar. And all this, he realized enthralled, had already been discovered long before the establishment of modern science. Most intriguing to Tripoli were the careful tabulations marking the onset and end of the growing seasons. They were keyed to the blossoming of specific flowers and these entries were closely correlated with migration patterns of birds.

  For countless centuries, at least two thousand years, the authors had been tracking fluctuations in the climate. There were variations in temperature, up and down, periods of cooling and warming observed around the globe. Though scientists could no doubt observe the end result today, what they lacked was the baseline. And the prehistory was all here in the books, the data that science could at best only infer from tree rings or signs buried in the rocks and soil.

  But it was the relatively recent entries that riveted Tripoli's attention. Apparently made in the early twentieth century, the authors had noted that global temperatures were steadily rising. What astounded Tripoli was that at this early date the authors had the foresight to note that, as a result of continuing human activity, temperatures in the future were going to rise at an accelerating rate. And that the regularity in the patterns of rainfall would begin to oscillate with ever-increasing amplitude. They were calling for droughts where there had been an abundance of water. Floods in what had formerly been deserts. If things were allowed to continue, not only would the quality of life suffer, but there would be severe dislocations: crop failur
es and famines with, inevitably, political instability and war, vast migrations of desperate people in search of habitat and food.

  And not only would the planet become progressively less capable of sustaining any significant human population, but countless life forms would be rapidly extinguished as weed species crowded them out of their ecological niches. Catastrophe could be averted, noted the authors, only if humans drastically changed the patterns of their lives. From what Tripoli could discern, it all appeared to revolve around energy, its generation and storage and use. And buried in these arcane books lay the very prescriptions for survival—if one could decipher them.

  The other volumes dealt with humanistic issues, about how and why people behaved as they did when gathered in groups. There was a model proposed for “a just society,” a democratic structure in which each individual's unique talents were to be identified and recognized. Under the plan, no adult was to be underutilized or mismatched in vocation; the promise of each child was to be given the full opportunity to develop and flourish.

  Tripoli's reading kept him leaping back and forth both temporally and across the span of books scattered on his table. In the late afternoon, as the sun was throwing long shadows across his kitchen, he discovered a huge collection of stories about the encounters its authors had had with other people, living creatures, and cosmic phenomena. Taken together, these stories seemed almost like a handbook for living with the real rules of life given by example—not the sort of thing, he mused, that he had been taught in school.

  Tripoli was so engrossed that he rarely left the table. He forgot to eat, hardly slept. Coffee became his constant companion, and the only times he got up were when his bladder was so painfully full he could no longer concentrate.

  The books, taken together, were interconnected, linked almost like a complex piece of software. There were branches and bifurcations that led Tripoli from one volume to the next, then looped back again through a third, as if the numerous writers had been holding a dialogue among themselves stretching across a wide span of time. In one of the later tomes, Tripoli was particularly fascinated to discover that the authors had developed indices that could be employed to measure the state of a civilization, to determine if society was healthy, in decline, or perhaps even dead. The indicators keyed in on everything from the accumulation of refuse to declines in everyday civility. They looked at how a society treated its most vulnerable citizens; examined a culture's architecture, gauging its scale in relation to humans and the surrounding natural world. One of the primary indicators, however, was a measure of the ability of a society's citizens to listen to each other and truly hear what was being said. It evaluated by gradation the ability of individuals to stand motionless for prolonged periods, receptive to their surroundings.

  When Tripoli finally took a long-needed break, he stepped out into his yard, then made his way toward the barn. The night was cool and overcast; a heavy fog had settled around his house obscuring every vestige of light. He stood perfectly still and stared blankly out into the night until, suddenly, he was struck by something he had never noticed before. Even here in Newfield, in the country miles from the city, there was a constant, almost subsonic rumble. He could feel it through the soles of his feet. It was the massive weight of trucks on the move, machines drumming, billions of people shod in hard shoes rushing about, their feet pounding the earth.

  When the phone rang in the morning, Tripoli ignored it. He turned from the book he was reading and stood at the kitchen window, watching the lambs as they frolicked around the enclosure, their tails twiddling contentedly. He was still thinking about his discussion with the old priest. The man, who seemed as much a philosopher as a cleric, had found through his own studies that most holy men became enlightened through a series of traumatic events, the experiences culminating in a state of extreme tension that ultimately transformed them.

  “Some people go insane,” the priest had explained,“some people become prophets…and some people can’t tell the difference.” Many of them, when called, were reluctant to go forth. Many were of ordinary lineage, born into the most modest of circumstances.

  Tripoli's phone kept ringing. He shifted his gaze back into the kitchen, his eyes falling on the books interleaved with slips of paper serving as bookmarks. The table was littered with crumbs, pieces of dried toast, and piles of hand-scribbled notes. He had gone as far as he could, he realized, absorbed as much as he could, but now he had hit the wall of incomprehension. Although with his limited powers he had barely scratched the surface, nevertheless, the message within these works was, now abundantly clear: when humanity's deafness to simple common sense is allowed to reign, the implications for the world can only be catastrophic.

  The telephone rang on incessantly.

  “All right, all right already,” he said picking it up.

  “Is this Lou Tripoli?” inquired a woman's voice.

  It took him but an instant to recognize it.

  “Rosie?”Tripoli's voice registered his surprise.

  “Look, I’m sorry to call you at home like this…”

  As with most of the cops at IPD, Tripoli's number was unlisted and he was surprised that Rosie had found it.

  “When she wasn’t looking this morning, I went through Molly's address book,” Rosie confessed.“I mean I wouldn’t do this normally, but—well, I’m getting kind of desperate. If she puts Daniel in school, he’ll be gone again. But this time it’ll be for good. I can just feel it.” She told him about the walk they had taken along the old railroad beds. “Daniel knows his way around and could be miles away before anybody knows it. I tried to tell Molly but she won’t listen to me. But if Daniel takes off into the woods…this time he has nowhere to go. He's just a little boy. And he’ll starve!”

  “Okay, what do you propose?” he asked.

  “Yeah! That's the word.” Rosie gave a high, nervous laugh.

  “Huh?”

  “Propose.”

  Tired as he was, Tripoli had to laugh, too.

  “I’m serious,” Rosie went on.“You live out in the country. You love each other. And Daniel's really crazy about you—he keeps telling me about you. And your farm. He loves you. I mean, what more do you need?”

  “And you think I haven’t tried?”

  “So try again,” she urged. “If Daniel runs off…I keep thinking of what it’ll do to Molly. What it might do to all of us.”

  “Oh?”

  “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure things out. You’ve got those books.”

  “What?” he asked astounded.“How did you know?”

  “Curly Donahue's sister is married to Ed's first cousin. Small town, huh?” Rosie laughed.

  Tripoli was speechless. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Small town, busy tongues. So, what else do you know?”

  “I’ve known Daniel since the day he was born. I’ve been spending time with him. Just the two of us alone. And I can tell you he's been changed. Spiritually changed.”

  “But Molly doesn’t see it.”

  “Of course she sees it! It's just that she's in complete denial. If we can protect Daniel, keep him here safe, with us, one day that boy is going to change the world.”

  Rosie seemed to have gained an insight that he had reached only by studying the books. Reluctantly, Tripoli finally told her about all he had discovered. Everything. About the young Matthew. His teacher in Florida. About the ancient books and their implications of an impending calamity.

  “My God, of course. The weather is going crazy. I keep seeing things on television. There are these terrible fires. And today I heard how people's crops in South Africa are being devoured by these clouds of insects. I keep thinking, well it's far away and it doesn’t really affect me. But it does and it will. And not just me but my kids. Things may be getting out of control, but at least we can do something here.”

  “Like what? Kidnap the boy?”

  “I was thinking. You’re a cop.”

  “Oh, am I sup
posed to arrest Molly?”

  “No, no! Listen to me. You post a guard. Somebody sits there. Right in the class with him. Doesn’t take his eyes off Daniel—you know that he's going to take off the first minute somebody turns their back.”

  “But—”

  “You’ve got cops, don’t you? A whole station house full of them. You could rotate. Everybody takes a turn. Once every two weeks.”

  Tripoli imagined the Chief going for the idea.“Rosie, dear,” he sighed indulgently.“Rosie—”

  “I’m just talking about buying a little time. Till we can talk some sense into Molly. Look, this weekend is Labor Day. Then on Tuesday he starts school. Three days. That's not much time. We’ve got to take some action. And do it now!”

  “Look, I gotta do something,” said Rosie early Sunday morning as she bolted out the door, her hair flying in the wind. Outside it was so hot and dry, it felt as if she were in the desert.

  “Hey, you can’t just march up there!” Ed cried after her. But Rosie was already out of earshot.

  She caught Mary Tilley, the South Hill principal, just as she was heading off to church. Mrs. Tilley was backing her big Lincoln out of the driveway when she spotted Rosie rushing toward her car.

  “I’m sorry to bother you like this,” said Rosie.“But if you could just give me a minute…” She hung onto to the edge of Mrs. Tilley's car and caught her breath.“It's about one of your new first graders.”

  Mrs. Tilley turned off the motor.

  “It's Daniel. Daniel Driscoll.”

  “Oh, yes.” Mrs. Tilley smiled. She immediately knew who the boy was. She had, of course, heard about the kidnapping and his subsequent return and a bit about the fuss people in town were making over the child. But it was quickly obvious to Rosie that she hadn’t the faintest notion about how extraordinary Daniel really was. Leaning in through the open window, Rosie hurriedly tried to explain. “…and he's tuned in—in touch with life like no other human being. And he needs to be out in nature. He's not the kind of boy that you could keep confined in a classroom.”