by L. A. Fields
“Sick, sure, sick in the head,” one murmured to another after a visit on a nice day, a day when Noah’s mother had invited them for lunch on the back lawn.
Noah was a boy then, home from school because all the pollen in the air was stuffing his head with highly pressurized mucus. His head throbbed hard every time he blew his nose, and bright light made him squint and wince. Even so he had still helped his mother set up her table and makeup a bright complexion onto her face (Noah helped by blowing excess blush off her brush). If those women could see how pale she was underneath, or how it drained her just to get up and down the stairs, they wouldn’t talk like that behind her back.
Then again, maybe they would. His mother always told him they were frightfully petty gossips.
Noah drops his glasses from his face onto the desk. His eyes feel like undercooked meatballs, and if he’s daydreaming about his mother it means he’s due for a study break. He takes his binoculars from the bedside windowsill and heads downstairs through the thick stale air that never leaves the middle of the house no matter how often they open the windows on cool nights, hoping to air the place out. Noah doesn’t realize how oppressive the atmosphere inside has gotten until he finds himself blinking at the post-lunch summer brightness outside.
Now, the way to spot birds is to first spot where they are not, to find their ripples in the leaves. There is a slight breeze that makes the treetops sway gently, rhythmically, and if at any point a small section of leaves shivers against the regular motion of the rest of the branches, chances are there’s a bird or a squirrel up there. Noah scans slowly with his own vision, allowing his sight to expand to take in as much area as possible. When one of the branches shimmies, its leaves rustling like the fringe on a dancing dress, Noah squares his stance and raises his binoculars.
Noah is scrutinizing the branch trying to rule out a possible squirrel, searching for feathers, for colors, when he feels a stinging flick on the back of his neck.
Noah assumes some bug has launched itself at him, but when he looks around for the offending creature all he sees is a rubber band in the grass at his feet. Then he hears snickering, adolescent laughter. Then he sees two boys on their bikes, one with a kitchen junk-drawer rubber band ball, the other with a crude wooden pistol meant for firing them at people.
Noah scowls and moves further away from them, closer to his neighbor’s yard, and out of range of their gun. If they come onto the property, surely Noah’s justified in braining them with his binoculars, right? How desperately he longs to. The boys continue down the street disrupting every pleasant thing they find: they send a rubber band into some jogging woman’s frizzy ponytail; they send another into a rather pretty wind chime with colored marbles and wire curlicues, knocking it into the dirt; they send one at a mailbox’s raised red flag, which leaves the flag crooked. There’s nothing that they can’t ruin.
The grouchy old bitch next door is out on her porch. Noah hadn’t noticed her when he fled this way or else he would have just gone back inside. She used to glare at him something fierce whenever he was outside burning ants with a magnifying glass as a child, but now suddenly they are on the same side.
Their eyes meet, and she nods grimly toward Noah before saying, “If they come back around here you feel free to whip their little behinds with my garden hose, you hear me? The nozzle’s nice and heavy.” She nods next at the hose, coiled like a snake on one of her refuse bins. Noah nods back at her; they’re coconspirators now.
Ray would like that idea, Noah and bitter old Mrs. Rosen murdering a couple of brats together, a little vigilante neighborhood justice. And as soon as that thought occurs to Noah, he turns and hurries inside for his phone so he can tell Ray all about it. He’s been waiting for a good enough reason to talk to him again for what feels like forever.
If his trusty binoculars hadn’t been hanging by a strap around his neck, they would have been dropped and forgotten.
8
RAY IS ON A TRAIN platform when he gets Noah’s message, lost like he tends to get around trains, daydreaming.
What Ray wouldn’t give to have lived just a few decades ago when trains were loaded with goods and money instead of just droolingly stupid commuters. He wishes he could be riding alongside a train, horse-backed and hollering, leaping onto the money car and putting the guard in fear of his underpaid life. Cracking a safe with a stethoscope, explosives with fuses held together by twine, a hat to tip up and down like a rearview mirror to do all a man’s emoting for him. That’s how Ray sees himself, the way he truly is. If only everyone else could see it, too.
Noah’s message says, I found some candidates for murder. A couple of brats just rode by with a rubber band gun. Mrs. Rosen and I are going to beat them to death.
Ray chuckles and sort of dandles his phone affectionately. Good old Noah, he always did know how to cheer Ray up. Too bad he never has that effect on anyone else.
Ray’s train pulls up and he steps in, noting that it’s the start of rush hour, so there are some few seats in each car, but they won’t last past the next stop. In the midst of everyone tidying themselves into their own seat or getting a secure grip of the support bars for standing passengers, one grubby homeless man is taking up three seats all on his own.
His ass is planted in one, his feet are propped on another, and he’s got an apple core holding a third seat open as he eats his dinner. Ray manages to sit across from this specimen of inferior humanity, and starts observing surreptitiously.
I’ve got a good candidate for murder too, Ray types into his phone to Noah. This animal across from me on the L is taking up three seats when there are standing passengers.
Christ, Noah sends back.
An apple core is keeping the seat next to him occupied. He’s eating an entire Entenmann’s cake with his disgusting bare hands. It’s chocolate, so there’s no telling if the lines under his nails are dirt or icing or a troubling mixture of both. What Ray finds himself typing next almost makes him sneer.
He’s licking himself clean.
The man puts the empty cake box and apple core under his seat and lays sideways for a little nap.
He’s using an old pizza box as a pillow.
Noah comes back with, This is why murder is necessary. Mankind is a long way off from becoming Supermen with scum like that gumming up the works.
Everyone else in the car is ignoring this man and his rude arrogance as hard as they can.
Somebody should kill him, Ray agrees, but there’d be no challenge in it for us, no reward. No one would miss him and we’d never get a ransom.
Good for practice?
Good for nothing.
Ray decides to walk his last couple of stops—he can’t stand the congestion in the car, trapped and watching this cretin misbehave. It’s just too depressing. It’s about to spoil his whole young hopeful life.
Once he squeezes his way out of the car like some substance out of a clogged pore, Ray feels better. With a little space he feels free, athletic, acrobatic. He lifts and swings himself gently on the moving handrails of the escalator. Topside, out of the subway, he hops up on the edge of every stone planter he finds on the streets of Chicago, each one a balancing beam. He’s come to the Loop in the early evening to do a little “Man of the Crowd” action, just roaming and roving wherever there are people. He likes to move through the shifting throngs with precision, a kayak through rapids, hands in his pockets, his shoulders dipping back and forth like a double bladed paddle. He challenges himself to anticipate which way people will break around him and to dance with them for a moment, never having one of those awkward face-to-face shuffles that ruin the waltz.
Ray’s on the look-out for someone interesting to trail, but this being a weeknight, it’s mostly just working folk headed home, harried from today and dreading tomorrow. They won’t do anything overly interesting for Ray to see. After about an hour of this type, Ray considers ducking into a movie theater, putting his feet up in the dark, getting drunk off the flask
of gin that’s warm from being strapped to his outer leg beneath his right sock, and then taking a cab home to pass out.
But before putting that plan into action, Ray decides to walk one last wide circle out to Lake Shore Drive. It’s gotten dark enough for Navy Pier to be lit up and beautiful against the sky, nice far-out Gatsby-grasping lights reflected on the lake.
Ray lands himself on a bench with a view of the pier’s electric sweep to look up what movies are playing where, but before he gets too entranced by his phone, he spots a one-legged pigeon hopping along and decides to creep up behind it for a while.
He or she is a tenacious little thing, covered in a dirty city sheen, bouncing down the sidewalk with purpose. Ray turns on his flash and snaps a picture of it for Noah, sending it to him with a question: Hey birdbrain, what do you think happened to this little guy’s leg?
Some alley cat probably took it, Noah responds, along with a second message a second later. Or it got cut on some garbage, got infected, and fell off.
Thanks, you’re a font of knowledge.
Any time, my friend.
Ray abandons his bird after this, his curiosity temporarily satiated. He starts heading to the movie theater, thinking he’ll just see any crap off the marquee, and also thinking that since Noah’s now transferred back to the U of Chicago, he can afford to be nice to the kid again. He’ll spend the summer being aloof, and beginning in the fall they’ll be a whole state apart, and there won’t be any harm in keeping Noah sweet on him from afar.
After all, he’s still the smartest person Ray knows.
9
IT’S THE FIRST DAY OF school. Again.
The best place for Noah to be is not in front of his full-length mirror, but it’s an important step in the process to achieving perfection.
Slick down the hair so he doesn’t have to worry about it moving. Belt the pants, not too tight, but tight enough so he won’t have to fidget with them all day. Socks clean, shoes laced tight. An undershirt for catching sweat, and an outer shirt, whatever one his hand first hits when he reaches into the closet. He owns nothing but the same shirt in slightly different colors because he doesn’t need to look interesting; he’s no peacock. Noah feels better when he can’t be seen by himself or by anyone else.
He must be in school, it’s his true arena. He only wishes he didn’t have to get there, or if only the commute would go much, much faster: down the stairs, hi Dad, no Mom (again); car, train, swarms of people (why); asphalt, stone steps, hardwood, desk (finally). And now it begins.
The wait.
Just wait until that professor gets something wrong, just wait. He will eventually—absolutely none of Noah’s teachers live and breathe to be right the way he does.
Mispronounce something, please.
Mix up the year it happened, please.
Put a concept so simply that you’re all but begging Noah to say, “Well, actually,” please.
Even just one score a week could sustain Noah happily, but it would be so beautiful to set the tone of the year right, right off the bat.
Noah’s at the top of the room, in one of the back seats of this amphitheater-looking lecture hall, sitting straight up (no slouching soporific in his seat like his classmates), and gazing down over this sea of his so-called peers. The professor is droning on about attendance policies and the school’s code of conduct, reading off a prepared statement, when all together the students shift slightly.
Small lights are zooming across the ceiling, reflected and whirling off a pair of army dog tags being spun on a chain by some skinhead-looking kid in the third row. The dude is an absolute child, sneering and bored, with all the attitude Noah himself has, but with much less justification. He’s too young to have earned those tags in service, for example, and even if they’re a family member’s and not just some mass-stamped jewelry from the mall, Noah hates him for the way he’s twirling them on that necklace, letting lights and motion entertain him like some bouncer-bound brat, even as it distracts everyone else who might be here to learn, or at least listen.
Noah fantasizes about being in the seat behind that boy as the teacher continues the same spiel Noah heard when he first attended this school at fourteen. He imagines what it would feel like to reach forward and snatch that chain back onto the kid’s throat, twisting and pulling it tight like a garrote.
The kid stops his little game a moment before the professor looks up, the luck of the loutish saving him from a reprimand.
The class is a waste of time. Here’s your syllabus, let’s go through each point
aloud as if no one here can read. Everybody say a little about yourself, name and major and why you’re taking this class (like it matters). Well, now there isn’t enough
time left to do justice to a lecture so go home and read the first assignment in the textbook. Noah is frowning as he leaves the classroom, grumbling to himself, “That’s a chunk of my life I’ll never get back again,” when he is overheard by a passing professor, a man so old and established at this campus that he’s all but morphing into an emeritus with each lapsing second.
The man frowns at Noah, offended on behalf of his colleague, until he rears back and peeks through the door. When he sees the man who just wasted Noah’s precious time, he grimaces.
“We’re not supposed to speak ill of our fellow faculty, but . . . hmm. Put it this way: his wife is an excellent asset to the science department.”
Noah snorts, and then remembers exactly who this man is, and then says, “Professor Rudell, I don’t know if you remember me, but I just transferred back and I was wondering—”
“You’re Kaplan, the one with the articles on . . . bugs?”
“Birds.”
“Even better.” Professor Rudell beckons Noah to walk with him, his arm reaching out from his jacket sleeve and revealing the fish-belly flesh of his wrist. He pincers Noah’s shoulder with his craggy fingers. “I’ve been wanting an underclassman to help me organize material for my TAs. I need someone who knows how to write and knows what a deadline is, but I don’t like bugs. Are you free on Wednesdays?”
“Totally free,” Noah says, pleased with Professor Rudell for reading his mind like this. Noah promised his mother, almost the last thing he said to her before she died, that he would have a stellar college career, but he never got around to it in Michigan, not with Ray eclipsing everything.
“Come to my next office hours and we’ll set it up,” Rudell says, releasing Noah from his grip and pointing at him. “Glad to see you’ve returned, young man.”
Noah is nearly smiling as he exits the corridor into the outer hallway. He is thinking of how his mother would approve, of how his whole family will think better of him now after the waffling he did in trying to follow Ray to U of M, and in this pleasant haze of having his reputation precede him, Noah finds himself in front of a bulletin board advertising school clubs.
There’s one for a Latin Club, for a Spanish Table, for an Italian Society. Noah’s got an aptitude for language, one that crosses into his ability to correctly identify and locate birdcalls. He’s been meaning to research the connection at some point but . . . perhaps it can wait until after he joins a few clubs, maybe makes a few friends, maybe discusses the topic with one of them first.
Noah jots down the contact info for every language club he can see, and scratches down a reminder about his appointment with Professor Rudell, and all the while he’s shaking his head at himself: how had he forgotten that Ray wasn’t the only smart person on the planet? Noah resolves that his whole life will improve from today onward, now that he’s out of Ray’s charming aura, and finally free.
10
SCORCHED EARTH, THAT’S HOW RAY thinks of this past semester without Noah. The mercury’s high, the ashes glow red, and will continue to smolder for hours and days and weeks to come. This semester is Chernobyl. This semester is the Hiroshima bomb, it’s a mushroom cloud that billows so thick it almost looks comfortable.
He drank too much this year
. Tanked, that’s the word for it. He tanked because he was tanked. He didn’t totally fail, but he disappointed everyone. A C-average student. An average student. A let-down.
Now Ray’s sitting in front of a counselor. A counselor with babyish curls in his hair, and a cozy turtleneck sweater on, and the kind eyes of a mother above a full and robust beard.
“You came into this school with a lot of potential, Raymond.”
“Call me Ray,” he says. X-Ray, death Ray, a Ray of nuclear light.
“Do you feel like you’ve lived up to that potential, Ray?”
“Of course I haven’t, but it doesn’t matter. Grades don’t matter in college.”
“Well, yes they do,” the counselor says. Ray bets himself that this is the huggy counselor, the one they send you to if they think you might cry. Ray doesn’t cry. He hasn’t cried in at least ten years.
“You know,” Ray says, reaching out to spike the drinky bird on this guy’s desk so he’ll have something interesting to take his attention, “most people think these things are perpetual motion machines, but it’s actually a heat engine.” That’s something Noah told him when they saw one in the school store the first day they arrived in Michigan and had gone out together to explore the campus. Ray often quotes Noah when he wants to feel smart.
“Really? How? It’s not warm.”
“I don’t know,” Ray says, watching the bird (who has no water to drink, the poor bastard) try to pound its head on the desk and always just miss it. “Ask someone who gets better grades.”
The counselor smiles understandingly at him. “This session isn’t about criticizing you, Ray. We recognize that college has a lot of challenges that have nothing to do with how smart you are. Time management, a social life, love, sex, friendship, money, all kinds of adult things are hitting you all at once, and you being so much younger than most of your classmates, you’ve actually done really well. You certainly haven’t failed anything, you haven’t gotten into any trouble, you joined a fraternity, which is excellent, that’ll give you plenty of stability and support going forward next year. Some of your professors just recommended that I touch base with you, make sure you know I’m here. If you ever feel overwhelmed, you can come talk to me and we’ll work it out.”
