Lost Boys

by Orson Scott Card

  "Sorry," he said in a small voice.

  They both burst out laughing. "Just stop bouncing the ball inside the house, Road Bug," said Step.

  "OK," said Robbie. "It don't bounce good on the carpet anyway."

  "It doesn't bounce well," said Step.

  "I know," said Robbie, puzzled. "I told you."

  Half an hour after DeAnne left for the church, the phone rang. It was DeAnne. "This is going to sound stupid, Junk Man, but would you mind asking Robbie where he got that ball?"

  "He's had it for years," said Step.

  "But it rolled down one of the yucky holes in front of the house the first week we lived here," she said. "I want to know how it got out again. You didn't rescue it, did you?"

  "I didn't even know it was lost. Maybe I could put it back."

  "Step, please find out or it'll drive me crazy for the rest of my life."

  He agreed, hung up, and went in search of Robbie.

  "The invisible guy got it for me," said Robbie. "He said it wasn't very far down in the drain, and it came when he called it."

  Step might have rebuked him for making up such a weird story, but the mention of an invisible guy gave him pause. "Where did you meet this invisible guy, Road Bug?"

  "In the yard today," said Robbie. "He was naked because if he wore clothes people would see him."

  "But you could see him," said Step.

  "I'm your son," said Robbie, as if that explained everything.

  Lee Weeks, thought Step. "How long ago was this?" asked Step. "Before or after Stevie got home from school?"

  "Before," said Robbie. "He's gone now. He had to fly to Raleigh."

  Step went around the house, double-checking the locks. Then he made Robbie and Stevie go into Betsy's and Zap's bedroom while he went outside.

  It was nearly dark, with scant moonlight, but Step saw him almost at once, a pale ghostlike figure standing up against the neighbor's high hedge in the front yard. Step locked the front door behind him and strode toward him.

  "How did you get over here with no clothes on, Lee?" he asked.

  Lee laughed in delight. "I knew you'd be able to see me. Just like your son."

  "You're lucky it wasn't a cop who saw you, Lee. This is called 'indecent exposure' and you go to jail for it."

  In fact, though, Lee's naked body was more sad than anything, so pale, the hair making feeble shadows. "I don't appreciate you talking to my son in this condition."

  "I can't help it if he has your power to see the invisible," said Lee.

  "You've been palming your medicine again, I guess."

  "Mother checks my hands," said Lee. "She checks my mouth. And she watches me so I don't throw it up."

  "Do you hate it that much?"

  "It makes me feel like I'm moving through the world in a fog," said Lee. "When I don't take it, everything gets so sharp and clear. I can see forever. And my thoughts-I can think the thoughts of God. I don't have to sleep. I haven't slept in five days."

  "I can believe it," said Step, noticing that if Lee was God, then God chewed gum. "Why are you here?"

  "If you're really going to be my spokesman, then you have to be tested."

  "I'm not going to be your spokesman, Lee. Where are your clothes?"

  "Those are the robes of my captivity," he said. "I never had clothing."

  "Yeah, well, they don't fit your mother."

  "My mother likes you," said Lee. "She thinks you're really smart."

  "How nice."

  "But she says you don't like woman psychiatrists."

  "She's mistaken," said Step.

  "Oh, you don't have to pretend. I don't like them either. They're so bossy. And they don't understand what it's like. They've got their drugs to turn you into a robot, when you're just this close to seeing it all. To getting the whole picture."

  The picture I need right now, thought Step, is how to get you safely back into your mother's care without endangering my family and preferably without bringing in the police. "We never get the whole picture in this life, Lee."

  "I do," said Lee. "I see that you're planning to call my mother."

  "Of course I am," said Step. "You need your medicine."

  "Never again. I'm going to go seven days without sleeping and on the seventh day I'll come into my full power. It's sleep that dulls our minds, you know. I almost made it once before. I was driving along in that jet-black Z and I knew that all I had to do was just lean back to the right angle in my seat and I could fly anywhere. It was God in me. I wish I'd done it, Step. But the police wouldn't listen to me. The guy from the car lot must have called them. He didn't understand that it was my car now. I drove exactly fifty- five, so the policemen wouldn't stop me. But they have no respect for the law. They knew they had to stop me before I began to fly. They cut me off, about five or six police cars, and I got out of the car when they told me but they made me lie down on the road and the gravel got into my face and it really hurt." His voice went high at the end. A kind of whimper, a childlike cry. It made Step think of Howie Mandel's little-kid voice, small and high.

  It was funny when Mandel did it.

  "That was the time I was in the hospital. I told them, I can't stand to be confined. But they strapped me down anyway, it's this kind of straitjacket for when you're lying on the table. You can, like, lift one arm, but if you do, it tightens down the straps on all the others, including the one around your throat. So if you move your arms both at once you can choke yourself. And I kept thinking, what if I fall off the table? I'll strangle here and they won't do anything because they're jealous of me and they want me to die without ever coming into my power."

  "I think they were trying to help you, Lee."

  "It was killing me. So I started screaming, I don't like this, I don't like this, over and over but when the guy finally came in he just tightened it more so I couldn't even move one arm anymore and he said, We won't loosen this until you show us that you're in control of yourself, and I said How can I be in control of myself when you've tied me up? You've got to let me stand up, I won't go anywhere, I promise, and he says Yeah right. And then Mom got there and she had the medicine again but when she tried to give it to me I threw up right on her."

  He laughed uproariously. Then stopped. "S he won't let me drive anymore. I had to walk all the way over here.

  Look. My feet are bleeding."

  It was true. When he sat down in the grass and held up his feet for inspection, Step could see even by the light from the porch that they were badly lacerated, with bits of gravel and road dirt ground into the wounds.

  "That must hurt," said Step.

  "I'm above pain," said Lee. "That's how I know I'm on the verge of my power. Pain means nothing to me. I could break you in half and you couldn't hurt me. I could break you up into pieces."

  Step thought of Lee talking to Robbie in this condition and shuddered with retroactive dread.

  "It's time for your test," said Lee. "To see if you're worthy to be my servant and accompany me into immortality."

  Step could think of several ways to enter immortality, and he didn't want any of them to happen right now, least of all with Lee Weeks. "I don't intend to take any tests," said Step.

  "Fine," said Lee. "But I'll bet you can't guess how I faked Mom out about the medicine."

  Step said the first thing that came to mind. "You hid the pill in your chewing gum."

  Lee cackled with glee. "That was the test! You passed it!"

  "One question? The whole test?"

  "That's it. I'm going to take you with me now." Lee scrambled to the hedge on all fours, and started searching for something. A gun? Step didn't intend to wait to find out.

  "Wait a minute," said Step. "What about my test for you?"

  "You don't test me," said Lee. "I'm God, you idiot."

  "So you say," said Step. "Anybody can say that."

  "But I'm invisible."

  "Not to me."

  "What's your test, then?" asked Lee.


  "Let me go in and get it."

  "Get what?"

  "The test. It's an object, and you have to tell me where I got it. If you're God, you'll know."

  "I already know what it is," said Lee. "God already knows what your whole test is. When I asked you, that was a joke."

  "OK," said Step. "Wait there."

  He unlocked the front door, went inside, and locked it behind him. He called Stevie's name as he headed for the phone. Dr. Weeks's number was ringing when Stevie got into the kitchen. "Go get me Robbie's ball. Tell Robbie I need it right now, and bring it to me."

  Then Dr. Weeks answered.

  "Are you looking for Lee?" asked Step.

  "Is he there?"

  "Naked and talking about taking me into immortality with him. He might have a gun."

  "Lee isn't violent," she said.

  "His feet are badly injured. I think you'll want an ambulance."

  "We'll be right there. Don't let him leave." She hung up.

  Stevie came back with the ball. Robbie had followed him. "Go back to Betsy's room, boys," said Step.

  "Stay there and don't leave."

  Back outside, the door locked behind him, Step held out the ball. "Do you recognize this?"

  "I called it, and it came to me," said Lee. "I have called it again, and you have brought it unto me."

  "How did I get this ball, Lee? If you're God, you'll know."

  "You got it from Robbie, of course," said Lee.

  "No, Robbie got it from me. It was a present. So I ask you again, how did I get this ball?"

  Lee tried several answers, but as soon as he spoke, he immediately refused to let Step tell him whether he was right or not. "This is very hard," said Lee. "You have great powers, Brother Fletcher. You are able to conceal this knowledge from me."

  The guessing game lasted until the ambulance and Dr. Weeks arrived ten minutes later.

  "You tricked me, you bastard," said Lee.

  "That was the test," said Step. "To know that the ball wasn't the test."

  Lee's fury turned to disappointment. "Then I failed."

  "You aren't God, Lee. You're just a nice kid with a serious problem."

  Lee stood impassively as the men from the ambulance took him by the arms. Dr. Weeks came up to him, baring the needle of a syringe.

  "Please don't, Mom," said Lee. "You'll ruin everything. It'll all be wasted."

  "You need to sleep," said Dr. Weeks.

  "I need to sleep with you," said Lee, laughing. "Isn't that what your precious Freud said? I need to kill Dad and sleep with you."

  "How did you get off your medicine this time?"

  "Step knows," said Lee.

  "He hid it inside his chewing gum," said Step.

  Lee looked crestfallen. "You told."

  Dr. Weeks pushed the plunger down and Lee watched, fascinated, as the fluid went into his arm. "Is this the fast stuff?"

  "Yes," said Dr. Weeks.

  It was true. By the time they got him to the ambulance, Lee wasn't walking under his own power. They strapped him down inside. "Take him right in," Dr. Weeks told them. "They're expecting him. I'll be there very soon."

  They drove off. Dr. Weeks stood there on the lawn, facing Step. "Thank you," she said.

  "It must be hard," said Step. "Being a psychiatrist, and having a manic-depressive child."

  "Lee is the reason I became a psychiatrist. So I could understand him."

  "And do you?"

  "No," she said. "Not when he's like this. Not even when he's not like this. I think he likes his madness better. I think he doesn't want to get well." She smiled wanly. "You don't like me, Mr. Fletcher."

  "I think you should have warned us about Le e when he joined the Church."

  "When one is alone and at wit's end," she said quietly, "one seizes upon even the tiniest hope."

  "Did you think we could heal him?" asked Step, thinking of Sister LeSueur and wondering if she would think herself up to the job.

  "No," she said. "But I thought, since you believed ... as you believe ... that God talks to human beings ... I thought you might accept him."

  "We did," said Step. "As best we could."

  "And I, too," said Dr. Weeks. "As best I can."

  After she left, he rummaged through the hedge, looking for whatever it was that Lee had been reaching for.

  It wasn't a weapon after all. It was the Book of Mormon that the missionaries had given him.

  The autumn wore on, the routine changing but not in any important way. Jerusha brought along a physical therapist on her October visit, and he told Step that what he was doing, stretching out Zap's muscles and moving his limbs through their full range of motion, was not only good but essential. "It's like his brain doesn't have the normal connections to his muscles. When he shoots off a command, it does too much, which is why he kicks so hard, but then it disappears, just like that, and so he can't sustain anything. By himself he can't keep his limbs limber, so to speak. So you have to keep his tendons from tightening up on him. Same thing they do for coma patients."

  "We'll have to do this for how long?" asked Step.

  "Till he finds some alternate neural pathway to let him do it for himself. He will, you know. Just give him time."

  It was encouraging, and now DeAnne and Step took turns twice a day, flexing and extending all of Zap's joints. Robbie and Stevie even picked up on it-Stevie silently, wordlessly doing exactly what he had seen Step and DeAnne do; Robbie far too rough and ne ver quite correctly, so that they had to insist that he only do "Zap bending" when they were there.

  DeAnne's hardest job with Zap was bathing him. Zap didn't cry much-only when he was in real pain, which happened mostly when she fed him formula and he didn't burp enough. However, bathtime was torment for him. For some reason the water terrified him. Maybe, Step speculated, because gravity was the one constant, the one thing that felt in control in his life, and in the water the gravity just wasn't there the same way. DeAnne only answered, Maybe, but who can know? What mattered was that bathtime was the only time that Zap ever got really upset, and then he was frantic, and his desperate cries just tore DeAnne apart, because she couldn't help him feel better and yet she couldn't give up bathing him, either. Finally what she evolved was a song that she called "Tubby Time for Jeremy." It was completely absurd and the first time she realized Step was listening to her she blushed and stopped, but he insisted she teach him the words and he sang along with her, so she wasn't embarrassed anymore.

  Tubby time in the city.

  Tubby time in the town.

  Tubby time for Jeremy, It's tubby time right now.

  So Tubby-dub and scrubby-dub, It's time for your nightgown.

  It's tubby time all over the world, So please don't frown.

  As she explained to Step, the song didn't really help Zap at all. But it helped her,- it soothed her so she could endure his desperate sobbing and keep on bathing him without going to pieces inside.

  Around the middle of October, Step and DeAnne both became aware that Stevie's behavior was changing just a little. He was no longer being quite as obedient as before. In fact, at times he seemed almost rebellious.

  The rule in the house now was that no kid could go outside without one of the parents, and Stevie knew that-in fact, he had several times caught Betsy going out and brought her back in. But one day DeAnne came into the family room from the back of the house just as Stevie was coming inside through the back door.

  "Stevie, what were you doing outside?"

  "Looking," said Stevie.

  "Good heavens, young man, you're filthy! Where have you been?"

  "Under the house," he said.

  She remembered the latticework skirt around the base of the house and immediately flashed back to her imagined picture of what it was like under there, all the bugs and webs and mud and filth. Having crickets come up through the closet last winter hadn't done anything to change that image in her mind, either. "That's just incredible!" she said. "You know what th
e rule is about going outside, and to think you pried open the latticework and went under the house, that's just unspeakable! I'm going to have Bappy come over and nail it all down. Now get into the laundry room and strip off your clothes while I get a bath running."

  Later that night DeAnne and Step discussed what had happened, and they realized that because of Stevie's hard adjustment and their worry about these invisible friends of his, they had been slack with him. They may not have held him to a firm enough standard of discipline.

  "But when you think about it, when would we have disciplined him?" asked Step. "I mean, till now he hasn't done anything wrong."

  "Well, now he has, and I don't know what to do about it. I can't start deadbolting the back door and taking the key out because what if there was a fire? I can just see the headline: FAMILY HAD PLENTY OF TIME TO

  ESCAPE BUT DEADBOLTS WERE ALL LOCKED AND KEYS COULD NOT BE FOUND IN TIME."

  "They don't write headlines that long," said Step.

  "Oh, good, so we'll die and no one will even know why."

  "Less embarrassing that way."

  "I think we need to show him that this is serious. I mean, there's a killer somewhere in Steuben, and Stevie's cutting out of the house without even telling us. Not to mention crawling under the house, I mean that's disgusting."

  "Not really," said Step. "Not when you realize that my younger sister and my younger brothers used to eat dirt."

  "Oh, gross!" cried DeAnne. "Did you have to tell me that?"

  "They'd come into the house with flecks of mud all around their mouths and then try to act innocent when Mom said, 'Have you been eating dirt again?' And they'd open their mouths to say, 'No, Mom,' and the whole inside of their mouths was black with mud."

  "I'm going to throw up, Step. I mean it."

  "I'm just saying, kids like to mess in dirt. I always liked to dig in it, and maybe Stevie would like to, too, only there's just no place for it."

  "It's a rental house. We can't just tear up a section of lawn for him."

  "Oh," said Step. "That's what I was just about to suggest."