Somebody, Please Tell Me Who I Am

by Harry Mazer

  Great. He’d managed to be taken by a total psycho stranger.

  “Chris!” Niko shouted.

  The Jeep started up. Niko darted out into the lot. To his left, tires screeched. Instinctively he jumped to his right, hooking his ankle on a trash can. He fell hard, the sun now blocked by a hulking shadow inches away.

  He opened his eyes into the pebble-choked tire treads of a black Cadillac Escalade.

  Someone in the car was screaming. Someone else was coming out the driver door. “Sorry!” Niko yelled, jumping to his feet.

  He ran, his ankle throbbing. A half-dozen cars ahead, the Jeep was pulling out of the slot. It was rusted and run-down, its engine loud like a motorcycle. The green-and-white jacket was in the back. “Wait!” he cried out.

  The Jeep stopped, and Niko nearly smacked into it.

  The person in the back quickly turned. He looked about thirty years old and had red hair and freckles. From the passenger-side window, a wary-looking older woman asked, “Can I help you?”

  Wrong person. Wrong assumption. Wrong everything.

  “Sorry, looking for someone else,” Niko said, quickly turning away. “Sorry.”

  Where was he? Niko scanned the lot. People were staring at him now. Niko cupped his hands and shouted: “I’m looking for a fifteen-year-old runaway in a Jets jacket!”

  Niko raced back inside, past a uniformed security guard who was looking at him suspiciously. Inside, another couple of guards were headed into the men’s room through the open door. Ariela emerged from the crowd, running toward him. “I can’t believe you let him get away,” she said. “Come with me.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Bright were near the restrooms, in agitated conversation with another guard. He asked Niko a few quick questions, mostly the same material he’d gone over with Ariela.

  “He has autism,” Mrs. Bright said. “He’s very smart but he makes his own rules. It’s not Niko’s fault. Chris likes to walk. When he doesn’t want you to see him, he devises methods no one else would think of.”

  “Has the child run away before?” the guard asked.

  “He’s not a child!” Ariela said. “Are you sure he’s not still in there—hiding in . . . I don’t know, a duct or something?”

  Before anyone could react, Ariela was heading toward the men’s room. Niko followed her in and glanced around. The ducts near the ceiling were easily reachable, but they were thickly painted and obviously untouched for years. If I were Chris leaving the men’s room, he thought, where would I hide? He turned his back to the stalls and walked slowly out of the bathroom, following the green-tiled wall into the short hallway. The jammed-open door did not have enough space behind it to conceal anyone. But it had been closed when he’d first gone back in to look for Chris. What was behind it?

  Kicking the stop aside, Niko let the door close, revealing a shut broom closet.

  Niko grabbed the doorknob, expecting it to be locked, but it turned easily. Yanking the door open, he peered into the shallow darkness.

  Chris was sitting in a rectangular sink, his calves dangling over the front. Despite how extremely uncomfortable this appeared, he was fast asleep. A spiral notebook lay open on the floor next to him.

  “Hey, buddy, time to wake up,” Niko said, feeling a relief so sudden and giddy he thought he might pass out.

  Chris could be prickly about wake-ups. But his eyes fluttered open like a little kid’s. “So many miles we have come,” he said. “Six words. Last word is ‘come.’ I think that will be the fourth line. D. Which means I have to use ‘come’ at the end of the fifth line in the next stanza. E.”

  Niko wanted to throw his arms around Chris, but that was a no-no, so he just helped him to his feet. Once upright, Chris immediately let go and picked up his notebook. “I think I may try something different. My teacher showed us a variation. You vary the number of words in the lines of each stanza. Six words in each line of the first stanza, five words in each of the lines of the second—”

  “Hold that thought,” Niko said, then called over his shoulder. “I found him—I found Chris!”

  Chris laughed sharply. “I wasn’t lost. I found this little room because I didn’t like the toilet. It’s very good for writing and thinking. But my butt hurts.”

  In a moment, Ariela and the Brights were all over Chris, crying and gushing and scolding, as Chris described his writing journey. The security guards smiled uncertainly, confused but relieved. A small crowd had gathered, wondering about the commotion.

  “Please, let’s take him right to the car,” Mrs. Bright said. “He won’t like this.”

  Taking Chris’s arm, Niko nodded amiably to the crowd and rushed Chris toward the front door. “You’re a star, dude,” he said.

  As they all stumbled gratefully into the parking lot, Chris fell silent. Niko gave Ariela a glance, and the expression on her face was immediately recognizable.

  Ben, it said, would have loved this.

  September 19

  “Ben, this is Dr. Parini. Can you look at me?”

  Look. Look. Look.

  “Eyes flickering, uneven dilation of pupils, response to sound.”

  Sound. Sleep.

  “Very good, Ben! That’s great. I’m going to ask you yes-or-no questions. Can you blink one time for yes, two times for no?”

  Yes.

  “Is your name Ben Bright?”

  Benbright.

  “Is your name George Washington?”

  Bengeorgeben.

  “Can you see me, Ben?”

  Seeben.

  “Patient once again opening mouth, making clicking sounds and indefinite vowel aspirations. Ben? Will you please follow this light with your eyes?”

  Brightbrightbright.

  “Patient’s eyes follow light stimulus. I’d say we were making some progress! Very good, young man. Big difference from yesterday, right, Nurse Sanchez?”

  “Excellent progress! You are da man, Ben!”

  Manben.

  September 19

  “You’re seven minutes late,” Ariela said, rolling her suitcase down the front steps toward Niko’s car. “If there’s any traffic, I’m going to miss my flight.”

  Niko held the passenger door open with one hand and waved to the Cruzes, who were standing on the porch. “It’s all part of a diabolical plot to keep you here forever.”

  Ariela stuck out her tongue at him, although she was grateful for his upbeat attitude. The visit home had helped. She was glad she’d made the drive up from Washington, and she hated the idea that she was going back to college. It felt disloyal and indulgent, like she was shirking her real life for some kind of Brigadoon fantasy. Yet whenever she tried to define what her real life was—and she’d done little more than that since she’d been home—she came up blank. Her home, her friendships, her family, everything seemed a succession of temporary landing places, each unfamiliar in its own way. The intense exhilaration of college wasn’t going to last, the security of home and high school had run its course, the future was a black hole. The grand design of life till now was simply this: everything you experienced and trusted was designed to push you away.

  The worst thing was, she thought she’d already understood this. She thought she’d planned for it, at least psychologically. She’d always known that her plan had included Ben. What she hadn’t realized was how little of the plan didn’t.

  Niko had the radio on to the highly annoying WINS, where a radio announcer was yammering a traffic report in a staccato rhythm no human ever used except in traffic reports: “On-the-jam-cam-we’re-seeing-a-stalled-tractor-trailer-in-the-left-lane-of-the-on-ramp-to-the-GWB-inbound-upper-deck,-at-least-forty-five-minutes-on-the-upper,-thirty-on-the-lower,-only-minor-delays-at-the-Lincoln-and-Holland,-East-Side-crossings-look-clear-but-watch-for-rubbernecking-delays-on-the-LIE-from-an-overturned-vehicle-at-Exit-twenty-four . . .”

  “We’ll take the Grand Central,” Niko said, snapping the radio off.

  “This feels so weird,” Ariela said.


  “Being late in a car with me? You should be used to it,” Niko said.

  “No, leaving so soon after seeing Ben,” Ariela replied. “Leaving at all.”

  Niko was silent for a few moments. He turned onto the Meadowbrook Parkway, and a string of strip malls gave way to swaths of tired-looking greenery. “Do you believe in souls?” he asked.

  “Yes, otherwise my feet would get dirty,” Ariela said.

  “When I saw Ben lying there, I thought about my Uncle Petros.”

  “Your Uncle Petros who died? Wait. He looked like Ben when he was young?”

  “No, the way he looked in the casket. At the funeral.”

  Ariela felt her stomach turn. “Niko, that thought will disgust me for the rest of the year.”

  “I don’t mean he looked like him—”

  “Your uncle was fat and bald, and the hair sticking out of his nose looked like a small water vole trying to escape. No offense.”

  “He loved you too, Ariela. Actually, he was a really great guy, and when I knew I was going to the funeral and had to actually see him dead, I was expecting to faint. But I had the opposite reaction. As I stood over him, I immediately calmed down. All the pain he’d been experiencing? It was gone from his face. He’d been suffering for two years. Even though he looked made-up and artificial—the embalming and everything—in a funny way I was seeing him again. I was reminded of all the smiles and jokes and adventures and good times we had whenever he visited. I could hear his voice, and he was saying, ‘Yia sou, Nikolaos, I’m free now! I’m back again!’ That’s when I realized what a soul was. I know, it sounds ridiculous, I can stop now.”

  “No, go on. Shoot your other foot.”

  “I saw for the first time that people aren’t their bodies. Even you and me—we’re not just brains sending signals to eyes and vocal cords and . . . touch sensors or whatever. We’re something bigger than that. We’re communicating on a higher level.”

  “But Ben isn’t dead, Niko!” Ariela said.

  “I know. It’s not a perfect comparison. I guess what I’m saying is, Ben’s with us. No matter what happens, he’s with us. And compared to Uncle Petros, we’re a thousand times luckier. Because eventually Ben’s body will recover, and we’ll have all of him again, in the flesh. Does that make sense?”

  “By any chance, were you abducted by aliens?”

  Niko slapped the steering wheel. “You never take me seriously.”

  “Just kidding. But you are very strange.” Ariela sank back in her seat and felt her eyes closing from fatigue. She didn’t want to rag on him too much. He meant well. “Mostly in a good way.”

  She fell into a deep sleep and was dreaming about the breakfast burrito at the Center Ground Coffee Shop when she heard a scream. “He what?”

  Ariela’s eyes blinked open.

  It was Niko, his voice about an octave too high, talking on his cell phone while navigating Grand Central Parkway. “That’s dangerous,” she remarked. “You could get a ticket.”

  “I’m not texting. Okay, okay . . . Mrs. Bright? Wait. I’m putting Ariela on. Tell her.” Niko’s face was beaming as he handed Ariela the phone.

  “Um, hi, Mrs. Bright,” Ariela said. “He’s driving, so—”

  “Ariela? You won’t believe this.” Mrs. Bright let out an uncharacteristically raucous laugh. “Ben talked.”

  Ariela nearly dropped the phone. In trying to come up with a response, she emitted something between a word and a squeak.

  “Not talk talked,” Mrs. Bright went on. “He didn’t perform Hamlet’s soliloquy. But he did make sounds.”

  “Like, word sounds?” Ariela asked.

  “Well, not really. But responses,” Mrs. Bright replied. “Last night they asked him something and his eyes moved. This morning they did the same thing, and he opened his mouth and vocalized. Apparently this is great progress.”

  “It’s incredible progress—woo-hoo!” Ariela said. She lurched across the seat and gave Niko a hug. He swerved into the next lane, forcing a yellow cab to jerk to the left and honk loudly.

  “Thank you, good morning!” Niko called out.

  “They say it’s still too early to tell,” Mrs. Bright went on. “The length of his coma may indicate serious brain trauma, but it’s all very murky and they have seen similar cases with remarkable recoveries. Palo Alto is looking more and more likely. That’s where the best treatment center is. But we’ll take that when it comes. I just thought you and Niko needed to know.”

  Ariela could barely sit still. Her feet were dancing of their own accord. “I wish there were something I could do.”

  “Oh, Ariela, you were here for his return, and he knew it, sweetheart. Who’s to say your presence wasn’t the reason for his progress?”

  Ariela tried to reply, but her throat closed up. “Thanks. Love you,” was all she managed.

  She gave the phone back to Niko, who said a quick good-bye as he pulled into the LaGuardia Airport entrance. Ariela fought back tears. She envisioned Ben in that bed right now, looking up at Dr. Parini, wondering who she was, wanting to talk, unable to utter a real word. Did he know where he was? Did he know how he got there? What did he remember? What was he trying to say? Was he afraid? That last question hung in the air as the American Airlines sign loomed, and the idea that she was leaving home nearly made her sick. “I—I can’t do this.”

  “You have to,” Niko said gently, putting a hand on her shoulder. “He’s strong. He’s the strongest person I know. He’s going to get through this.”

  “I know. It’s just that—” She paused. She knew Niko would trivialize the thing she was about to say. A sharp noise made her jump, and she turned to see an airline traffic guard rapping on the window. “It’s too embarrassing. And I have to go.”

  Niko popped the trunk and they both quickly got out. “No need to be embarrassed in front of me,” he said as he reached in for her luggage. “I’ve seen you naked.”

  “You have not!”

  “At the beach that time you took off your bathing suit in public.”

  “I was four!”

  “I was three. You think I’d forget that? Tell me what you were thinking, or I’ll construct something in my fertile imagination and use it as my status update.”

  He let Ariela’s luggage down and she pulled up its telescoping handle. For a moment she thought about giving him a quick good-bye and booking. But she knew Niko would be the only person she could talk to face-to-face about this for a long time. “Okay. Here’s what I can’t stop thinking about. I want to be here when he says his first word. I want that word to be ‘Ariela.’ I want to see him take his first steps.”

  “You sound like the mother of a newborn.”

  “I should slap you. You wanted to know, and that’s how I feel.”

  Niko reached around behind her neck, drew her gently toward him, and gave her a kiss on the forehead. “Keep looking forward. Live your own life. That’s the best thing you can do for yourself, and for him.”

  “You’re so profound all of a sudden. Did you just think of that?”

  “I’m reading a Star Wars novel. I think it was Yoda. I fixed the syntax.”

  She gave him a big hug and stayed there until the guard banged on the hood of Niko’s car.

  November 11

  December 2

  Report on Poetry Project 12

  Mr. Hobbes

  Nicholson School

  Chris Bright

  Today I wrote more of my sestina and most of it was not good in fact terrible becasue it is hard to make each stansa have a different number of of words which is not standard but my own variation and also I forgot some the end words and had to do ssttza 3 over again and I got mad. I got so mad I went into my brothers room his name is BEN of course he wasnt there but I sat on his bed and I remembrd the last time I got mad at homework and he helpd me but it wasn’t in writing it was in math and he tought me to use excel and I thought well a sestina is mathemtaical so I can use ecxel so I wont make
mistakes keeping the end words in the right place. Its really pretty easy all you need to do is write ONLY ONE stanza but you write one line in each row so you have six rows which are your template and you make a column to the left where you put A in the first row and B in the second row and C in the third row and D in the fourth row and E in the fifth rown and F in the sixth row like this

  A

  B

  C

  D

  E

  F

  and then like I said next to each letter in the second column is where you write the six lines of the second stanza but just one line in each row so there will be one line next to each letter. Then you take the last word of the line and you copy it into a column on the right so it will look all together like this

  A first line of stanza ending in word “end1” end1

  B second line of stanza ending in word “end2” end2

  C third line of stanza ending in word “end3” end3

  D fourth line of stanza ending in word “end4” end4

  E fifth line of stanza ending in word “end5” end5

  F sixth line of stanza ending in word “end6” end6

  but end1 etc are actual words. and then you skip a row and make six more rows just like the above bt the first column contains the letters F, A, E, B, D, C, but leave the second and third columns blank for now then you skip a row and then the next six rows in the frst column only contain C, F, D, A, B, E, skip a row and then the first column in the next six rows contain E, C, B, F, A, D, skip a row and then the next six rows contain D, E, A, C, F, B, skip row and then the next six rows contain B, D, F, E, C, A because that is the form of the sestina that we learned. You leave the middle column blank because that’s where you write your stanza and i started to use a long embedded IF function but then i learned about the VLOOKUP function and i realized I could use it in the right column to get the end word right, so I used =VLOOKUP($A$10,$A$3:$E$8,5) in the third column of the first row of the second stanza but the numbers would be different if youre columns were in a different place so the referenses would change in case you want to try it. anyway the first element changes as you enter the formula with each row, so the third column of the secnd row of the second stanza would be =VLOOKUP($A$11,$A$3:$E$8,5) and right under it would be =VLOOKUP($A$12,$A$3:$E$8,5), and you keep doing that till the sixth row and then you skip a row and start the whole thing again for the next four stanzas making sure to adjust the first variable apropriatly, and then for the envoy its pretty easy just pick up from the first stanza E4, E7, next row E6, E5, next row E8, E3. And then you wont make any mistakes when you write your sestina.