Fum

by Adam Rapp

  Take, for instance, his 1996 novel, The Smallest Hands, in which young children comprise the world’s workforce because their hands are small enough to assemble the most minuscule manufacturing particulars of nanotechnology. Eventually, each child’s hand size outgrows the required size limit, and the work is outsourced to a younger, less developed child, at which point the maturing, unneeded child mysteriously disappears. It’s implied that the missing children are getting dispatched by the Human Resources department so as to guarantee not passing along nanotech secrets to rival companies. At the center of this manufacturing tragedy is Willa, whose hands start to grow — employee hand growth is monitored on a monthly basis — and who catches wind of her grisly fate and orchestrates her escape through rocky, mountainous terrain that is policed by corporate drone wolves.

  Cloris discovered the book in a literary trade journal review that was neither hugely positive nor in any way negative. She felt it was a diamond in the rough and placed a modest order of three copies for the library. When it arrived, she read it, loved it, ordered five more copies, erected a mini-display in the young adult section, and started talking up the book to precocious junior-high-school students as well as to Lugo Memorial freshman Corinthia Bledsoe, who had read one of Lorcan Nutt’s earlier novels, Rocky River Makes Me Shiver, which is about the struggles of a six-fingered boy who draws naked pictures of the citizens of his small town, exposing birthmarks, scars, and genital configurations. The pictures appear at the post office, the supermarket, and the entrance to the local Catholic church. The boy’s father, embarrassed and ashamed, winds up cutting his son’s extra finger off with a bowie knife after a naked picture of him (the father) is posted on telephone poles all over town, exposing a telephone number written across his chest in black Sharpie ink, which proves to be the number of a woman — the local pharmacist’s wife, to be exact — with whom he’s having an affair. After the boy’s finger is cut off, he loses his ability to draw, and his father forces him to learn how to play classical piano.

  Cloris Honniotis explains to Corinthia how she tracked down Lorcan Nutt detective-style, extracting clues to his whereabouts from his strange, self-written mini – author bios featured in the back of his books. Before Cloris starting working there, the Lugo Public Library carried only four of his sixty-some novels, and she’s had to take it upon herself to hunt down used, rare, and remaindered copies of his books. It’s been an act of literary archaeology, to say the least.

  “Lorcan Nutt?” Corinthia cries.

  “The man himself.”

  “You’re shitting Jabbar.”

  “I would not shit Jabbar, Chewy.”

  Cloris snot-rockets into the sink. Sometimes her year-round allergies make it difficult for her to get through a full-fledged conversation without having to send mucus flying in one direction or another.

  “But what to do about these tornadoes?” Cloris asks.

  “If the horn starts blowing, at least promise me that you’ll go down to your little smelly basement.”

  Cloris Honniotis lives by herself in a white clapboard ranch house that’s not much bigger than a two-car garage. Despite her cluttered basement, she keeps the house nice, with a ceramic deer poised in the front yard and little flower boxes lining the windows.

  “I promise,” Cloris finally replies. And then adds, “What are we gonna do with you, Nostradamus?”

  Suddenly there is a knock on Corinthia’s special bathroom door: three knocks, their reports tentative and faint.

  “Dinner’s ready,” Marlene Bledsoe’s voice sings from the other side. It has a quality like a teakettle’s whistle expiring; a four-syllable descent of exasperation.

  “I could use a vision or two,” Cloris adds. “Lucky giant.”

  August 26, 2015, part two

  Dave,

  I’m home now. It’s quiet. I can hear the crickets in the backyard. They sound like the throbbing mind of a monster. A thing with glowing eyes circling the house. Sometimes I think it’s the ghost of my dad looking for his watch, which he was always misplacing. The watch was a gift from my mom before they were married. There wasn’t anything fancy about it — it was a Timex Expedition men’s analog/digital combo watch with a brown band — but it was important to him, and he would always lose it and then go on these epic searches. Once he found it in the refrigerator’s butter cubby. Another time it was actually on his wrist and he’d been looking for it for over an hour. I see him creeping around the lilac bushes in Mom’s garden, picking the slugs out of the mulch and looking for his watch. Mom’s been pruning the older branches so new lilac bushes will grow. But no matter how much time she spends back there, it doesn’t do any good. It seems like her lilac bushes will never get as tall as she wants them to be. Sometimes I get this feeling that they’re going to start growing in the house. I’ll come down to the kitchen and they’ll be creeping through the floor and crawling up the walls like they have a strategy. But they won’t grow in the garden. Not until my dad finds his watch.

  Mom is in her room, reading and crying. I think she still misses Dad. Twice a week she goes to Belleville to talk to this woman about grief, but it only seems to be making things worse. Sometimes her crying sounds like laughing and sometimes it sounds like birds. I keep thinking I should buy her an ant farm, just to give her something to do besides pruning her lilac bushes.

  One more thing about Mom: I think her hair is falling out. I saw a clump of it on the bathroom floor. I’m going to start gathering it for her, just in case she wants it back someday. When you look at it up close, you can see how some of it is a little gray and some of it is sort of red, too. I’m storing it in a shoe box under my bed.

  Tomorrow is gym. I DO NOT WANT TO TAKE A SHOWER, DAVE. That is the last thing I want to do, because I bet I’m the only boy in class who doesn’t possess pubic hair. I might Scotch tape some of my mom’s dead hair to my upper junk area. I think I could pull that off if I execute it with excellence. The hair on my head is dark brown, Dave, and, like I told you already, my mom’s has gray in it and it’s also a little red, but once I found one of my dad’s old Playboy magazines, and the centerfold had blond hair on her head but her vagina bush was black like a cat with no face.

  God, I hope Lars Silence and Mark Maestro aren’t in my gym class. I hope we never play dodgeball, and I hope they aren’t on the opposite team. I have practiced dodgeball in my mind. My guidance counselor, Mr. Smock, says that visualizing being good at sports can sometimes make you better. I close my eyes and perform deep-breathing exercises, and then I visualize myself doing incredible things. I catch all the dodgeballs — even the fastest ones coming at my head. I can throw with both arms — left and right equally — and the other team doesn’t have an answer for me. I am the last one standing, and my classmates see something in me that they didn’t know was there. But sometimes other things happen at the end of these visualizations, Dave. Like things I can’t tell you about yet.

  Dave, I know in my bones that at some point, Lars Silence and Mark Maestro will come at me. I know it the way you know there are slugs in Mom’s garden. They will have weapons, and they will break me open and cut my foot off with a saw or a high-end serrated kitchen knife and bury it in the football field, and in the spring, grass won’t grow there, only mushrooms, like the poisonous kind that make you spit up black oil.

  Dave, I know you can’t see me, but do you think it’s weird that I’m wearing Camila’s hairnet? I’ve been wearing it for a few hours, since like 6 p.m., and I can feel my heart beating faster. And I can also feel my hands filling with blood. I would wrestle a wolf for Camila, Dave. I would break a bottle over someone’s head and then stab his thuggish partner in the neck with the weaponish shards.

  Camila Camila Camila Camila Camila Camila Camila Camila Camila Camila Camila Camila Camila Camila Camila Camila Camila Camila Camila Camila . . .

  Saying her name over and over makes me feel huge, like my bedroom is too small for me.

  So, as an assign
ment from Mr. Smock, I’m supposed to tell you about five things that I care about. Here they are:

  1. Mom.

  2. My dad, who died at the kitchen table for no apparent reason — he just fell face-first into his brussels sprouts and then he made a clucking noise and then his heart stopped.

  3. Camila the Mexican cafeteria worker.

  4. The Freshman Frogs.

  5. I can’t think of a fifth thing right now.

  And here is the beginning of The List:

  1. Cinthia Hauk.

  2. Mark Maestro.

  3. Lars Silence.

  At dinner, a small planet of some sort of stew with meatballs, celery, peas, and carrots has been plopped onto Corinthia’s plate. It appears to be infinitesimally trembling beside a serving of Marlene Bledsoe’s scrubbed potatoes, which have now been skinned, mashed, and whipped into spiraling mounds not unlike the arrangement of her hair.

  Brother Channing sits across from Corinthia. He wears a tight-fitting Lugo Memorial Varsity Football sweatshirt, its sleeves pulled up mid-forearm. The veins in his hands and wrists are practically bursting. His hairless skin is like taut designer calfskin gloves. When he chews his food, he breathes through his nose in a measured, controlled manner. During most meals, Channing rarely looks up, because he is so consumed with “visioning” all the incredible feats he will pull off during football games. A few weeks ago, at the dinner table, when asked by his mother to explain the concept of visioning to the rest of the family, he told them that he closes his eyes and imagines running his routes, changing speeds, and executing tight 180 buttonhooks and sharp turns. He also visions a variety of catches: mediocre two-handed grabs for short yardage; elite one-handed snatches while falling out of bounds; effortless over-the-shoulder snags for long yardage; across-the-middle receptions in heavy traffic; and downright jaw-dropping Hail Mary end-zone miracle catches. He visions his body’s acceleration toward the goalposts and his all-business, almost nonchalant consignation of the football to the end-zone turf, as if he is dropping off an important package at the post office in a responsible, timely fashion. He has already set Lugo Memorial career records for receiving yards, touchdown receptions, and punt returns. Friday night’s game versus Clinton Academy is no doubt at the forefront of his mind.

  It suddenly occurs to Corinthia that today she also had one of these visions, but perhaps hers was far less useful to herself, to her high school, and even to her community. No one wants to be associated with the bearer of bad news, after all. That became clear to her in her freshman ancient literature class, where she learned about the origins of the concept of the phrase “Don’t shoot the messenger” while reading Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus the King.

  Have she and her brother inherited this talent from their parents? Does Marlene secretly vision, too? Does her dad?

  Marlene sits at the foot of the table, her back facing the archway to the living room, while Brill mans the head. This has been the arrangement for years now. Marlene, Brill, and Channing sit on matching high-back dining-room chairs, while Corinthia, whose knees haven’t fit under the table for going on four years now, is set back some three feet from the table and sits on an old piano bench whose joints have been reinforced with titanium brackets. She’ll often hold her plate in her lap when she eats, and the effect is prayerful, as if she’s some penitent martyr forced to stare down at the tops of her thighs while the other members of her family attack their plates with forks and knives.

  As soon as Corinthia fills her glass with the Bledsoe soft drink alternative — Hi-C Flashin’ Fruit Punch — her father passes her something. It’s a neon-yellow origami crane fashioned from a Bazoo Meatpacking Post-it Note. He places it on her knee. It’s as weightless as a fruit fly. Corinthia has no idea how her father knows how to make origami, but she enjoys the occasional miniature crane, elephant, or municipal backhoe.

  She opens it with her long, slow fingers. In very small all-caps print it reads:

  IF YOU WANT TO TALK TORNADOES . . .

  OR NOT.

  UP TO YOU.

  Brill Bledsoe winks at Corinthia, and she smiles.

  In addition to eating his food, Channing drinks a creatine-rich, time-release, whey-protein shake. Brill and Marlene allow this dietary supplement on Thursdays during football season. Channing won’t look at his sister. He is clearly embarrassed by what happened today, as the news spread through their small three-story high school like so many ants on a paper plate of cold cuts.

  Or is the sudden emergence of Corinthia’s ability to vision disturbing to Channing? Is he somehow threatened by his sister’s newfound talent? Sickened by it?

  Sometimes Corinthia thinks her brother is so handsome that it physically hurts her to look at him. It can be piercing, like stepping on a thumbtack in socked feet. He is a B+ student and will definitely be playing football somewhere in college, as he is already fielding several offers from Division I schools throughout the Midwest, including Illinois State, Northern Illinois, and Missouri.

  As of late, Channing has been speaking to his only sibling less and less frequently. This started weeks ago, well before Corinthia’s outburst at school, and she can’t for the life of her figure out what’s caused his distance. There was a time when they were close. This was before her enormous growth spurt. They would play video games and stream Netflix movies and compete in best-four-out-of-seven basement Ping-Pong matches. But after she grew, their friendship drifted apart, and it’s been painful for Corinthia. The truth is that she pities her brother’s weakness. To her, Channing is a boy-man trapped by his own beauty. The other day she caught him touching himself while gazing at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, tracing a finger along one of his biceps, his ribs, his perfect hairless chest. Despite his breathtaking good looks and athletic prowess, Corinthia finds him to be strangely asexual. When she imagines him intimately arranged with another, invariably Channing’s partner is a large Nerf puppet named Yvonne, and he’s not actually fornicating with it but, rather, spooning with it the way a four-year-old might embrace a beloved fire truck under the Christmas tree. Sure, it’s well known throughout the Lugo community that he’s been dating senior cheerleader Winter Hornacek for the past three years, and they cling to each other in the hallways with a tenacity that would rival a pair of blind people trying to cross a frozen lake during an ice storm, but Corinthia has always felt that there was something false in their relationship, something performed. Despite Winter Hornacek’s outward good cheer toward big little sister Corinthia, there has always been something oddly vacant in her perfectly round, cervine homecoming-queen eyes.

  After a long silence marked by a score of utensils clinking on dinner plates, Marlene says to Channing, “So, how was practice?”

  With a tight, serious mouth, Channing replies that practice was “utilitarian” and gulps his shake. A worm of gray protein slop settles on his upper lip. He can’t be bothered right now, and the Bledsoes know and respect this. He is no doubt scrolling through the details of the varsity playbook in his head, seeing his routes like lines on a graph, feeling the hard cuts contracting in his thighs, his hamstrings, his calves, the arches in his sinewy feet.

  “Were you in pads today?” Brill asks.

  “No pads,” Channing replies, his voice congested with whey and taurine and L-arginine.

  To Corinthia it looks as if he’s drinking wet cement, and she briefly imagines Channing as a concrete statue, waking up in bed this way, skipping the glory of his final year of high school, college, and professional football, and simply becoming the inevitable monument of himself. Brill and Marlene hiring movers to have him transported over to Lugo Memorial, where he will be erected on a marble dais beside the flagpole.

  Corinthia feels a wicked delight, imagining her and Cloris Honniotis tagging the statue with black spray paint, smiting out the eyes with a hammer, adding a mock Chicago gang symbol or two.

  Corinthia always wonders where Channing is at school when the shit hits the fan, like whe
n Coach Task and Mr. Hauser are wrestling her to the ground, for instance, or when students are thumping ominously on the door of her private bathroom when she’s simply trying to have a good, clean pee. Where is her heroic older brother during these crucial moments?

  He’s nowhere, is where he is.

  Her brother lives in the Land of Nowhere.

  “Well, we’re all excited for the game tomorrow night,” Marlene says.

  “Clinton Academy,” Brill adds for good measure. “It’s a big one.”

  “We’ll all be there,” Marlene continues. “Right, Cori?”

  “Yep,” Corinthia manages to utter in between spoonfuls of mashed potatoes. Tonight she feels like she could eat everything in the house: all the contents of the refrigerator and the pantry, all the canned goods that are stacked in the cupboard over the microwave, all those pieces of salt-water taffy her mother hides in the flour bin, even Channing’s protein powder. The family would wake up and they’d be without food.

  Channing makes a face that’s almost a smile. Corinthia thinks he puts far too much pressure on himself, so much so that even when he intends to express appreciation facially, it comes off flat; not forced, just flat. There is an undeniable stoicism at play, one that might befit a much older man. A cowboy, for instance. Or a black-sheep drifter in a train-robbery movie. Perhaps it’s the burden of sacrifice for one’s community. Striving for excellence day in and day out has to really make it hard to muster a smile. It’s like a man who is hungry rather than happy. Channing has become too hungry to enjoy the taste of a good meal.

  That night, Corinthia rereads the first twenty pages of Lorcan Nutt’s The Smallest Hands. Just as she is about to drift off to sleep with the book tucked under her chin, there is a knock on her door.

  “Come in,” she says.

  The door is opened, and Channing stands there. He’s still wearing his gray varsity football sweats, and it’s hard to make out his face because he’s backlit by the soft yellow hallway light.