As he and Michal walked down the street together, Lionel nodded and greeted everybody.
“You’ve got to be sociable. You can’t be afraid of people.”
People would glance at Lionel strangely because of his getup. Some people looked nervous, others gazed straight ahead as if he was about to ask them for money and some went ahead and said hello back. Michal laughed every time Lionel greeted someone. He cringed, his shoulders up, embarrassed. He put his hands over his face.
“You do it. Just make eye contact and smile at any of these jokers.”
Michal smiled and waved at a middle-aged woman. He couldn’t believe he was doing it.
“Hello, sweetheart,” the woman said.
“See! You like people. That’s why you’re shy. It’s because you care so much about what people think. You’ve got way more regard for these fools than I do. And it comes to you natural-like. I was bitter even as a little kid. I was like this character from Shakespeare named lago.”
“The parrot in Aladdin.”
“No. I’m not talking about a bird. I’m talking about the immortal bard. The greatest writer who ever lived. And he had this character who messes stuff up for everybody. And they put these scholars on the case in order to figure out why Iago did all the stuff that he did.”
“What’s a scholar?”
“Scholars are like therapists, but for books. But none of them could figure out Iago’s motivations. Why he would fuck everything up.”
Lionel paused a second as if reflecting on his own words. The cars were honking at one another behind him on the street.
“Hey, whatcha got left over from your lunch?”
Michal reached into his school bag and pulled out a Ziploc bag with half a peanut butter sandwich in it.
“There is nothing like a peanut butter sandwich that was made by someone’s mama. I could make a sandwich like this, but it wouldn’t taste good at all. This is like manna.”
“What’s manna?”
“Food that the gods delivered.”
The next week they were doing Michal’s math homework together at a picnic table at the park. A crow opened its wings, like a man opening a trench coat to exhibit some stolen jewellery that he had for sale.
“How can you not understand this?” Lionel asked. “This is simple basic shit.”
“I’m an idiot. I can’t do anything right.”
“No, no, no. You’ve just got a mental block. Let’s go over this all careful-like, okay. We can do this.”
“Everybody thinks I’m stupid.”
“Who’s everybody? Come on. You’re afraid of what’s going to happen if you let yourself be able to figure all this shit out. I was like that. I was scared of all the ideas that were in my head. I couldn’t accept the responsibility that comes with being smart. So I went and started doing all these drugs because they made me numb. And I destroyed myself just so that I couldn’t be great.”
“Subtraction makes no sense. How can anything be less than zero?”
“You’re right! You’re right. Everything stops at zero. Zero should be as low as you can go. The government invented negative numbers. Why? Just so that people can go into debt and then never get out of it. But we’re going to have to play their game. Then when you learn to play their game, you can challenge them. I tried to reject it all and look at the sorry-assed state I ended up in. Okay?”
“Okay.”
The next weekend Lionel and Michal went to the amusement park together. Lionel was wearing a blazer and a long striped silk scarf and a pair of track pants. He had on a pair of shiny leather shoes.
Lionel had a plastic bag filled with Coke cans. They had coupons on the sides of them. You could trade them in for a dollar off at the amusement park. He had been looking through the trash for them all week. So when Michal pulled out the twenty-dollar bill that his mother had given him to pay for both their admissions, Lionel told him to put his money away.
They walked around the park, checking out the fanciful structures.
“Once, when I was a little boy, I was trapped in a hall of mirrors. The configurations rattled me. I’ve never really been able to think properly since then.”
Michal didn’t want to go on any of the scary rides. He held Lionel by the sleeve of his blazer, pulling him away from the roller coaster. He begged and whined, but Lionel insisted. On the ride Michal squeezed his eyes shut. He wrapped his arms so tightly around Lionel’s waist that the man started having a coughing fit.
“We’re going to ride this thing until you are no longer afraid.”
By the end of the day, Michal was able to put his arms up in the air. He was fearless. He was alive.
Michal was too short to go on the pirate ship.
“I hate being a midget,” Michal yelled.
“Don’t worry about being so little. You’re a late bloomer. Anyways, it’s what’s on the inside that counts. You know how your mom puts marks on the inside of the door frame, showing your height? Well you’re going to get to a certain age where you don’t get any taller. But your insides never stop expanding. That is limitless.”
Lionel almost always had a paperback book somewhere on him. He loved to read. He took Michal to the Children’s Library every Saturday. It was a building made of red stone with squirrels and birds carved into the stone arches around the doors.
He had a pair of reading glasses that he got from the pharmacy. He took them out of his breast pocket and put them on as he was going through different books that were on display.
“Here’s a book about peeing on the potty. The great theme of man versus himself. It’s bound to win the Pulitzer.”
“This book about the owl looks really good,” Michal called back, holding a book over his head.
“Damn! Check this out! It is an abridged children’s version of Don Quixote. You’ve got to take this out. It’s all about madness and the inability for anybody to ever really be heroic. My man Cervantes was prophetic. He foresaw the modern age coming.”
Lionel sat in a little armchair that made him look like a giant. Michal sat on the carpet on the floor, which had a cobblestone pattern and was meant to look like the yellow brick road.
They always took out the maximum number of fifteen books. Michal walked down the street with the pile right up to his chin.
“You have got to read, Michal. Every time that you read a book, it is like depositing money in the bank. You spend every weekend reading a pile of books this big, I swear to you that you are going to be a rich man.”
“No, I won’t. How?”
“Trust me on this one. This is the only thing that is going to make you into a rich man. No matter how hard your mother works at that grocery store, she is never going to be a rich woman. There is nothing that your mother can do to get out of that building in this lifetime. And that is the class divide, my friend.”
“Will I always be poor?”
“No, because we are going to have a revolution. The odds will be against us, because it’s going to be Michal against the whole fucking structure. The whole country.”
“The whole country!”
“Yes, but don’t worry. I got your back. We are going to outwit the motherfuckers.”
One of the neighbours was over drinking coffee with Andrea. The roses on the wallpaper behind her head looked like the tomatoes thrown at the opera singer that had missed her head.
“I know he’s been spending some time with Michal lately, but I stand by my statement that he is a heartless fuck-up. One thing that he has going for him is that he will never have a heart attack, because you need to have a heart in order to have a heart attack.”
Andrea laughed really loudly at her own joke.