The Freak Observer

by Blythe Woolston

  Jack shows me how he makes his ducks, and I make a little one too. Mine doesn’t really look like a duck, not the way Jack’s clay birds do. I can’t figure out exactly what it is that makes the difference. It might be the way he squishes the clay into the shape of the head. Maybe it is the way he licks his thumb and uses his own spit to smooth out the places that are lumpy looking. It might be the way he pokes a pencil in to make the eyes—and then the new duck is suddenly looking out at the world. Jack is the master of clay ducks. That is evident.

  I have to wait to learn more about raku ducks. It’s a process. I have finished step one. I have a gray, sort of duck-looking gob of damp clay to prove it.

  On the way out of the studio, Arno pulls a brick out of one of the controlled infernos.

  “Look in,” says Arno, “Look in until you can see something.”

  I’m looking, but I don’t know what, if anything, I’m seeing besides fire and heat.

  Then Arno looks in through the little brick-sized hole into the fire, then Jack.

  “Not at cone 10 yet,” says Jack.

  “Nope,” says Arno.

  I look again, but I still don’t know what I’m supposed to see—or not see, since it isn’t yet, whatever it is.

  Arno slides the brick back into the hole.

  “I’ll be back when you tear down the door,” says Jack.

  . . .

  I walk home really dirty and tired. I’m pretty sure I can sleep without dreams.

  I’m almost right.

  I take a shower and I sleep hard, so hard I never wake up when Mom and Little Harold come home, even though they probably turned on the light.

  . . .

  I know I am dreaming. I came to see Arno in the kiln yard. There are lots of kilns. I think it is snowing, but when I hold out my hand, the flakes don’t melt. It is ashes, falling like snow. I look out the kiln-yard gate toward the river, toward the mountains. The ash storm is happening there too. It is happening everywhere.

  “I came to see the ducks,” I say to Arno.

  He shakes his head, but it is just to shake the ashes off his dreads. The ash snow is falling really fast. I can hear a snowplow out there somewhere.

  “Yah, mon, the ducks,” says Arno. He reaches out and pulls a brick out of the door on a kiln. Then he reaches his whole arm inside the fire. When he pulls it out, he is holding a duck, but the meat is all burned off his hand and his arm. He holds the duck, and it’s glowing like lava, red hot. Then he throws it into the sky.

  Suddenly, the sky is clear. It’s night and the ash storm clouds are gone. I can see the Milky Way. I can see the Pleiades, but they are very bright, brighter than Aldebaran, the eye of the Bull. Then I see the duck; it is still red hot; it is flying away into the sky.

  “When the ducks get tired, they turn into meteors—or real ducks, sometimes they turn into real ducks. Mostly, they burn up on reentry,” says Arno, but it isn’t Arno. It’s The Bony Guy.

  “Why don’t you just leave me the fuck alone?”

  “If I go away, there won’t be any more shooting stars.”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  “And shooting stars.”

  When I wake up, I’m not really scared. Disturbed, yes. Angry, a little. But mostly I want to remember what I saw— how big and bright the stars were and how the little fire duck flew away on really fast wings, the way real ducks fly.

  I did not, ever, expect to see Corey’s mom sitting at our kitchen table talking to my mom.

  They are drinking coffee and flipping through some papers.

  Mom looks up where I’m standing with the door wide open.

  “Hi, Honey, shut the door.” Mom is smiling.

  The only reason I can come up with for this visit is that Corey’s mom is here sharing news about pool-table sex pics. This is the day that the other boot drops and the shit hits the fan. But Mom’s emotional response to discovering that I’m a porn star is not what I expected.

  “Hi, Loa,” Corey’s mom is all cheerful and nice too.

  I have no idea what is going on.

  “Ms. Thompson . . .”

  “Kate,” interrupts Corey’s mom.

  “Kate. Kate is helping us with some options for the land.”

  “If you can talk your dad into selling the whole thing in one big piece, I think I can get him a much better price. I know people who would pay a fortune for a place like that.” Then she turns to Mom and says, “Any questions? You can always call me anytime.”

  “Everything seems pretty clear,” says Mom, “You’ve been a great help, Kate.”

  “Loa,” Kate swivels around to look at me again, “I have something for you in the car. It’s something from Corey.”

  So I follow her out to the car. We are Prius people, I see. I’m glad we aren’t Ram truck people, but I don’t think we are Prius people. Maybe she needs another vehicle— a beat-up pickup with an ignition problem, maybe—for visits to “clients” like us.

  “Here you go. Corey kept reminding me that you were supposed to get this, but . . . you know how it is,” Kate, also known as Corey’s mom, hands me a cardboard box with the top taped shut.

  “That’s his e-mail address on the Post-it,” she points to the little yellow scrap on top, “He’d love to hear from you, Loa.”

  Oh-yeh-sure-ya-betcha.

  “He’s been sending me postcards. ‘Wish you were here,’” I say. I’m sure he’d love to get a message from me . . .

  Corey!!!! Wish YOU were HERE. I want to strangle you with my bare hands and scratch out your entrails with my toenails and replace them with biting weasels. LOL, LOVE, LOA

  “Postcards? ‘Wish you were here.’ Isn’t that funny and sweet? He’s doing so much better,” Kate says. She takes a deep cleansing breath and shakes her hair, “He loves that school. They do a lot of traveling. He thinks he might want to go into international contract law. It costs a fortune, that school, but it’s worth it. He just didn’t belong here. He hated all this,” she waves her hand. The gesture covers the town, the mountains, the wide gray sky, and me. . . . She may not have meant it, but she made me part of all this that Corey hated.

  “Well, buh-bye, sweetie. Make sure you write to Corey. And remind your dad about what I said. An undivided acreage like that—I have great clients just waiting for something like that to come on the market.”

  “Thanks,” I say. Thanks for the mystery box. Thanks for reminding me that I’m not what Corey wanted. Finally, thanks, but no thanks, as far as pressuring my dad to sell his home. It’s not my decision, but I think it might kill him if he traded himself for money.

  When I get back inside, my mom is still sitting at the kitchen table, but she has gone back to her homework.

  “Can you explain what this means?” she says as she jabs at an open book with a fat yellow highlighter.

  “Maybe,” I say. Then I turn to put the box into my closet.

  “What is that? In the box?”

  “I don’t know. Debate stuff from last year, probably.”

  “Well, come and look at this. It makes no sense.”

  When I sit down beside her at the table, she smiles and pushes the book over near me.

  “It’s good to have a live-in tutor,” says Mom.

  It’s nice to see her happy. And she is totally right, that book makes almost no sense. Between the two of us, though, we will figure it out.

  . . .

  Mom and Little Harold are at the campus gym. Most days, the two of them make a trip to go swimming or run laps. Mom’s not used to sitting around all day, and an hour or so of exercise calms my little brother down a bit too. It sure reduces the noise he makes when he gallops around in the apartment. I like to think that the neighbors downstairs appreciate the effort.

  Since they are gone, I open the big box that Corey’s mom brought into my life.

  There is a book wrapped in newspaper with “Happy Birthday! I know you’ll love this!” scrawled across it in black marker. When I tear a
way the newspaper, I recognize the cover. Corey has given me a copy of Wisconsin Death Trip.

  The book isn’t quite as I remember it. There is a baby in a coffin in a long white gown, but there is also a baby with a bottle. That one is also wearing a long white gown, but it is alive. So the book isn’t full of dead babies and outlaws. There are plenty of photos where everyone is alive: four young people are sitting in a hammock, a woman with a snake in each hand and another wrapped around her shoulders, a family and their dog are sitting in front of a house. All absolutely alive.

  Then I notice that Corey hadn’t given me a copy of the book I saw in the library; he’s given me the library’s copy. He checked it out before he left for Europe, and it has been sitting in a cardboard box since then. It’s about a year overdue. Assuming he checked it out and didn’t just figure out some charming way to steal it.

  Next, there is a little tiny bundle. It’s a spanking-new MP3 player complete with charger. When I pop in the buds, the song is about the girl on the stairs who jumps because someone says they will catch her, but they don’t. It was the first song I ever heard with Corey, but that’s just a coincidence. The player is on random shuffle. It isn’t like Corey knew what song I was going to hear.

  The box is mostly full of folded clothes: my killer-bitch debate ensemble, complete with the tall black boots, and a couple of plain white T-shirts I used to sleep in when I spent the night, a single pink and black striped sock. One of the boots has a bottle of pear vodka stuffed into it.

  So that’s it. Here are my lovely parting gifts, the stuff Corey wants me to have, the stuff he packed up especially for me before he left me behind. I put everything but the book back in the box. Then I push the box back into the corner of my closet by the front door.

  . . .

  It’s time to take Wisconsin Death Trip back to the library.

  What does a person say when they return a book that’s a year overdue?

  I have decided to say that I found it in the closet. Maybe the previous tenant had overlooked it when he went away. That’s the story I plan to use.

  As it turns out, I don’t have to tell anybody anything. The guy at the circulation desk just takes it and plops it on a pile of books on one of the desks. He smiles and says thanks. Transaction over. No need to deploy my well-planned, convincing lie. Life is simpler than I give it credit for being.

  . . .

  Since I’m in the library anyway, I read. I read about Japanese pottery. I read about careers in astrophysics. I read part of a book about dreaming and the brain.

  There is a term for knowing you are dreaming while you are doing it: lucid dreaming. Some psychologists try to train people to do it as a treatment for nightmares. The method is to think about how to alter the dream before sleeping. The point is to imagine a “triumphant ending” to the dream story. The conclusion of the investigation is unclear. Maybe lucid dreaming reduces nightmares; maybe it doesn’t.

  Assuming that I could learn to be a lucid dreamer and assuming that I could control my dreams, it might be the silver bullet that puts an end to The Bony Guy. What would a triumphant ending be? I stay and win the cake in the cakewalk, and I take it home and share it with Asta? Is that a happy ending? It doesn’t feel like one. What exactly is a better ending for the dream where Dad is dead? Does he burst out of the papier-mâché shell—ta-dah!—followed by Mom’s chickens, alive and whole and not made into soup? And what about the shooting stars and innocent ducks? If I get rid of The Bony Guy, do I lose them too?

  There is a little box on the kitchen table. It is addressed to me. It is from Europe, and I don’t want to open it. I suppose I should trust that Homeland Security would have caught it if it were a bomb. It doesn’t buzz, so it isn’t killer bees.

  The phone in the kitchen rings.

  “Aloha, Loa. Hey, you better not go to the University of Hawaii, because that would be really irritating. Aloha, Loa. Aloha, Loa.”

  “Jack, is that you?”

  “Who else?”

  “Well, lots of people use phones, Jack. For example my mother usually answers this one. She would find your behavior confusing, and she would probably hang up right away.”

  “Good to know, but you really shouldn’t go to Hawaii. Unless you use your middle name. Do you have a middle name?”

  “It’s Elizabeth, Jack, my name is Loa Elizabeth.”

  “That would work. It isn’t as cool as Loa. Aloha, Elizabeth. Maybe it wouldn’t work. Does your mom call you by both names when you screw up? Because Aloha Elizabeth could make you feel like you screwed up.”

  “Jack, did you have some reason for calling me? Other than warning me about Hawaii?”

  “Want to see a movie? Want to see Mah Nakorn? It’s playing at the campus theater.”

  “Monocorn? Is that like a unicorn?”

  “No. Mah Nakorn. Two words, with a K. It’s from Thailand. In English the title is Citizen Dog.”

  “I don’t know. . . .”

  “Well, it has amputation, nosepicking, and a zombie taxi driver—it’s a romantic comedy.”

  “OK, Jack. OK.”

  . . .

  It is a good movie, actually.

  . . .

  Little Harold has opened the box. I had left it on the table, in plain sight. It’s not like anyone told him not to open it.

  There is some crumpled up bubble wrap beside the open box.

  I can hear Little Harold in his room.

  He is sitting on the floor playing. He probably doesn’t admit to his friends that he still plays with his action figures and Happy Meal toys, but he does. He is just sitting on the floor playing.

  He looks up at me in the doorway.

  “Hi Loa, look what you got. It’s cool. What is it? I was just playing with it a little bit.” He holds it out to me.

  “It’s OK. I’m not mad. You shouldn’t open other people’s mail though, alright?” I say.

  The thing is surprisingly heavy. And weird.

  It is solid, like a sculpture, not an action figure. It looks like a hunchback bird with a funnel on its head. It has long floppy ears or wings drooping almost down to the ground. It is holding something, a letter probably, speared on its twisty beak.

  “What is it?” asks Little Harold.

  “I don’t know. What do you think it is? Was there anything else in the box?”

  “Just this,” he says and handed me a folded-up postcard. “It’s cool. That thing. Can I play with it again sometime?”

  “Sometime, maybe, after I look at it.”

  “Cool,” he says, and then he resumes the story in progress with the rest of the action figures and stuff.

  . . .

  I take the little figure and the postcard with me to the library. I typed in “jheronimus bosch,” like it said on the bottom of the bird. The library catalog likes “Hieronymus Bosch” better and burps up twenty titles to consider.

  I learn a few things about my weird bird. He appears in a painting, in the left panel of The Temptation of Saint Anthony made by Hieronymus/Jheronimus Bosch about 1550. He is wearing skates. Nobody knows for sure what the word on the letter in his beak means. And as far as weird goes, a hunchback bird on ice skates is not in the Hieronymus Bosch top ten. A walking stomach, for example, with what looks like Cubone the lonely Pokémon’s ancestor riding on its back playing a harp: that’s weird. A guy with feet, wings, tentacles, and hands wearing glasses. That’s weird.

  When I open some of the art history books, I feel like I’m reading one of those dumb dream-symbol dictionaries. Ice skates are equal to folly. Funnels are equal to the deceits of science.

  It just bugs me, the idea that there is a simple answer. Maybe that’s because I want simple answers. I want to know why Corey sent me this thing. I want to know if Esther knew the truck was coming. I want to know if the little lights that were Asta blinked out one at a time like stars behind a moving cloud or if they all went dark like twinkle lights as soon as one failed. I want to know she wasn’t
a lonely little chick brain floating without a shell.

  But I don’t know shit.

  . . .

  When I get home, I find messages for me on the table: one of those green sticky notes Mom loves to leave around and an envelope from my old high school addressed to me.

  The green sticky note says, “Your friend Jack called, and your duck is ready to cook. Be at the studio tonight around seven. I hope you know what that means. Little Harold and I are swimming. Make dinner, please, we are going to be starving when we get home. Little Harold says not to cook duck—or chicken, either. Love, Mom.”

  I open the envelope and unfold the sheet of paper inside.

  It is my extra-credit essay.

  It doesn’t have a score on it, but there is a note in Mr. Banacek’s square-printed letters, just like he used on the whiteboard in class.

  Loa, Sometimes the theory side of physics seems a little loony to me. You were an outstanding student and a pleasure to have in class. I have a lot of confidence in you. If you ever need a letter of recommendation, let me know. T. Banacek

  . . .

  “So what do you know about Hieronymus Bosch?” I’m helping Arno build a kiln door while I wait for Jack.

  “I make pots. I don’t study history,” Arno pauses and looks carefully at a brick. Then he puts that brick down and chooses another that looks exactly the same as far as I can tell. “Nobody knows anything about Hieronymus Bosch. Not really.”

  I pull the weird bird out of my coat pocket and hand it to him. Arno holds the figure at eye level and looks at it, “Well, one thing I can say about Hieronymus Bosch is that this image works. Whatever the hell this thing is, it’s interesting.” He hands my gift back to me.

  “I’m glad I make pots,” says Arno, “I think clay is easier to work with than nightmares.”

  “I read today that the town he lived in burned down when he was thirteen. Do you think that was the problem?”

  “What problem? The guy was a genius. But maybe he just ate spoiled rye bread. It was full of LSD. That explains a lot about the Middle Ages. They were all hallucinating. Here, let me show you something really important.”