Fum

by Adam Rapp

  She opens the magazine, thumbs through its glossy pages, most of which are dominated by ads for outdoor living products and services: RV dealerships, big-game tours, hiking and fishing gear companies.

  The cover of the October issue features a thickly coated black Mongolian she-wolf with eerie blue eyes, huddling with two of her cubs on a snowy embankment somewhere in Siberia.

  Corinthia flips through this issue as well, looking carefully at the outdoor-living ads and Alaskan vistas and various articles about mating habits, migration patterns, and hunting strategies.

  In her pocket she’s been carrying the small wooden wolf that she found in Channing’s bedroom. She puts it on the table and stares at it, wondering if there’s some other clue as to her brother’s whereabouts.

  She is continuing to leaf through the October issue when Channing’s girlfriend, the beautiful, honey-haired, doe-eyed Winter Hornacek, appears before her.

  Did I just somehow summon her? Corinthia wonders.

  Is there some sort of homing device hidden in the little wooden wolf?

  “Winter,” Corinthia says, closing the magazine.

  “Hello, Corinthia,” Winter says. She is holding a pink subject binder in front of her, her fists clutching either side of it as if she is manning a shield. Her makeup is so immaculately applied, it looks like the work of an entire team of expert cosmetics artists. Her tan cashmere turtleneck is a perfect choice to combat the early autumn chill, and also highlights the smooth slopes of her lovely breasts.

  Corinthia starts to ask her how she’s doing, but before she can execute the musical lift at the end of the question, Winter Hornacek lets her have it.

  “You know something about Channing, don’t you,” she states rather evenly.

  Corinthia just sits there, holding the PDF printout of her reading material.

  “I know you know where he is,” Winter adds. Her pupils and irises seem to be one entity now, both eyes almost entirely dark with the kind of righteous rage befitting a queen, or at least Lugo Memorial’s Homecoming Queen.

  Corinthia begins calmly, “I’m sorry, Winter, but —”

  “But what?” Winter shouts. Her pretty face is red now, or sort of orange. She’s obviously been holding her breath. Corinthia suddenly thinks her brother’s girlfriend resembles the local female TV news anchor Tracy Jeopardy, who can purportedly execute over three hundred floors on the StairMaster in under an hour at Fare Thee Well Fitness, Lugo’s new, state-of-the-art health club.

  “You saw the tornadoes,” Winter Hornacek continues. “You saw those stupid geese. And now you’re telling me you have no idea where your brother is? That you can’t see him, too? Corinthia, in case you haven’t noticed, Homecoming is quickly upon us. Homecoming!”

  Winter Hornacek breathes again — she inhales and exhales exactly three times — and continues:

  “Just three months ago while Channing and I were at Six Flags Great America up in Gurnee, just after we got strapped into the Giant Drop, he gave me this charm bracelet, which he purchased at Zales! Zales!” Winter cries, now going into a one-handed hold of the pink binder, thrusting her bejeweled wrist into Corinthia’s face. “Just after we got strapped in, he put this around my wrist — THIS! Can you see it?”

  “I can,” Corinthia says.

  “And as we crested to the top of the tower, he attached THIS BRACELET to THIS WRIST with its sterling-silver clasp, and then he told me he LOVED ME and that he couldn’t wait for HOMECOMING, where we would again be crowned KING AND QUEEN, and his voice cracked, it practically broke IN HALF, and then we fell twenty stories at a speed of over SIXTY MILES AN HOUR. Can you see this bracelet, Corinthia?”

  Winter rotates her wrist so that the fluorescent library lights can dance off its dazzling details.

  “It’s a PERSONA CHARM bracelet from ZALES, and it has a SUNFLOWER and FOUR MINIATURE HEARTS and CHAMPAGNE GLASSES with CHAMPAGNE IN THEM and my BIRTHSTONE, which is an AMETHYST, and two CUDDLING KITTENS who are obviously IN LOVE, and a bronze FOOTBALL, and this right here is a tiny MERCEDES-BENZ SL-K conVERTible, which is the car we’re going to OWN someday, even though material objects don’t mean a THING to EITHER of us, and THIS PERFECT LITTLE THING next to the MERCEDES happens to be a FROSTED CUPCAKE CHARM, which features PINK and WHITE AUSTRIAN CRYSTALS! DO YOU SEE? Channing even put a little SNOOPY at the end of it because HE KNOWS HOW MUCH I LOVE PEANUTS!”

  And just like that, Cloris Honniotis — all four feet nine inches of her — has materialized at the young adult reading table.

  “Can I help you with something?” Cloris says calmly to Winter Hornacek, who has retracted her wrist and gone back to manning her pink binder like a shield.

  “No!” Winter cries — and she’s doing exactly that now — she’s crying. “You can’t help me with ANYTHING, you FERAL MIDGET! You and GODZILLA here obviously can’t do a damn thing to help ANYBODY!”

  And then, in perhaps the quickest three-part move that’s ever been witnessed at Lugo’s infrequently frequented district library, a move clearly informed by one who seriously practices Brazilian jujitsu, Cloris Honniotis confiscates Winter Hornacek’s extremely pink binder, extends her short arms to their vertical limit, and bops her smartly on the crown of her head with it, so smartly that the detonation emits an audible thwunk that one might normally associate with, say, a sledgehammer being brought down onto an old sidewalk that needs to be recemented.

  Winter Hornacek goes down on one knee, attempts to get up, and then falls onto both knees.

  It’s amazing how beautiful her brother’s girlfriend can look during such a terrible moment, Corinthia thinks, especially one containing such embarrassing, asinine shame that should, by all accounts, belie even the most competent and deserving incumbent Homecoming Queen.

  “Stand up!” Cloris Honniotis barks at Winter Hornacek, who makes a swallowing sound and then abides, slowly standing, tears now slicking her lovely pronounced cheekbones, yet miraculously not disturbing her makeup in any noticeable way. At close to five feet nine inches tall, Winter Hornacek, who normally exhibits exemplary posture, is nearly a foot taller than Cloris Honniotis, but at the moment, her physical stature has been rendered meaningless.

  “Now, get out of my library!” Cloris Honniotis seethes through her teeth. She thrusts the pink binder into Winter Hornacek’s breasts. Winter then quietly turns toward the checkout desk, a bit dazed, passes through the turnstile, and exits, her right hand grazing the top of her head where she’s been thumped with her own binder.

  Three hours later, after Cloris Honniotis’s superior, Norma Klondike, fields an e-mail from Dr. Gunter Hornacek, Winter’s ophthalmologist father and esteemed member of the Lugo Memorial School Board, Cloris Honniotis is relieved of her duties at Lugo’s district library, whose carefully curated young adult section will never be the same.

  Two days later, in a cream-colored office with handsome midcentury furniture, Dr. Nene Flung and Corinthia Bledsoe sit across from each other on cream-colored leather beanbag chairs. Corinthia sort of lies back on hers, her knees tented, her shoulders, neck, and head kissing the warm, smooth hide of the beanbag. Dr. Flung, on the other hand, is perched weightlessly on hers, sitting with her legs crossed, a steaming earth-colored mug cradled in her hands. The office smells like eucalyptus and green tea.

  “So, tornadoes and geese,” Dr. Flung says, following Corinthia’s explanation of her two visions, their settings and contexts, her physical experience, the migraine-like headache following the three tornadoes, the epileptic-like seizure roughly coinciding with the arrival of the geese.

  It’s cold today, more brisk than normal for the middle of October — it’s actually in the low forties — and Dr. Flung’s plum turtleneck gives the effect that her pretty head is floating slightly higher than her body, as if it contains an intelligence that functions better in the room’s higher altitude.

  Dr. Flung says how curious it is that none of the medical scans produced evidence of unusual matter in the brain.<
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  After a long silence, she adds, “There is considerable evidence that the vast majority of us access only a small fraction of what our brains are actually capable of.”

  She goes on to cite a recent finding in which a man in Germany was able to predict unusual behavior in a herd of cows. Without any knowledge of farming, the weather, or matters bovine, he was able to predict what fields they would migrate to when left to their own devices.

  “He was twelve for twelve,” Dr. Flung says. “They came to him in visions.”

  “I saw a cow, too,” Corinthia says. “At center court of the field house. And when we arrived at school the morning of the tornadoes, this farmer had come to collect her.”

  “It sounds like you have a gift,” Dr. Flung offers.

  “A lot of good it’s done me,” Corinthia replies.

  She’s been suspended from school for almost six weeks now and is barely interested in her schoolwork. She’s stuck at home, where she pretty much completely avoids her mother, who seems to be shuffling around in her own world of confusion, no doubt aggravated by the disappearance of Channing and in no way relieved by the FirmaMall collapse.

  “It’s your choice to think of it this way,” Dr. Flung offers.

  “In what way?”

  “Cynically,” Dr. Flung says.

  “I want to stop taking my medication.”

  Dr. Flung knows not to ask why, but rather to wait for Corinthia to actively offer an explanation.

  “I have too many chemicals in me,” Corinthia eventually continues. “All these meds are obviously screwing with my brain.”

  Dr. Flung rotates her mug in her hands and offers the possibility of considering these visions a good thing.

  “So few of us have access to what’s beyond the realm of normal perception.”

  “Everyone thinks I’m a freak.”

  “You’ve been different from the others since your growth spurt,” Dr. Flung says. “And the fact is that for the rest of your life, you’re not going to be like anybody else. And you know this, Corinthia.”

  Corinthia has no response. She’s suddenly reminded of why she stopped seeing Dr. Flung: it’s because this slight woman with the simple, clear vision of her circumstances has been the only person in her life who actually makes her face the truth, and this grew to be too uncomfortable. But now, during this difficult time, at this very moment at least, Corinthia appreciates it.

  “You didn’t get suspended because you saw those tornadoes,” Dr. Flung says. “You got suspended because the administrative leaders at your high school felt you were upsetting your fellow students.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “I know you didn’t. But the fact of the matter is that you’re seven feet four and a quarter inches tall, and when a person this large gets excited and damages school property, it can be quite upsetting.”

  “I only broke one door.”

  “Still,” Dr. Flung says. She sips from her mug of hot water.

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m coming out of my body. Like there’s an animal inside me.”

  “That is your rage,” Dr. Flung says. “It’s perfectly okay to be in touch with it. When you wrote ‘FUM’ on your shirt in the cafeteria, you were expressing your rage. How did you feel after that?”

  “Great.”

  “Good,” Dr. Flung says. “That was a healthy expression of your rage. And you felt relief, no? You forced others to contend with your feelings. This is a healthy step.”

  Corinthia nods. Since she wrote that FUM on the front of her shirt with black spray paint, she’s also written it on the inside of her leg, on the back of Lorcan Nutt’s novel The Smallest Hands, and on her bathroom mirror in the basement.

  “Perhaps the next step in dealing with this is to figure out how to share your visions with poise,” Dr. Flung says. “To train your system to respond to the imagery in a calmer, more controlled way, to relax for a moment or two and be with the prophecy, to process it internally before rushing toward some irreversible action.”

  Corinthia nods.

  Next Dr. Flung suggests that they do the wall exercise. She uses a remote control to lower the lights and spritzes the air with a small, cylindrical atomizer, releasing more eucalyptus.

  Corinthia rolls off her beanbag, removes her old-school size 22 low-top Pony basketball shoes, and lies on her back, extending her corduroy-clad legs flat on the floor, her arms elongated behind her, her wrists extending beyond her plaid flannel sleeves, her palms conjoined, so that she’s nearly eleven feet long now, like some supersize human kayak.

  In order to make space, Dr. Flung has to dismount from her beanbag and move it to the corner. She conducts the exercise from the other side of the room, where her sleek teak desk and handsome installation of jade plants are arranged.

  During the exercise, Dr. Flung paces slowly, padding a slow parabola in socked feet, her hands clasped behind her back, her voice calm and clear.

  After the familiar breathing and relaxation primer, which takes a few minutes, Dr. Flung instructs Corinthia that once the slate wall is summoned, she should try to conjure the image of the geese, to welcome them as she might a friend, and that once the wall and the geese are alive and present, the goal is to breathe, to relax, to invite a sense of ease, to use the cool surface of the slate wall to calm herself if necessary.

  And this is exactly what Corinthia does. She can see her familiar wall, just as it was the last time she conjured it: its gray, monolithic vastness, the air around it cool and molecular. She approaches it, stands very close so she can behold the tiny fissures and imperfections on its surface, infinitesimal as the fibers of silk. She can see the moisture gathering on its exterior. . . . A ladybug passes. She resists the urge to take the insect in her hand. She simply stands before her wall and breathes. She can no longer hear Dr. Flung’s voice. She is on her own now.

  Moments later, she can hear the faintest honking, the distant beating of wings, almost a figment of sound. It grows more definite as it draws closer and closer. She knows they are coming. It feels as inevitable as the moment she fell to her living-room floor, when she saw the onslaught of their wavering black form, that enormous liquid-like force that seized her mind and body and drove her to the carpeting. She stares up at the top of her wall — miles up, it seems — and there they are, their honking louder now, discordant and violent. But Corinthia continues to breathe, to draw upon the wall’s strength to remain poised.

  And now there are hundreds of geese, flying over the wall and tacking back in a long arc behind her, their dark bodies powered by the deep, steady, thunderous strokes of their wings. There are thousands of them. She can see the white collar stripe marking their necks. They continue passing over the wall. The scattered orchestra of their honks is almost deafening.

  Corinthia turns and faces what appears to be a cyclone of geese. She steps away from the wall and walks toward it. She is in a meadow of long grass now, thousands of geese circling maddeningly above her. But she remembers Dr. Flung’s instructions and simply breathes through it, summoning the strength and solitude of her wall.

  She closes her eyes.

  When she opens them, the geese are gone. They’ve disappeared into thin air . . . except for one goose, which is sitting in the meadow, a good distance away from her. Separated from its flock, it seems smaller than the rest, somehow reduced by its aloneness, gosling-like. It honks a few times. It rears up, trying to flap itself into the air, but it appears to be lame. It skitters about for a moment and then comes to rest.

  Just as Corinthia is about to take a step toward the wounded goose, a wolf appears from behind a stand of trees. It is hackle-backed, gray with yellow eyes. Its sharp, sickle-shaped irises exude a knowing madness. The wolf approaches the goose, circles it. The goose honks and attempts to flap its lame wing, but it can’t lift itself off the meadow. The wolf wears what appears to be a smile across its long snout. Its tail hangs low. Another wolf appears from the stand of trees. And then ano
ther, and another. They yelp to one another. Their yelps are high-pitched, almost jubilant. They start to circle the goose as a unit, three going in one direction, two trotting the opposite path, their tails low, their smiles wide, yellow-toothed and lunatic. Three more wolves join the pack. The goose cries out, its honks almost human-sounding. And then the wolves start going in, one by one, nipping at the goose, their yelps like children shrieking with joy. A blur of feathers starts to boil above the circle. . . .

  Corinthia opens her eyes. She is panting. Dr. Flung is kneeling at her side, holding out a bottle of water.

  “I think I lost you for a minute there,” she tells Corinthia, offering the bottle.

  Corinthia sits up, brings the tips of her fingers to her temples.

  “What happened?” Dr. Flung asks. “What did you see?”

  “Wolves,” she says, taking the bottle of water. “I saw wolves.”

  Not even an hour later, Corinthia finds herself in the center of town, at Lugo’s main municipal building, an impressive, four-story block of brick with a portico and marble hallways, which contains the courthouse, Lugo’s lone Starbucks, a community meeting hall, a small visitors’ bureau kiosk, the police precinct, and the office of Dole Ossining, who’s been the mayor of Lugo, Illinois, for two consecutive terms. In front of the building, erected on a short lawn and surrounded by park benches, is a brass statue of Captain Clyde Lugo, the legendary Union Army hero and agricultural leader and the town’s namesake when it was incorporated in 1865, only months after the end of the Civil War. According to the brass plaque below the large figure, in addition to being a heavily awarded Union Army hero and close friend of fellow Illinoisan Abraham Lincoln, Clyde Lugo was really into corn and soybeans and lived to be 102.

  Corinthia has been waiting to speak with Mayor Ossining for over twenty minutes. She’s walked all the way here from Dr. Flung’s office, some three miles away, and the arches of her feet are inflamed and aching, as are her knees and lower back. While passing through Lugo’s business sector, Corinthia came face-to-face with another FUM that had been spray-painted on the glass of an empty storefront formerly occupied by Lugo’s lone independent bookstore, Black Bear Books. The three running red letters slashed across Corinthia’s reflection in the window, and in that moment she felt like she was fading; fading from her hometown, from her high school, from her family, even from herself. She reached up to touch one of the letters and realized that the word had been painted on the inside of the glass. Did this mean that the proprietor of the storefront was somehow in cahoots with the vandals? Were they planning some sort of Corinthia Bledsoe exhibit? Outside of her parents and Dr. Flung, is there a single adult in Lugo who might actually sympathize with what she’s been going through?