by Paul Russell
Once, when he was in college, a boy had stopped him on a path and given him just such a look. He was only a kid, thirteen or fourteen, but Tracy, suddenly, was uncannily aware that sex, its hunger and lure, lay somewhere in that look. Unnerved, he’d hurried on, gaze averted but spookily certain that if he paused to glance back, that boy would be standing there looking after him. Safely in his dorm room, he’d flung himself on his bed and, in a fit of desperation, saying to himself, “You’re crazy, you’re crazy,” even as his imagination spun thrillingly out of control, masturbated furiously.
Shifting uncomfortably in his train seat, he tried to concentrate on the landscape passing outside the window, the river’s flat shallows where birds skimmed in the dimming light. Painters had sought these shores. On the wall of Louis’s office hung a very minor production of the Hudson River School: a limpid twilight, oxcart fording a broad stream; the Catskills drowsing in the pearly distance.
Out in the river, an oddity caught his attention: a series of ramparts and crenellated turrets set on a small wooded island. He’d seen those ruins on the way down; they caught his imagination, an inexplicable romantic folly out there interrupting the ordinary run of scenery. Who had built it, and why? He’d craned his head to catch as much of it as he could before it passed by. And this time too: flitting past the train windows, in an instant it was gone. But it had broken, thankfully, his somber reverie. He reentered the droning frequency of the couple behind him.
“Somebody,” the old lady was telling her husband, “really should get out there and tear that thing down. It’s a terrible eyesore. And somebody might get hurt.”
Betsy’s boundless enthusiasm ambushed him at the front door. Drooling and slobbering, deliriously happy, she desired him as no one, it seemed, had ever desired him. She kept leaping up to put her paws on his thighs. “Hey,” he told her, “I missed you too.” In the empty living room he could see Noah rousing himself from what appeared to be a nap on the sofa.
“Jesus, what a racket,” Noah complained.
“Fit to wake the dead,” Tracy told him.
“Well, I guess that would be me.” Noah stood and stretched. His drab short hair was disheveled from sleep, and he combed through it with splayed fingers, to no particular effect. Barefoot, he wore gray sweatpants, a blue flannel long-sleeved shirt, untucked and half buttoned. Used as he was to seeing his student in regulation blue blazer and red tie, this casual dress—mufti, he supposed it was—struck Tracy as oddly intimate. “Your dog, by the way, is a whore,” Noah observed matter-of-factly. It took Tracy, still puzzling about mufti, off guard.
“How so?” he asked seriously.
“Well, the instant you were gone, she transferred all her affections to me. One hundred percent.” Kneeling, Noah encircled Betsy in his arms. “Didn’t you, girl? You didn’t think about him one bit.”
Where his shirt fell open, Tracy couldn’t help but register smooth skin. Still thrown a bit by Noah’s antics, and half hoping, guiltily, for a glimpse of nipple, he asked, “How do you know what goes on in her head? She may have been secretly pining for me the whole time.”
“You can believe anything you want,” Noah said. He held Betsy’s head and peered into her eyes.
We’re not really fighting over the affections of a dog, Tracy thought. We’re doing something else. But he wasn’t exactly sure what that something else was.
He didn’t really know Noah at all, he felt with a pulse not unlike nausea. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know him. He wasn’t sure he even liked him.
But the die, it seemed, had been cast. He’d made his overture of friendliness; in the form of Betsy he’d handed Noah responsibilities he couldn’t now easily withdraw. To draw back would be a gesture of cowardice.
Abruptly dropping the subject of Betsy, Noah leaped to his feet. “I have to tell you,” he said excitedly, “I think this house of yours is haunted. I kept thinking somebody was hiding in the closet, but then I’d look and nobody was there.”
“Get out of here,” Tracy told him. He considered, for the briefest of moments, making the obvious joke, but decided that would be distinctly unwise. Instead, he asked, “What on earth did you have for dinner?” Kneeling down, he in turn nuzzled with Betsy—who did seem promiscuously eager for any affection that came her way.
Noah only shrugged. “I’m just telling you,” he insisted. “I think this house has secrets. I think things happened here.”
Shaking his head in bemusement—he’d never lived in such a welcoming house—Tracy tried to humor Noah. “All old houses are like that,” he said. “More things used to happen at home. Babies got born. Old people died. Did Betsy notice anything?”
“She’s just a dog,” Noah said.
“Well, dogs have incredibly fine hearing. There’s this whole world out there that only dogs know about.”
“I think Betsy’s maybe not the smartest dog,” Noah judged. “By the way, you got some messages on your machine.”
He was disconcerting, the way he veered abruptly from this to that. Attention deficit disorder, according to his files. He took Ritalin for it. They were a remarkably doctored-up bunch, these Forge School students. Still, as Noah glided over to push the button on the answering machine—Tracy was about to say, “That’s okay, I’ll listen to them later,” but it was too late; the tape was already rewinding—something in his movement, the purposeful way he sailed through space, chest out, head bent, gripped Tracy with surprising force. There was a moment in late boyhood when shambling awkwardness and long-limbed grace came together in tune. Noah rang with that clear pure pitch, and Tracy felt, gazing at the boy who stood by his answering machine, shifting his weight from one foot to the other as the first message began, something very much like awe.
“Oh, hello there.” A tentative, cultivated voice spoke from the tape. “Louis Tremper calling. Claire and I wondered if, perhaps, you might care to come by this Friday for drinks and dinner, but I see you’re not in. Well, I’m sure we’ll run into one another on Monday, but I hope you’ll be available.”
Noah watched him. He had presumably heard all this already. The machine beeped and the next message, which Noah had presumably also heard, began to play.
“Hi sweetie,” a high, musical voice sang out. “It’s…” There was a pause, in which Tracy hoped, absurdly, the machine would cut off. But it didn’t. “Arthurina. As in…Queen Arthurina. So lovely to have seen you. Hope you had a fabulous trip home. You know, I’ve been thinking, and I would definitely really really love to come see you, the sooner the better. And good luck with staying out of trouble. So many ephebes, as they say, and so little time. Call me soon.”
In other circumstances the coincidence would have been interesting, even propitious, but Tracy felt himself redden as if an accusing finger had been pointed his way.
But what did it accuse? Noah was nonchalant. “That’s all,” he said. “Only two. Do you want me to save them?”
“Yes,” Tracy said. “I mean, no.” Did he owe an explanation? “An old friend,” he said lamely.
“So will he come up and visit you?” Noah asked. It was impossible to tell whether he was interested or only making conversation. He was inscrutable that way. Then, without waiting for an answer, he changed the subject. “You should buy a television. I went crazy without a television here. How do you stand it? What do you do at night?” He paced restlessly up and down the bare room.
“Oh,” Tracy said (thank God, he thought, for attention deficit disorder), “there’s this bloody old woman who comes out of the closet, and we sit and talk.”
“Fuck off,” Noah said lightly. “You’re too weird.”
“Me?” Tracy said in mock surprise, both relieved and disappointed to leave the subject of Arthurina safely behind.
It made Noah smile; this time there was even a hint of humor in his eyes. “You’re weird because you’ve got nothing in your house,” he proclaimed. “There’s a ton of things you need to civilize this place. I should’v
e made you a list.”
As if to show the extent to which his house-sitting had gained him some stake in the house, he flung himself back down on the sofa and, grabbing a pillow, held it to his chest. “Before your friend comes up to see you, we should go shopping,” he said. “I’ll help you fix this dump up.”
“I sort of like it like it is.” Though he wondered if that only meant there was something depressingly lacking about his inner life.
“You mean—empty,” Noah told him. “Ghosts love empty houses.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Well, I mean, wouldn’t you, if you were a ghost?”
“I have to think about that one,” Tracy told him. There were perhaps worse things to contemplate than spending some Saturday afternoon at the shopping mall with Noah, looking for various furnitures that might keep away the ghosts. It might even be interesting, educational.
Though it might also move things a next step in a process he should perhaps call a halt to while he still could. Before him flitted the crazy image: Noah and Arthur meeting one another. It was simply impossible. He had way too many different lives going on at once.
“By the way,” he said distractedly, to get his mind off that troubling thought, “thanks for your Halloween gift.” Releasing Betsy from his attentions, he looked forthrightly at his house-sitter. He hadn’t thought he was even going to mention it.
Noah squeezed the pillow as if he wanted to force life into it. “I guess I was kind of bored,” he said. “I’m great at procrastinating.”
“Well, it was very, uh, creative.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Noah said flatly. “About as creative as my asshole.”
Tracy scrambled to conceal his surprise. “You kids have such foul mouths these days,” he joked, though inwardly the words sent a sharp thrill through him.
“Sorry,” Noah apologized, as if it were a belch or fart that had slipped out. “It’s just a saying.”
What could Noah possibly know about assholes? Except that he had one—whose secret particulars Tracy, in spite of himself, had no choice but to contemplate inwardly.
“Kids these days are stupid as dogs,” Noah went on. “But then you know that. You’re the one who has to teach us.”
But Tracy was unwilling to pursue any of that any further. “Look,” he said, for fear of spoiling the acute, unlooked-for pleasure he’d already got, “I think you’ve gone and hurt Betsy’s feelings”—a betrayal that wasn’t strictly obvious from the way she lay, content, on the bare floor between them.
“Aww…Betsy,” Noah crooned. “Light of my life.” He released the pillow he’d been hugging to his chest and reached down for the top of her head, stroking her delicately for a minute. Her tail wagged madly and Tracy thought, All this affection, for the dog, the pillow. But none, apparently, for him.
Instantly he chided himself for that stupid thought, even as Noah said, relinquishing Betsy with a regretful sigh, “I should probably be getting back to my dorm. Believe it or not, I have to try to do some homework tonight.”
“That’s the spirit,” Tracy told him heartily. But as Noah disappeared into the bedroom to gather his things, he felt both relief and disappointment. He was suddenly, depressingly, conscious of invisible lines circumscribing him all around, unmarked boundaries it was unwise, even downright dangerous, to cross.
“So now,” he said as Noah, hair newly combed, shirt buttoned, sneakers the size of motorboats on his feet, reappeared in the doorway with his gym bag of belongings, “tell me honestly. Did you really see a ghost in my house?”
IV
Beneath the bleak fluorescent lighting of study hall, where thirty of them hunched diligently over their work, Mr. Brill somehow managed to grade papers at his desk in the front of the room and keep watch at the same time, his sinusy breathing audible, like a slippery fish hauled up on deck and gasping.
No distractions: that was key. In Noah’s dorm room there were way too many things to lead him astray, variously collected rocks and seashells and wasp nests whose contemplation could fritter away an hour of valuable study time before he even realized it. Particularly alluring: a foot-long fish fossil from Wyoming his dad had sent him on his fifteenth birthday. Its fifty-million-year-old skull and backbone, its delicate fins and scissored tail, all lay precisely etched in the undulating sandstone. He could daydream about just about anything except, unfortunately, algebra. Nothing made him feel stupid like numbers made him feel stupid. He’d rather count all the bones on that fish.
From time to time, his voice bored and slightly bullying, Brill punctuated the quiet with more than just his breathing. “Mr. Delson,” he called out, his ancestor no doubt closely related to that fish from Wyoming, “let’s stop dreaming about ice cream cones, or whatever it is you’re dreaming of.”
In the back of the room, somebody suppressed a snicker. Brad Delson sat, lost in thought, idly licking the tip of his ballpoint pen. Supposedly it was all for their own good. Since Noah had been at the Forge, his own habits had definitely improved: his academic tutor was cautiously pleased by his progress, and his English teacher said he’d really liked some of his more off-the-wall compositions, the ones he usually got Ds on in other classes. Go figure. But then, none of the other teachers at the Forge wanted you to call them by their first name the way Tracy did.
“Mr. Laskii-Meyers,” observed Brill, hardly bothering to raise his eyes from the page he was perusing, “I thought we weren’t going to have any more fantasies about Jerry Garcia. The long strange journey is, alas, over.”
On second thought, Brill wasn’t so much a fish as a monkey, a baboon with his orangutan wife and chimplike children and an obsession not with bananas but with model trains. He’d commandeered the basement of Goethe Hall to lay out his train sets, miles and miles of track, miniature villages and tunnels and hills. The school’s worst losers all flocked to the Miniature Railroad Club like moths, and though Noah had been down to Gorilla Brill’s private domain only once, when all the newcomers had gotten dragged down there on a tour, those gloomy, cavernous basement rooms, originally built as bomb shelters (at least that was the rumor), had unaccountably spooked him. The doors were reinforced steel, huge concrete pillars supported the ceilings, there were two underground levels rather than one, and reputedly the shelters were still stocked with canned goods dating from the fifties. He hadn’t seen any supplies when he was down there himself, but Joey Pinnavaia had lifted a few and displayed them, bulging and rust-spotted, along his windowsill. Forty-year-old green beans: now that was something that could set you thinking. When the big one came, Noah hoped somebody remembered to bring along a can opener.
Anyway, it was stupid to think you could survive a nuclear war. He tried to imagine what it would be like to be cooped up with no light or fresh air. Claustrophobia was no pretty thing. He’d go insane. He’d attack people with his bare hands.
When they ran out of food, what were they supposed to do? Eat one another like those people whose airplane crashed—where was it, the Andes?
There he went again. Tom is six years older than Mike. Five years ago, Tom was three times as old as Mike. How old is each now? There was no hope for it. He read the problem in his algebra book six times in a row and still didn’t have a clue how to solve it. Trains looped through it. A bomb exploded. An airplane crashed in its midst. He’d read somewhere that the thumb was the tastiest part of human flesh.
One more time he tried to focus; then, with a sigh, he gave himself over to his unruly thoughts.
Across the aisle, Christian Tyler was reading a music magazine he’d slipped into his notebook. With silent envy Noah watched the collage of photos and text that enlivened its pages. Chris was reading a tribute to Kurt Cobain.
It wasn’t completely by accident that he’d picked a seat near Chris, though he was careful to make it look like one. There was something weirdly fascinating about a kid who’d inexplicably, over the course of a single summer, undergone a change so radical the Federal Witness Prote
ction Program would have been proud of the results. Six months ago, flashing his good-boy smile, speaking bright nervous words that didn’t say a thing, Chris had been totally forgettable. Active in the Boy Scouts, the Catholic society, the drama club and school newspaper. Never in trouble. On weekends his mom picked him up, took him home to Connecticut. But then summer came and maybe he’d gotten struck by lightning, because when he came back in September, not only had he shot up a couple of inches in height without, it seemed, gaining a pound; not only had he gone and dyed his hair lemony yellow and started wearing his clothes in some kind of purposeful disarray; but something deeper and stranger had happened. It was as if some other completely different creature inhabited his body. From coiled like a spring he went to limber as a willow tree, and his voice too, this loud, teasing singsong that made people nervous to be around, like he knew something funny on you but wasn’t telling. Gary Marks started calling him the Fatwa—who knew why, exactly?—but it stuck. In a bathroom stall a warning one day appeared, scratched into the metal: CAUTION: THE FATWA LIMBO DANCES. Nobody even said the name Christian Tyler anymore, just the Fatwa.
Everybody stayed their distance, and Noah too. The Fatwa didn’t seem to care. He strolled down the hallway with his head held high. Nobody roomed with him. Maybe it made sense: the school wasn’t about to put anyone else in the Fatwa den. Still, it didn’t seem quite fair—the best room on the hall, a double big enough it could’ve been a triple, and nobody but the Fatwa bouncing around in there, maybe crazy. Who knew? People always had one kind of animal or another inside them, but if the Fatwa was carrying one, it was an alien from some completely different planet, something both scary and alluring in a dangerous sort of way. As for his own animal, Noah thought it was probably a rat, like the wet slick-backed thing he’d seen climbing out of the school lake one day.
