by Paul Russell
“Mr. Lathrop, Mr. Lathrop.”
With good-natured mockery, Brill was calling his name. “Take your leave of whatever heavenly ladies are dancing in your head and come rejoin us here on good old planet Earth.”
Though nobody laughed, he could feel his face flash crimson. You’ll pay—he tried to laser the thought into Brill’s reptilian mind, but of course that was a mind too dense to get it.
As for his own mind, he guessed his concentration wasn’t safe anywhere. The least little thing could send it off. He looked back down at the page—James is twice as old as John, but four years ago, he was three times as old as John was. How old is each now?—but not before stealing one last look at the Fatwa, who kept reading his covert magazine with the kind of concentration Noah could only envy. From time to time he brushed a lock of lemon-colored hair out of his eyes.
The summer he was twelve was the summer he discovered the woods, a state preserve that abutted the gated development, Forest Haven, where his dad lived in a style befitting a man whose offices were four floors down from the top of the World Trade Center. The woods had been there all along, of course, but he never fully grasped that till the day he found a way under the boundary fence, a gap of nearly a foot where kids or animals had tunneled under. It was easy to pull yourself through, though he always imagined, halfway under, that an alarm would go off in the development’s entrance booth, the guard would push a button, and metal teeth would clamp down, skewer him right at the waist. He’d still be alive but helpless, nothing he could do, which was sort of exciting in a way to think about, till you remembered dogs would come and tear at your flesh, crows would peck out your eyes, ants crawl into your mouth and up your asshole—probably there was some tribe in the Amazon who tortured people like that. Then in the next moment he’d cleared the fence and stood in the open, for all the world like a prisoner who’d just broken from Sing Sing. With a silent cry of relief he flung himself into the mysterious safety of tall trees and tangled underbrush.
A creek had gouged its way among stony hills. In sweet-smelling glens ferns grew six feet tall, and if you followed the creek half a mile, a nearly bottomless pool nestled amidst big mossy boulders. August sun filtered through the trees. On his favorite flat rock he stretched out in dappled shade. Lie still enough long enough and the forest, forgetting you were even there, went about its business without any longer noticing you in its midst. Invisible things came to the surface. The whole air was full of…presence. At such moments the woods were his, the way his thoughts were, or his dreams at night. He never met a soul there.
There was a complicated kind of insect singing, a shimmer of heat. Birds hopped from branch to branch. Ancient warmth radiated from the heart of the boulder he lay on, passing through him on its way to becoming air and sky. In the deep pool, nearly past seeing, big fish swam silently.
At the pre-Forge prep school he attended, that exclusive Massachusetts joint that was his dad’s and before that his granddad’s alma mater, he’d had no friends. From time to time someone drifted into his orbit, but something always happened—a fit of fury, a scuffle in the dirt, a bloody nose or ripped shirt, sullen silence. Nobody lasted. He wasn’t lonely. More than people, it was things that interested him. He collected the feathers of birds, cicada shells, smooth pebbles from the stream. On the rock beside him, a dragonfly with iridescent blue wings perched motionless for a full minute, two minutes, three. Fifty million or so years ago in this same spot those wings might have been ten feet across. He felt himself shrinking till a Jurassic dragonfly hovered over him, its stinger poised to go right through him. But did dragonflies have stingers? Instead of a giant dragonfly, how about a hunter walking through the woods with a rifle. How about a silent, silver spaceship landing, slender beings with dark liquid eyes emerging from its hatch to take him inside, stick him with metal probes, put implants in his teeth, a chip in his brain.
The flat rock was warm. The dragonfly was still flitting about, its blue sheen alien, shockingly beautiful. He felt slightly sick. Nobody was there. Nobody would come for him.
One afternoon a few days before, in the backseat of his dad’s Lexus, he’d found a cigarette lighter, not the plastic kind but an old-fashioned, satisfyingly substantial rectangle of metal. Its heft in his pocket made him feel grown-up, serious. What more logical thing to do than build a fire?
From the forest floor he gathered a mess of branches, then loaded them down with leaves. He’d send smoke signals, or maybe spear a trout in the stream and grill it over hot coals. Chanting loudly, he’d strip off all his clothes and dance around the roaring flames. When he flicked the lighter, a pale ghost of a flame wobbled in the breeze, but the leaves, to his dismay, wouldn’t catch. They smoldered without burning. When a slip of actual fire appeared, it was a sickly child clinging to life. It nibbled the edge of a leaf and disappeared. Even the acrid leaf smoke seemed to have no heart for rising, but instead clung close to the ground.
Then he noticed that the pale flames were spreading along the ground as well. It wasn’t alarming, but it also wasn’t what he’d expected. A circle gradually widened.
He could put it out. He had no doubt of that. He’d built his fire by the edge of the deep pool for that very reason. Still, for one or two minutes, maybe longer—afterward he wasn’t so sure—he watched that circle of fire with calm curiosity, the way he watched spiders’ webs on dewy mornings or the water for lurking fish. And then without a single moment of transition he was more scared than he’d ever been.
The fire had a life of its own, and there was no stopping it. He tried to stamp it out, but when he lifted his foot, the fire sprang right back in place. The more vigorously he stamped, the more that seemed to urge it on. He scuttled to the creek, cupped his hands, sloshed handfuls of water back in the fire’s direction to a hiss of steam, a smell of wet ashes. But the flame had taken on a healthy orange complexion. It didn’t roar, but let out a low murmur, crackling and fidgeting as it ran eagerly along the ground, pausing here and there to scale the finger-thick trunk of a sapling or burst from a green bush.
He ran. Following the creek back the way he’d come, he stumbled, fell, picked himself up to run some more. His heart was pounding, he’d scraped his knee on a rock, a branch had stung him on the cheek. Finally he rested, looking back where he’d come. Opaque with leaves, the forest had swallowed the fire completely, gulped it right down into its immense green belly. A strange sense of relief came over him. He walked along calmly. When he came to the fence he followed its graceful curve, touching with his fingertips the smooth metal spikes, the rough brick piers, all that comforting solidity. Beyond, he could see the roofs of the houses that fence protected from harm.
At the gatehouse to Forest Haven the guard recognized him and, smiling, waved him past. All that August afternoon bitter smoke hung over the neighborhood. It crept in through windows tightly shut against the humid summer heat. It infiltrated the air conditioners. People stood outside on their lawns. A helicopter flew low overhead, sirens wailed, the roads clogged with fire trucks from surrounding towns. Men reeled long hoses from their trucks, sucked the pond at Forest Haven half dry when the pressure in the hydrants gave out. They carried shovels and axes into the woods. Several, overcome by the smoke, the heat, were carried away in ambulances. The fire burned thirty acres.
Through it all, Noah slept soundly. His dad and stepmother were away; he had the big house to himself. He’d never slept so well, a slumber profound as hibernation. Deeper and deeper he burrowed into the snug, sheltering den of his bed, covers thrown over his head, pillows muffling any sounds of the world, his brain shutting down, his body turning itself off. Was he in there for only hours or whole days? He dreamed no dreams, just lay in a dark, merciful blank. When at last he crawled out of that refuge, he felt rested but weak. In the kitchen he made himself pancakes, drenching those golden roundlets in butter and syrup and grape jelly. He poured himself a tall glass of milk.
Venturing a cautious peek out the
window, he saw that nothing had changed. The sky was clear blue, the clipped lawns emerald; generous sunlight sheathed the wealthy neighborhood in a further embarrassment of riches.
One of the better players on the Forge’s not-too-terrible soccer team, Tim Vaughn was a clean-cut, laid-back junior from Albany who, in the free half hour before eleven-o’clock lights-out, liked to sit around in his boxers and shoot the shit with whoever stopped by, usually Gary Marks, Patrick Varga, and Kevin Motes, teammates who lived on their hall. As roommates, Noah and Tim got along with a minimum of friction, both being fairly skilled at keeping out of the other’s way. In the general scheme of things Tim wasn’t a bad ally to have.
At the end of the day, the Fatwa was frequently on the soccer team’s collective mind. Down the hall, the door to the Fatwa’s room was, as always, shut tight. He would slip in and out, but they hardly ever saw him; he never seemed to venture into the bathroom or the shower; on weekends he took the train to Manhattan, and nobody knew what he did there. The mystery of him down the hall, behind that closed door, drove them wild with a mixture of contempt, curiosity, and outright hostility. None of them, it seemed, had any clear memory of him from the previous year, though about his drastic transformation they had any number of theories. Tim Vaughn thought it was a brain tumor. Patrick Varga had heard his father was a millionaire who lived in Singapore, but that the Fatwa had never met him. Kevin Motes argued that the Fatwa was just a freak, pure and simple.
“He tried to kill himself,” Gary Marks insisted. “He tried to kill himself because he knew he was a faggot. He looked in the mirror one day and realized, Oh my God, I really am a faggot. I have got to do myself in. Wouldn’t you try to kill yourself?” No one was more inflamed by the idea of the Fatwa than Gary, who was the aggressive, sometimes too aggressive, star of the soccer team. Some nights he’d actually go down the hall to the Fatwa’s door and knock, saying in a loud voice when there was no answer, “Masturbation alert! Masturbation alert! No jerking off in the dorms. We know you’re in there. We know what you’re doing. Crank the rocket down and come out with your hands up.” Once, desperate at his failure to get a response, he’d stormed back to their room and, in what struck Noah as one of the oddest spurts of energy he’d ever witnessed, scissored a beaver shot out of one of Tim’s many porn magazines, scrawled the words “Fatwa’s Mouth: Candid Portrait” across the top, and slipped it under the Fatwa’s door. But even that provoked not a word in response; it was as if, to the Fatwa, his tormentors didn’t even make it across the threshold of his attention.
That had been last week. Tonight, Gary sat at Tim’s desk and guarded the mysterious J. Crew shoe box that contained, he announced portentously, “the final solution.” The others clamored to know what was inside, but Gary was determined to remain the master of the situation. “I declare the citizens’ tribunal of Goethe Hall officially in session,” he said.
Noah was adept at tuning out when he wanted to. These were Tim’s friends, not his. He’d retreat to a far corner of his bed, letting the others commandeer the chairs and crowd around the room’s other bed, where Tim sat cross-legged, occasionally scratching at what must be a very persistent case of jock itch. Nobody seemed to mind that Tim’s roommate tuned them out. Noah was the kind of person they could take or leave. Perhaps the kind of person the Fatwa had been, back when he was simply Chris Tyler.
Spiral notebook propped against his bent knees, a pillow supporting his back, Noah ignored Gary’s maunderings. An idea had been itching at him all day, and he scribbled furiously. When he got a story urge, there was nothing to do but grab a pen and write. Otherwise it was too much like getting a hard-on and not jerking off; the feeling you were left with was sour and uncomfortable.
THE THRUWAY MUST GO THRU
by Noah Lathrop III
Chapter 1
Once their was a grandma & she lived in a big old white house in the woods. She had a garden of cucumbers & tomatoes & onions & squash. She had four cats, a dog (beagle), a racoon, two squirrls & one skunk, all very tame. She lived happily ever after, except—
One day a man from the Government came. He said, I’m very sorry but your house is in the middle of where the new Thruway has to go. So you’ll have to move.
Grandma had lived there her whole life & she had no place else to go. Her children & grandchildren lived in a city far away.
I’m so sorry, said the Government man.
Well, I wont go, said grandma.
The Thruway must go Thru, said the Government man.
Grandma took her broom & said I’ll swat you. Now leave me alone.
I’ll be back, said the government man.
If you come back I’ll swat you, said grandma. Can’t the Thruway go somewhere else.
No, said the man.
Can’t it go around my house.
No, said the man.
Can’t you build a bridge over my house or a tunnel under my house?
No, said the man, The Thruway must go Thru.
Chapter 2
The next day Grandma looked up. There was a black helicopter flying in the blue sky. Go away, she said, but the helicopter wouldn’t go away. It flew above her house all day long. It scared the animals. It’s chopper blades made a wind that knocked down all the vegetables.
Chapter 3
The next day the Government man came back. Now, he said. The Thruway must go Thru.
No, said Grandma. The Thruway must not go Thru. And she picked up her broom.
Okay, said the man. Open fire.
A bullet zinged by Grandma and hit her dog (the beagle). Oh no, cried grandma.
That’s just the beginning, said the man.
Zing, zing, zing. The cats fell over, & the squirrels & the racoon & the skunk.
Chapter 4
Grandma cried & cried. She took her shovel & buried her pet animals. Then she heard a roar. Looking up, a great bulldozer came toward her through the woods. It made this huge roar.
Get out of the way, shouted the Government man on the bulldozer.
At the last minute Grandma jumped out of the way & the bulldozer smashed her house to smithereens. Their was nothing left just a heap of junk. Then the black hellicopter came & dropped a bomb on the heap of junk & that was that.
Oh no, said Grandma. Even her broom was smashed to smithereens.
The Thruway must go Thru, said the government man.
She looked up & here came rode graders and ciment-mixers and steam rollers.
Out of the way, they all yelled.
No way, she said. The Thruway will Not go Thru.
Yes it will. They rammed into her with the bulldozer & then the steamroller rolled over her & the ciment-mixer crushing all her bones till there was nothing left.
Chapter 5
Well, said the Government man. Good work. Job well done. Cash bonuses for everybody. Now I will go Home & take a shower.
Noah had written it all down so fast his hand ached. He felt feverish and excited. At the top of the page, under the title, he wrote in block letters A TRUE STORY (FOR CHILDREN). He crossed out the word “beagle” where he’d written it and put in “cocker spaniel” instead; then, remembering his mother had a cocker spaniel, he wrote “labbrador.” He didn’t know why he’d written “beagle” in the first place. Or why, in fact, he’d written any of it.
Reading his story through made him feel faintly nauseated. In his desk drawer, in a folder on which he’d written Read This and Die, he had a whole pile of stories, some starring himself, others about various kids at school, still others made up totally from scratch. Once he put them away, he could never bring himself to look at them again, though it crossed his mind that he could maybe show one to Tracy Parker sometime, just to see what he’d say. His teacher already thought he was weird, Noah could tell, but he also had a hunch that Tracy sort of liked weird kids. “I value your weirdness” he could almost hear him say, and it made him laugh to himself.
Could Tracy have been a weird kid himself gro
wing up? Noah tried to imagine, but all he drew on that one was a blank. Tracy Parker was like a shut door: you didn’t know anything about what was going on in there. It frustrated him, the way the Fatwa’s shut door frustrated Gary and the others. Or no—it was different. It wasn’t the principle of the thing, but something else. I feel like you’re trying to get to know me, he told Tracy in his head. But then you won’t let me get to know you. You won’t let me in. But he wasn’t sure he even wanted in. What did people want with each other, anyway?
Mr. Parker, you’re a challenge, he admitted, but then reminded himself, sternly, not to go having these imaginary conversations in his head. Lately he’d been doing that with the Fatwa as well, and it just messed you up, something else as bad and pointless as jerking off. Not that he’d been too successful in cutting down on that habit either.
Gary Marks, in the meantime, had become quite animated. Leaping from his seat, he clasped the mystery shoe box to his chest. “Oh excuse me,” he said in a mincing voice. Standing in place, head held high, lips pursed, nose in the air, he did his best to mimic the Fatwa’s striding walk. “Oh please, Mr. Tremper, can I kiss your ass like the little faggot I am? Please, Mr. Tremper, I don’t want the other boys to talk to me. I don’t want them looking at me the way they do. With their…their…their eyes of desire. And most of all, I don’t want them messing with my secret in the shoe box, which I carry with me everywhere.” His audience whooped with laughter. “God, he gives me the willies,” Gary concluded disgustedly.
