The Freak Observer

by Blythe Woolston

  He goes into the main studio and comes back with a fistful of sloppy clay. It stinks. It smells just this side of organic. It smells of rot and damp earth. Arno holds the ball of mud in his hand, just as he had held the bird figure earlier. He looks at it carefully. Then he pinches it and flicks it and runs his thumbs along it like his hands are looking for something.

  Then he stops and plops the clay on the top row of bricks on the kiln door. It is a little wet clay gargoyle all of a sudden: a thing with expressive eyes and stooped shoulders and a fat gut.

  “Kiln god,” says Arno. “Put your faith in the kiln god, at least until we open the door and see how the pots came out.”

  . . .

  I’ve been staring at the fluorescent lights on the studio ceiling for two and a half hours. I understand now why the place is dotted with decrepit couches. People do a lot of waiting in this place. I, for example, am waiting for Jack. He should never be a paramedic or a delivery guy or . . .

  “Hey, wow, it got late,” says Jack. “Maybe we should do this tomorrow, the raku. ‘Cause, like, it got late.”

  So we walk home, and my naked unfinished duck stays where it is, pale and grainy on the shelf, waiting to be changed into something else. Its little blobby bathtubduckie shape is starting to grow on me. Sure it looks a little inert next to Jack’s ducks, but it is patient and looks more like a duck than a doorknob.

  Jack and I walk across campus. The stars are out so I start naming them. Jack seems interested. At least he points his nose in the right direction and cocks his head.

  Sometimes Jack reminds me a little of my old dog, Ket. Like now, when he tips his head like he is listening for the stars. I still miss Ket and the way he used to look at me like he wanted to know what I wanted him to know. It is the sort of look that can easily be mistaken for love.

  “Can you really see pictures when you see the constellations?” asks Jack.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can you really see pictures? Or is it more like just a shape? An abstract shape?”

  “Well I guess it’s more like just a shape. I guess that Cassiopeia, the Queen in her Chair, looks more like a W than a queen or a chair.”

  “How does it feel, to know them? To see them as particular stars like that?”

  “I don’t know. A little consoling, I guess. I never really thought about how it feels.”

  “Can you not see them, the constellations, can you just see the sky?”

  I look up. There are stars I have no name for; there are stars up there that are invisible to the human eye, stars that can only be seen in the Hubble telescope mirror or heard as radio waves. But I can’t “not see” the constellations that I know.

  “It is sort of like reading, once you learn to read, you can’t look at a word and not read it. Even if you leave out letters, your brain will fill in the places and make a word and make it make sense. The constellations are like words I know how to read. I can’t ‘not see’ them.”

  It’s a little surprise: Jack can be quiet. He never says another word until we get to my building and he says good-bye.

  . . .

  I have a French test on Monday. It hasn’t gotten any easier. French makes me feel stupid. It’s like I don’t even have a place in my brain for l’enfantin langage much less le dérèglement du langage. I write the stupid stuff down over and over like Bart Simpson writing “Je ne parle pas Français” and it doesn’t help. By this time, my hands should know it; it should be embedded in my muscle memory even if my brain is a lost cause.

  . . .

  I’m trying to buy a ticket. I don’t know if it is for a movie or a trip, but I can’t get the attention of the person on the other side of a glass window. I think the little speaker device is broken or something. I start banging on the glass.

  The ticket agent gestures to the side of the window. There’s a tube there with a screw-on lid, like they use at the bank drive-through for deposits of cash. I want to put a note in there to explain what I need, but I don’t have a pen or paper. I start rummaging through my pockets looking for something to use.

  I find the letter that the messenger bird was carrying, but it is the real letter. I’m torn between using it for scratch paper and knowing that it is very valuable. Someone might know how to read this message. I shouldn’t destroy it.

  The lights in the lobby start to flicker out, and I realize that the ticket agent is leaving. I start banging on the glass. I need help. I need to buy a ticket.

  An announcement comes on over the PA system. I can’t understand it. It’s in French. I can only understand the day of the week, “Lundi.”

  The ticket agent looks right at me and shrugs. Then the last of the lights go out, and I’m standing there in the dark holding a letter I can’t read.

  I look out the window, and I can see stars in the sky, they are all very bright and beautiful, but none of them is familiar.

  . . .

  It’s nice actually, to wake up in the middle of the night and not be terrorized. It’s nice to just wake up and wonder, “Wow, what was that?” and then feel OK about flipping the pillow over and going back to sleep.

  Believe me, it’s even bigger than being able to have pizza delivered.

  It isn’t quite so nice to wake up and find out that first period starts in less than half an hour. I never slept in before. Maybe I need to buy an alarm clock—a wind-up one with a big clanging bell on top like they have in old cartoons. How cool is that?

  We are doing expository presentations—a.k.a. speeches with props—in English. Mine is next week, and I’ve just realized that my plan to bring in a freshly cooked raku duck might not pan out. I hadn’t figured Jack into the equation. He isn’t exactly dependable in a where-andwhen sort of way. But I’m weirdly unconcerned about next week. For one thing, I could take off my boot and use it as a visual aid to explain Freak Observers. I could do that right this minute, but I don’t have to. I can just sit back and be a member of the respectful audience.

  Yesterday one guy explained how to make a drum out of a propane tank. That was followed by the story of Nintendo’s shift from sex hotels to video games. I’m fairly confident that I would never have discovered those things on my own. I’m learning things in school.

  Today the first girl talks about being an insulin-dependent diabetic. She has good, clear diagrams and seems to understand the way her body has failed her really well. She pulls out an orange and says a nurse taught her how to give herself shots when she was eleven. Now she passes the lesson on to us. It seems like she is finished, but then she picks up another syringe and says, “Just saline.” She points it at the ceiling, flicks it, presses the plunger, and looks at it. She is looking for bubbles. Bubbles are bad. She pulls up her sweater and exposes her side. Her face doesn’t even twitch when she sticks herself with the needle.

  . . .

  The next girl has dimly green hair—it looks like a bad Kool-Aid dye job—and she looks nervous. That’s understandable. Unless she is going to give us tasty snacks, it is going to be hard to make us stop thinking about that needle, that needle, that needle. And she doesn’t appear to have snacks.

  She leans a stack of big foam-core posters against the whiteboard. She isn’t showing them to us yet. That’s smart. She’s going for the big reveal.

  Then she puts a little bundle of cloth on the table at the front of the room, takes a deep breath, and looks to the teacher. The teacher nods.

  The lime-haired girl turns over her first poster.

  It’s The Bony Guy.

  He’s wearing a suit of armor, but it’s him.

  She flips over to the second poster.

  This time, he’s dressed in a brown robe, like the monks in the bone-decorated room, and it says “Saturn” by his feet instead of “Death,” but it’s him.

  The shock is wearing off, and I’m starting to hear the words of her speech. These are Tarot cards; they are used to provide answers and guidance. She learned to read them from someone cal
l Nonna, who is her grandmother, I gather. She collects different decks—the way some people collect manga—and she is going to explain how they work.

  Now that my brain is turned back on, it is in defensivesnark mode. It doesn’t pay to soak your head in Kool-Aid—I can recognize the bright red star of Aldebaran in Taurus, but I don’t think it has any influence on my day. I could do my speech about astrology and include the experiment where everyone gets a random fortune, and then they have to decide if it is “correct” or not, and then everybody realizes they are fools. I am so not being a respectful audience.

  Now the speaker has unwrapped a deck of cards. They are so big, it looks like she is holding a paperback—but it’s a paperback where you can shuffle the pages.

  She sets the shuffled cards down carefully and points to the posters again. She talks about the traditional images of death. He often carries a scythe, she says, turning over another poster to reveal a full-frontal Bony Guy dressed in Little Red Riding Hood’s cape.

  She says people tend to freak out when the Death card appears as part of the answer to their question. They assume it’s a very bad thing. But it isn’t that simple. Some decks don’t even have a Death card. And a card’s meaning always depends on the question and its position relative to other cards. When Death is right side up, it usually means there is some sort of change happening—a new beginning. She flips Red-Riding-Hood Death on his head. Now the card might mean that you’re stuck in a rut or hanging onto old ideas that aren’t working. She makes death sound like a variable.

  There are all kinds of tarot decks, that’s what the collector-girl with the greenish hair said.

  . . .

  Nobody else is home this afternoon, so I pull out my manila folder and spill out the postcards and stuff. My deck, I think.

  Bony Guy-Death Card-De Dood lands upside down.

  “Stuck in a rut,” says gravity-defying De Dood.

  Jack’s business card is almost covered up by De Dood. I can see part of the bird squiggle, like it’s trying to fly up and away. I’m not freaking out. There’s more to reading the cards than just dumping them out. There’s a system to it. I don’t remember all the details, but it’s about position and relationship. The answer isn’t in the data; it’s in the analysis.

  My deck, I think, so my deal. I can shift the variables in the equation. I lift De Dood and turn him right side up and put him off to the side. Now I can read Jack’s card: “raku ducks, web design, undiscovered talents.”

  “New beginnings,” says De Dood from his new place out of the center.

  What about the other cards? What is the significance of the four of pink-nipple piggies? The ace of hammers? Is that the king of after-dinner science? I didn’t even know I was looking at an orrery when I first saw that card. The machine in the painting looked so different from Mr. Banecek’s, the one I’d nudged a little to keep the planets moving.

  I turn it over and read,

  So that’s how the sun works. Who knew?

  Love,

  Corey

  Turning it again, I notice that the lamp meant to be the sun can’t even be seen. It is revealed only because it reveals other things, like the observers studying the model galaxy. The faces of the observers shine like phases of the moon. Some are full, others only a crescent of light, one in total eclipse. Do they imagine themselves on the marble-size Earth while it ticks around its clockwork orbit? When the demonstration is finished and the observers walk out under the night sky, will they see the constellations—or will they imagine other observers beyond the reach of human eyes?

  . . .

  I turn the card over again and touch the words that Corey wrote.

  If I hadn’t had practice decoding his useless sloppy marks when we were debate partners, I wouldn’t be able to read the words at all.

  So that’s how the sun works. Who knew? Love, Corey

  . . .

  Who knew?

  . . .

  I never told Corey that I used to have a little sister. I never told him about my bad dreams. I didn’t want him to know I was crazy—because, if he didn’t know, then I could be something completely different when I was with him. He isn’t mocking me with The Bony Guy because he doesn’t know—he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know that Esther was a brave pig-whacking girl and now she is dead. He doesn’t know I saw her die.

  He just sent me a postcard, “Wish you were here.”

  I read something else, written in lines that were much too dark and much too sharp. Corey never joined those dark things into constellations—I did that.

  He’s not a vindictive monster. He’s not trying to ruin my life. When he posted those pictures on the net, it was about him, not about me. I’m just “girl with ginormous thighs on a pool table.” I have no face in those pictures. I am in eclipse. It’s his face that shines in the dark. His name is in the tags. Maybe he wanted someone to see those pictures and think that was what he was doing in Europe. Maybe he was just trying to confront his own enemy in his own bad dream.

  He may not know about my nightmares, but I don’t know his either. All those nights in the dark, close enough to feel the energy of his body, close enough to hear the sounds of his pulse if I didn’t mistake it for the echo of my own—but that’s the problem. I did, somehow, mistake Corey for an echo of me. I was so focused on my reflection in his eyes, on the way he let me see myself, that I never saw him at all.

  So when the postcards came, I never got them, not really. I was too busy being hurt. I was too busy hurting myself. Now I’m finally getting the messages that he sent me.

  He’s drinking absinthe in Prague and feeling a little sympathy for me because I’m not. He’s wandering through museums and seeing amazing things he wants to share with me: a chandelier made of bones, a scowling face in a painting that looks a little like me. He’s just trying to keep in touch—to touch. He couldn’t text me. He knows I don’t have a phone—no computer, no e-mail, no social networking. He got past all those barriers. He sneaked around them in an old-timey way. He sent me postcards. He knew I was hurt, and the postcards weren’t apologies, exactly; they were little gestures that kept things open and made it possible, maybe, for us to someday be friends.

  . . .

  I’m in Santa Cruz wading in the ocean. I can’t hear anything. There isn’t any wind. I look up at the sky, and I realize I’m deep underwater. The sunlight is flickering down in little beams and sparks. I panic and my heart jerks faster, but then I look around. There are all kinds of strange things in the water. I don’t know what they are, they are just floating or swimming or hovering. It is hard to see them because the light is so undependable, but what I see is unbelievably beautiful. It makes me cry, the unpredictable hovering beauty. When I start to cry, I can feel my lungs fill up with water. It feels natural. I can breathe underwater, I just never knew it before.

  This is just another universe. And I’m its observer.

  Acknowledgments

  To Andrew Karre, my editor: In the beginning, there was chaos. Your ability to see a book in there is a little freakish.

  To the book builders of Carolrhoda—including visionary production editor Julie Harman, careful reader Delores Barton, book designer Danielle Carnito, and publicist Lindsay Matvick: thank you all.

  To Kate McAlpine (a.k.a. Alpinekat) and to the community-at-large of science writers: You wade out into the lagoons of science and bring back the most amazing things. I appreciate it.

  To my household, both Bedlam Central and the Martian Outpost: You are interesting people. I love you.

 

 

 
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