by Robert Reed
I lay there for a very long time.
I remember the sky—a clear warm blue, empty of clouds—and there was no reason to fear anything above me, or anywhere. I felt warm and safe in the grass, and I got a little bit lost. For a little while. Then the wind blew and the grass nodded and there was a garter snake that passed within arm’s reach, its body dark and the yellow stripes dirty and the lidless eyes hard and patient in a way that people can’t be patient. Then it was gone, and I felt rested and breathed easier, my throat pleasantly brassy, and I sat up and smelled the sun on the grass and the shadows in the woods and all the snakes curling in the tangled green growth. Or so it seemed.
Cody and Marshall and Beth were beside the almost-pond. Jack Wells emerged from the woods above me. He was carrying a magazine curled under one arm, and he was giggling. “Marshall!” he shouted. “Rich boy!” He uncurled the magazine and selected a page, the liquid crystals changing into an elegant long body. A naked woman’s body. “Look what I found!” he called out. He waved the woman’s picture, and he danced—
“Asshole!” Marshall answered. “Goddamn you—!”
Marshall ran after Jack. They vanished into the shadows of the woods, Marshall furious and frantic and embarrassed beyond measure. I laughed and hoped nobody got hurt—but wasn’t it funny?—and then I turned and saw Beth and Cody climbing toward me. Beyond them was the motorcade of vans and limousines. They were driving past us, toward the west, and the longest limousine was at the back. I looked at it and looked at it, but I couldn’t see anything besides the smoky windows and the shiny body and the reflected, distorted shapes of the ground and sky. It’s been years, yes, but I remember every detail. I can focus my mind and see the limousine beside me climbing the hill, and I can freeze that instant and stare hard. Oh yes, I see myself reflected on the limousine’s body—a tanned and average-built boy, pretty much handsome but somehow quite strange, particularly in the eyes—and then the limousine is past, gone with the whispering hum of its tires, and I breathe once and blink and turn and start to move again, walking down the grassy slope, walking toward the girls.
Two
The three of us were at the dinner table. The TV was off and it was late; dinner had been delayed by the news on TV and the phone calls from people who’d seen me with Dr. Florida. Yet still Mom couldn’t understand. It didn’t seem to fit inside her head. “It was really him? A busy man like him?” She had watched us on several channels, and she had heard me tell it; but all she could do was squint into her steaming corn and hold her mouth closed, skeptical to the end. “Why do you suppose he came here this year?” she wondered. “What made him?”
“Had to go somewhere,” Dad joked. Then he turned to me, saying, “Ryder? Where’s he gone before?”
I named places. I went back several years, recalling different parks scattered about the city.
“See? The luck of the draw,” Dad told us. He ate his corn and the dark cultured beef, moving with his usual slow precision. “He had to come here sooner or later.”
“I suppose.” Mom picked up her fork and stabbed at her food. After a minute, she said, “It’s funny what you notice on TV.”
“How do you mean?” he asked.
“Oh, things like Marshall getting so tall. Seeing him beside all those people…well, it was obvious. Wasn’t it, Kip? And I wouldn’t have guessed Cody could run so fast. She just streaked along. Her bulk and everything, and she just flew.”
I summoned that instant when I’d looked at my friends kneeling beside the dragon’s box, my gaze slow and complete. I concentrated on the little details in the milling crowd—the exact curls of the smiles, the angles of the cameras, the shirts not quite tucked into place and the shiny green grass stains on trouser legs. Then Dad was shaking me gently, and he said, “Ryder,” as if he’d been repeating my name for a long while. I blinked and realized what had happened. Mom was staring at her plate, the corn not steaming anymore. “Sorry,” I said, and Dad said, “For what?” and I ate fast, thinking about nothing else. Concentrate, concentrate. I finished and cleaned the table, giving the dishes to the washer. Then we had a sweet and cold dessert, something with strawberries and foam. Mom kept quiet, and Dad, sensing her mood, tried to fill the room with his own voice.
“Yeah, that’s something,” he said. “A little dragon and that neat trophy,” he said. “Quite the trophy, isn’t it? Old Florida pulled out the stops this year, coaxing the big networks to send people. A human interest story, all right. Fifty years of the contest, fifty dragons released…yours the biggest, right? That’s right. Just shows you what they can do when they set their minds to it. Quite the critter—”
I looked at both of them, considering their faces. I knew their expressions and their stances, having seen them pass through every color of mood, and there were moments when I felt close to reading their minds. I asked, “How many people saw us, Dad?”
“On TV? Millions, I suppose. Maybe billions by tomorrow.” He wasn’t a tall man, yet he looked tall. He was lean and bony, his face full of angles and shadows and wrinkles. Dr. Florida didn’t look eighty, no, but Dad seemed older than forty. Easily. His hair was full of tired gray, and if he wasn’t smiling I could see the darkness behind his looks. He was forever working to sound happy, keeping his voice bright and cheery; but I knew him. “I guess this’ll rank high on your days to savor, won’t it?”
“It was fun,” I admitted.
Mom asked, “How’s Beth doing? We haven’t seen her in a while.”
“She’s fine. Her folks got sick again.”
“That’s too bad.” She nodded and wondered, “Are they better now?”
“They’re fine.” I shrugged my shoulders.
Mom paused, then she asked, “Does she talk about them much? Her folks?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “She talks sometimes.”
Dad said, “Gwinn? Aren’t you hungry?”
She didn’t seem to hear him. “Some people have such sad lives,” she told me, and she shivered.
Mom took comfort from other people’s troubles. Beth’s folks had had terrible things happen to them years ago, in India’s civil war, and now they couldn’t leave their house for any reason. They were invalids, and Beth served as their nurse on bad days—singing to calm their nerves, tending their old wounds, and whatever else was needed. I didn’t know her folks myself; nobody else had ever gotten inside to see them. The most I’d seen were dried, shadowy figures at a window, pale hands pulling aside the curtains and strange eyes staring out at me…and I felt ever so cold thinking of them, my mind filling in those gruesome blanks.
Mom brightened all at once. She said, “Marshall’s running,” and giggled into her uneaten dessert. “He’s not exactly coordinated.”
“He’s got his own style,” Dad joked. “He sure does.”
I sat and ate.
“So,” said Dad, “when are you chasing the dragon?”
“I don’t know.”
“After school tomorrow? While the trail’s hot?”
“Maybe.”
“Not too much longer and you’ll be on the outside,” he warned me, reaching out and touching my closer hand.
I didn’t understand.
“You’ll be too old for the contest. You’re growing up.” He said it with a sudden, unexpected seriousness.
“I guess so,” I volunteered.
“You think the five of you can catch it?”
“Maybe—”
Mom began to laugh in a gentle, dark way.
“What is it, Gwinn?”
“Just people,” she told Dad. “I was thinking about people. Such strange creatures, aren’t they?”
“Absolutely,” he responded. “Very strange.”
“They baffle me. Do they baffle you, Kip?”
“All the time,” he laughed. “Pretty much every day.”
Mom was nearly my father’s height, with short, straw-colored hair and the roundest face in creation. She had tiny hands and precise mo
tions like Dad’s. People said they were very much alike and perfect matches for one another. They shared the office in the basement and the business, selling real estate, and they cleaned the house together and did the lawn work on weekends, and our meals came at the same times every day. A late dinner was strange, even remarkable, and everything tonight felt askew. The air was tense and oddly sad, which surprised me, and I tried to see what share of the sadness I had brought on myself.
With a philosophical tone, Dad said, “Such a day.”
Mom said nothing, nodding and studying her dessert. No, she decided. No, she couldn’t touch it. She pushed it away and sighed.
I was finished. I started to leave, excusing myself and pacing my steps, knowing the rhythms of the house. I lingered in the hallway, pretending to climb the stairs but hanging within earshot of the kitchen. I knew by instinct that precise moment when they would start to talk honestly—
“I can’t stand it,” she said. She breathed and said, “I just…I just wish…I don’t know.”
“What is it?” asked Dad.
She didn’t say anything. I was on the stairs, taking them on cat’s feet, and she finally admitted, “They saw him.”
“Who saw him?”
“Everyone, Kip. Like you said—”
“What do you mean?” he snapped.
“I mean a few billion strangers!”
“If anything,” he told her, “they noticed Cody. Not him.” He was impatient and a touch angry. “Ryder looks like a quiet, inquisitive boy. That’s all, and quit it.”
“I hope so.”
“Jesus, it’s a thirty-second news piece,” Dad reminded her. “He was on the screen how many seconds? Ten? You really believe he’s that odd that people are going to care—?”
“Well—”
“Quit it, Gwinn. Just stop.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “I’m too sensitive. You’re right, I admit it.”
Dad said something too soft to be heard.
Mom said, “Anyway.”
And I finished climbing the stairs, entered my room and sat on the polished stone floor. I crossed my legs and concentrated, escaping into the afternoon again. I began where I was lying on the long bench, holding everything at normal speed, and I ended with Beth and Cody and me walking home through the weedy bottoms. Every sensation was the same. I was existing in a string of wondrous moments, fresh for always, and if I wanted I could have tied the string’s ends together and made an endless loop. A million times I could have seen Dr. Florida smile and Cody leap at the dragon, felt Beth’s breast against my arm and the ringneck’s red tongue on my bare foot; and there would be Jack and Marshall fighting—and the same surge of fear rising through me, and then the same sudden finish, my adrenaline building and collapsing because certain odd clusters of neurons inside my head knew how to sputter and spark in the same reliable, meaning-rich ways.
People don’t think like I think.
Most people barely recall past times, and their memories are forever infected with wishful thinking and impenetrable holes. But I have my way of focusing—concentrating hard on things stored within me. To me a memory can be more real and true than the things of the moment. Memories are reality cured and conditioned into a hard, clear stuff that can be examined with care from every angle and with every sense, new details always lurking, always close.
I have an early memory of the parkland, for example.
We had just moved to the city, and our neighborhood was full of new houses and young families. Mom and Dad walked me down to the old streambed that was soon to become the bottoms. Big bulldozers were gutting out the trash and eroded earth, making room for a modern, efficient sewage treatment scheme. My folks had been reading about it. They spoke of big perforated pipes and special cleansing sands, understanding almost nothing. Mom said, “It’s Florida’s park,” and Dad said, “Florida is this town.” I wasn’t four years old, and a lot of the words were strange to me. They were so much noise. What I noticed most were the huge and magnificent bulldozers with their robot brains and their high, empty seats where people would sit and drive, should the robots fail. I felt their throbbing and clanking, the sensation frightening and fine; and I stood safe between my folks, Dad talking about the dozers now and their invisible riders, and Mom confessing that the dust was bothering her, so couldn’t we go home now? Please?
We walked through the future pasture. I remember more weeds than grasses, and the weeds had a rich stink that lingered on my clothes and skin. We crossed a newly made street and followed a second street up to our house, blue and bright and sandwiched between the other colored houses. I went upstairs to my new room and sat on the stone floor, a big sheet of old-fashioned paper between my legs and a lovely black crayon letting me make lines. I didn’t understand tailoring. My idea came to me from a simpler, childish source, and it had nothing to do with genes and splicing.
I remember drawing hard and fighting my clumsy young hands, concentrating on little details. I did the bulldozer as well as I could manage, then I looked in a mirror and made a snarling face and drew it too. Then I went downstairs and found Mom. “Look look look,” I said.
“I’m looking.” She was sitting on our new couch, my drawing in her lap. She said, “Goodness.”
I said it was Dozerman. The dozer was below, the man on top. I was on top. I was the man, I explained. “Dozerman! Dozerman!” I’d drawn it the way I saw it in my head, minus the shakes of my hands and the limits of my crayon. Mom watched me chug-chug around the room. I imagined myself with the funny Dozerman wheels, and I told her I’d grow up the same way. “Dozerman!”—powerful and loud, digging and pushing all day, all night, its big super-loop batteries brimming with juice and no need for food or water, or anything—
“All right, dear. Stop.” Mom stared at me, folding the drawing in half and tucking it out of sight. “No more,” she said. “What you should do is go upstairs and rest. You must be tired. Aren’t you tired?”
Dozerman didn’t get tired. I tried telling her so.
“But you’re not him, are you? Are you?” She shook her head, saying, “So stop, please. Would you? Ryder? Would you stop now please?”
When I was very young and my folks were talking—at the dinner table, watching TV, or anywhere—I’d catch them forgetting something or telling a story wrong. I would correct them. Of course I meant nothing bad, and I certainly didn’t wish to seem proud or to belittle them for their failures. I didn’t even understand at first. Couldn’t they summon up the past? Did they blink at the wrong moments? I wondered. You put your keys there, Mommy. No, up there. Mr. Evans said the house was on Weavehaven, Daddy. And who cut down that tree? The one by the green house. The green house that was yellow last year, Daddy. Mommy. You remember! We drove past it when it was Christmas and they had all the fake bambis pulling Santa across the yard. We went down this street and turned, and Daddy said, “I feel snow in my bones, Gwinn. Maybe when we’re home we can melt it together,” and it snowed three inches that night. It did—!
My memory grew as I got older, and I began to have spells.
My capacity to focus was the culprit. Just as I could look inside myself, I could watch the world without and lose myself for times. Once when I was five I climbed a high stool to look at water boiling in a big pot. I’d never gotten lost in such a thing before. The clear water churned and popped, the bubbles skating along the bottom, and growing, and then rising free with such violence that my heart was left pounding and my chest felt tight. Mom was beside me after a while. She took my arms and face, saying, “Oh, what is it? Ryder? Ryder?” Couldn’t she see the water boiling? How could she miss such a wonder? I tried to answer her, but I couldn’t speak. I was completely lost, oblivious to the scalding steam and my bright burns. And she was terrified, of course. She told Dad so later. Another damned trance, and she didn’t care what the doctors said. I was hallucinating! These weren’t discrimination problems, or whatever they were calling them this week.
It was just boiling water, for God’s sake! And while I listened I grieved for her and for Dad. I did. That was the moment, precise and undeniable, when I understood that my folks were, in some fashion, blind.
Then I was six years old, and a certain teacher came home with me. The meeting had been arranged and my folks were waiting in the living room, wearing good clothes and smelling of soap. “Go play in your room, Ryder.” Mom spoke with her voice slow and tight, her face strange. “Shut your door so we don’t bother you. All right?”
I went upstairs. My room was cool and dark with the shades drawn, and my door didn’t quite fill its frame. The stone floor served to reflect sounds through the gap at the bottom. I heard talk from the living room. I focused on every sound.
“We’re glad to meet you,” said Dad. “Can I get you something?”
“A soft drink,” said the teacher.
“What can we do for you?” asked Mom. “Is anything wrong?”
“Oh, no. No.” The teacher was a fat woman, and old. She was wearing a huge bright dress and paint on her face, and no one liked her. Not at school, at least. The kids called her a witch and worse, and the other teachers said hard things when they thought no one was in earshot. I lay on the floor and thought about the things I’d overhead, the voices like angry bees in my head. “Manipulative,” they said. “Two-faced.”
“I was studying Ryder’s files,” she explained, “and I thought this would be a good time to meet his parents. That’s all.”
“It’s good meeting you,” said Dad.
“A very special boy. Unique, I think.” She wondered, “Where, if I might ask, did you have the refinements done?” Refinement was the same as tailoring. She said the word slowly, as if it was three words.
