The Notebook Boy appearing mute on popular talk shows
his image adorning the covers of glossy magazines
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July
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June
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B-flat or G-sharp. For argument's sake, you understand. Everything became a verb, became a story, you see, and the verbs hurried me away from the boom-boom. This happened, in short, in a phrase, and then something else happened. Here, it could be said to go without comment, we are splitting hairs. Wonderful turn of— Splitting. Imagine. And still… Or, to be more precise, some things happened, of course, and some things did not, again and again. Consequently, one could hazard without fear of reprisal a guess that some things happened among many things not happening. Unless, of course, et cetera. There's always that. Stranger things have— But there it is. Because the swallows. The clouds. The photographs, arresting. Because— Hello. It's lovely to make your acquaintance. The sound— The sound, I should emphasize, perhaps, for a sense of narrative immediacy, was a moist one. The gutting of a fish, let us say, and no more. My wing tearing. My wing being torn. Because the answer is… the answer is— But why?
The second Jarmo's fingertips contact her gown, the angel begins speaking to him without moving her lips, explaining, perhaps, explaining or describing, traveling with him without stirring, and yet her soliloquy is lost on the boy, for he misunderstands every word she utters, replacing each syllable with another that starts with the same letter of the alphabet but appears slightly earlier in the lexicon. So all he can think of as he removes his hand from her shoulder is the chatter of coins falling from one of his palms into the other. He sees Senate Square in the sunny pith of Helsinki, a cobblestone vastness surrounded by orderly Empire-yellow and white nineteenth-century Russian architecture, the expansive staircase leading up to the cathedral, the statue of Tsar Alexander II, the man who gave Finland back its language from the Swedes, rising in the middle of it all. Near the entrance to the university buildings, he sees a large iron-barred structure reminiscent of an ornate Chinese birdcage. It houses a sleeping angel. Jarmo is collecting money in the black booth out front from the long line of polite patrons, and, with the efficiency of an adding machine, Sami retracts the black curtain covering the structure to reveal a peep hole through which each patron may behold this miracle for exactly fifteen seconds, then he drops the heavy folds back into place.
It seems to Sami as if the angel were whispering to him from the center of his brain, the sound of her voice smelling brownish red like cinnamon at Christmas. Yet somehow he also misunderstands every word she utters, in this case replacing each syllable with another that starts with the same letter of the alphabet but appears slightly later in the lexicon. In the current version, the angel asks for the boys' help to effect her return to heaven, from which she was cast out accidentally when God forgot to dream her for the briefest of instants because He was so busy just then dreaming myriad British soldiers calling out His name in desperation and despair as they expired on the battlefields of the Boer War. If the boys were merely to carry her to the top of the hill on the far side of the lake, she would be near enough home to take flight and reenter God's imagination in the time it takes to think of a word in a foreign language you knew very well three hours ago but has momentarily slipped your mind. As their reward, Sami is certain she told him (although nothing could be farther from the truth), the angel is prepared to tell each boy about what the last seven minutes of his life will feel like, and precisely how death will smell a temporal flitter before she descends upon him in a mad whirl of black rags and ululation.
Perhaps, next, the same slightly out-of-focus afternoon. Perhaps a different one. It is becoming increasingly difficult to tell with anything approaching conviction.