“My mama forgot my birthday,” I say. “It’s no big deal.”
“It’s more than that,” she says. “I read your file in the office.” She brings her face close to mine, close enough for a kiss. Wild Nights, I’m thinking suddenly, and I get a little dizzy. Christ, lady, I think. It’s life, is all it is. I fall back away from her, and swing down backwards through the bars to drop to the ground.
“See you in class,” I say, walking away and not looking up.
“Let’s go for a ride, later!” she calls after me.
“Whatever,” I mutter. I want to mangle something, so I crush Yatha’s pilgrim, and then I feel bad and smooth him out, but he still looks pretty fucked-up.
At home yesterday there was the note on the television:
Con and Caleb
Gone shopping for guitar picks etc. with Milo. Back early evening about. Five dollars in the secret place for dinner. Love,
You-Know-Who
I felt something sharp in the appendix zone when I read it. I don’t care about birthdays. I haven’t cared about them since I was three but still there was that sharp pain like somebody got me with a voodoo, and a little voice, somewhere in my middle ear, whispering, “She forgot.”
I went into the room I share with Caleb. He was napping on the bottom bunk. I took out the Boy’s Life I stole for him from the school library and put it on his chest. He’d been a Cub Scout when he went crazy, insisting that he was from Mars and that they lit fires like this on Mars, and that they ran their soap-box derbies in this manner, and it was all superior to how they did it in the Cub Scouts Chapter Earth. I am not glad he’s crazy but I’m glad they threw him out. I would rather he was a brown-pantied little fascist Brownie than a Cub Scout but better neither than either.
I sat down by the bed, watching him sleep. His face was puffy, his eyes were rolling around behind his lids. I emptied my book bag on the floor. I had stopped by the bookstore, too, and bought Thuvia, Maid of Mars, and the October issue of Scientific American. Frieda, who owns the place, sells me the last month’s issue for half price at the beginning of the new month. She’s a lesbian. I know about lesbians because I have stolen, from Frieda’s Little Professor Bookstore, The Joy of Lesbian Sex, The Joy of Sex, The Joy of Gay Sex, and More Joy of Sex. They lurk under my mattress. I’ve looked in these books and seen all the gory fucking, every brand. I know what it’s all about, generally and specifically.
Also I got myself The Seven Storey Mountain but didn’t pay for that. Generally I follow a policy of buy one, steal one from the Little Professor. I’m reading Thomas Merton to become a better person.
And I stopped at the dime store and got two giant chocolate bars and two squirt guns — presents for me and for Caleb on my birthday. These fell out on the floor with the Merton and the magazines. I put the chocolate and the gun on his chest, too, then sat with my back against the side of the bed and read aloud until Caleb started to stir.
“Con,” he said, sitting up.
“Nice nap?”
“Too short. But I dreamed.” He picked up the gun and the magazine, hugging the magazine to his chest. It really broke his heart when they threw him out. “Thank you.”
“No problem,” I said. “Happy birthday.”
“It’s not mine. It’s yours.”
“You know that. I know that. Somebody doesn’t know that.”
“She knows.”
“She forgot. So it’s hamburgers for us tonight.”
“Hamburgers,” he said. “That’s okay.”
“You hungry?”
“Okay.” He shot me with the empty gun.
“Wash your face,” I said. “It’s all wrinkled.” He got out of bed and ran to the bathroom, gun in one hand, Boy’s Life in the other.
I went and watched him, standing in his bare feet in the tub, bending down to put his face in the water. He doesn’t care for the sink. This face-under-the-tap business is how they wash up on Mars, how they do it, he says, at home. In the past nine months I’ve read Stranger in a Strange Land, Podkayne of Mars, The Martian Chronicles, and all of Burroughs’s series except Thuvia, which for some reason is hard to obtain. All this to better understand my little brother. When Mama told us that Papa’s plane had gone down in the Everglades, Caleb had looked thoughtful for a moment and then said, “Who?”
“Your papa,” said Mama.
“And who are you?” he asked, turning to me. I didn’t say anything. Caleb passed out, falling right onto the carpet. Mama and I watched him, like it was a trick we’d paid to see him do. Then we both freaked out. When he woke up he did not speak for two weeks, but only peered at us like we and everything else around him were totally unfamiliar. When he began speaking it was clear we would have to get to know him all over again. He insisted that his name was Belac, and that he came from Barsoom. Papa used to read to us from Burroughs on our weekends with him, when he couldn’t sleep. First we got all the Tarzan books and then one through three of the Mars books. Dr. Mouw, Caleb’s shrink, and occasionally my own shrink, says we must live in his fantasy in order to draw him out of it.
Dr. Mouw dresses in dark suits and has dark, sad eyes and a pixie-cut hairdo, and I like her, usually, but only an idiot would become a psychiatrist. I wanted briefly to be a psychiatrist. Now I think I would like to become either a cat burglar or a Trappist monk, or else just a plain old evil genius, the kind that takes over the world.
“Ready,” said Caleb.
“Put on your shoes.” He put them on and looked at the laces. “Yes, you can,” I said, before he could say that he couldn’t tie them.
“We don’t have these on Barsoom,” he said crossly. But he tied the shoes. Mama ties them for him. Dr. Mouw and I agree that that is going too far.
I got the five dollars out of the lettuce crisper and we headed down De Soto to the McDonald’s. Caleb had filled his squirt gun in the tub and was shooting all the palm trees.
“Hi!” he said. “Hi! Hi! Bowbee do impapa!”
“Speak English, dammit,” I said.
“Die, enemies of Helium!” he said, then sucked thoughtfully on the gun. “Those trees,” he said. “What do you call them?”
“You know damn well what they’re called.”
“Those trees look like the kalai-zee.”
“I’m sure I want to know what those are.”
“A race of scaly giants,” he said. “With bushy green hair. You know when they’ve been eating children because the crumbs of skin stick around their mouths.”
“Where do you get this morbid shit?”
“Just telling it like it is,” he said, Papa’s line whenever he recounted the gross things he saw working as a doctor when he was very young, before he met Mama, before he learned to fly, and before he became a drug smuggler.
“Fuck it’s hot,” I said. Caleb shot me in the hair. “You’re lucky I didn’t bring mine,” I said.