Outside, a man who had been drinking wobbled around, as if gravity had suddenly lost its grip on him.
Lionel always had a ballpoint pen behind his ear. When they were finished at the restaurant, his paper napkin was covered in stars. He had a habit of doodling stars. When he had been dating Andrea, everything in the house started to be covered in stars. The borders of the newspaper and the phone bills would be covered in stars. The little boy thought there was something magical about Lionel.
As they walked home, every time the doors of a bar along the street opened up, the sound was like change spilling out from a slot machine.
“All great philosophical tracts were written at night. I have to stay up late. You have a bedtime now. But when you grow up, you can choose to be the type of person that has a bedtime or the type of person who does not. Everybody’s got to figure out their own way to do good in this world.”
There were cockroaches scurrying across the sidewalk. They shook hands and said good night.
Michal saw Lionel lying on the grass in the park. There was a dog sniffing next to him. Michal had to say hello to Lionel three or four times before he opened his eyes. Then it took Lionel a few seconds to figure out who the boy was. His eyes were all glazed over.
Andrea sat across from Michal at the kitchen table. She told him that Lionel was sick and that he would never, never, never be able to stop doing drugs. He had been on them too long. She had known boys like that since she was a little girl. Lionel would never be able to stop.
“I know that,” Michal said.
“I don’t know why he bothered to go out of his way to be your friend, just to start using again and abandon you. He’s heartless.”
“No, he’s not.”
“You certainly can’t expect him to be here forever, baby, okay?”
Lionel got better again, and when he did, he took Michal to the park to teach him how to play basketball.
“How come you never had your own kids?” Michal asked.
“I’m an addict. I would never pass that gene on. Besides, I have you. That’s way, way better than any sucker that would come out of me.”
Michal smiled. He had a good feeling inside of him that he knew nobody could take away from him.
“Although some of my genes aren’t so bad. I do have kick-ass hair.”
When Lionel started about how handsome he was, it usually meant that he was in a good mood.
Lionel had been a so-so basketball player in high school. That day he was dribbling the ball around feeling like a superstar. Lionel moved about all graceful and was able to get the ball in the basket sometimes. A bunch of other kids came to watch Lionel and to ask if they could play. It was always an event if a cool dad or an older brother took a little bit of time off their schedule to come and play.
Michal looked at Lionel and he was proud of him.
Michal was so excited about going to the zoo that he was already standing behind the glass door to the lobby, waiting for Lionel to show up. Lionel had a bag of peanuts that he had gotten from the grocery store. He said the peanuts they had for sale at the zoo were an extortion racket.
They squeezed in together on a plastic seat on the subway train. He was wearing a green button-up shirt with polka dots, pinstriped pants and a pair of black army boots, the black of which had long since worn off the toes. Lionel didn’t dress any differently on a weekday than he did on a weekend. He had long since ceased to be able to differentiate between the two. Michal was rocking back and forth because he was so excited.
Lionel picked up a newspaper that had been left on the seat next to them. The row of old men on the bench across from them sat hunched over like a row of buzzards.
“We have got to keep abreast of the news. Even if it makes us weep.”
Michal tried to turn the pages of the newspaper while Lionel was reading it.
“Ah, ah, ah. We’ll get to the comics in a little bit. I want to read the comics as much as you do, trust me. I’m itching to get to them too. But they are dessert, okay? We have to be worldly men. You don’t want your life to be confined to this little neck of the woods.”
“I like it here.”
“Travel the whole world. And if after seeing everything that there is to see out there, you want to come back here, then be my guest. But I’ll bet you five dollars that you will not.”
“Five dollars!”
“Yes.”
“You won’t pay up.”
They shook on it.
A few days later, Michal’s mother found a map of the zoo. There were red Xs drawn with a ballpoint pen on the entranceways. The word EXPLOSIVES was written underneath the Xs. There were black arrows next to the words EXIT STRATEGY. It was clear what this was. Michal and Lionel had come up with a plan to liberate the animals from the zoo.
Lionel called from the telephone in the halfway house. She sat in the kitchen, listening to Michal’s side of the conversation.
“Where will the animals go? Oh, oh, oh! We can put the wolves in the park. And then we can go and put up signs saying that there are wolves in the park. Keep out!”
Michal was quiet for a bit.
“What are we going to do with the tiger, though? It will walk down the street and it’s going to eat children!”
Michal was laughing and laughing.
“We can’t put hippopotamuses in the swimming pool! They’ll get chlorine in their eyes!”
Michal was laughing so hard that he had to cross his legs so that he wouldn’t pee himself. Andrea realized that she had been right about Lionel the first time she had met him: she had struck gold.
Sometimes, after Lionel buzzed for Michal to come down, Andrea and Lionel would shoot the breeze on the intercom in the lobby. Lionel could still make Andrea laugh. But she knew not to let him up. And Lionel knew that it was probably a good thing that Andrea kept him down there at the bottom of the stairs. Neither of them had ever been successful at romance. And the both of them knew that what Lionel and Michal had was bigger than what they could ever have.
Andrea didn’t really have much of a family. Lionel’s childhood had been different. His family had expected things from him. He had been so clever as a little boy. He knew that he had been born with possibilities that other people had not been born with. He was at the top of his class and his teachers said that he could get an academic scholarship to any school he wanted. He thought life was going to be a breeze.
That was before he knew that he was a drug addict. He went to parties like other kids. He did drugs like other kids. But lordy, lordy, lordy, all of that crap affected him in a different way than other kids. It possessed him. He should have known that he was cursed at birth. He was like Sleeping Beauty. Even though there were all these good fairies that gave him looks and charm and smarts, there was a mother-fucking dick of a fairy who showed up and said that on his sixteenth birthday he was going to prick himself with a hypodermic needle and he was going to walk around in a daze for the rest of his goddamn life.
Lionel couldn’t bear to be around people who knew what he was like before drugs had taken hold of him. Lionel’s mother said that the way he had turned his back on the family was worse than his addiction. He was heartless.
“Read me something from your journal,” Lionel said as he was walking Michal home from school.
“Today I had a conversation in class with a boy named Callum. He said that when he grows up, he wants to work on a ship. He says that he doesn’t mind the sea. He also had a dog that died last year. They buried it in the backyard. He said that he thought that he was going to cry, but he didn’t.”
“Magnificent! You know what you did, my boy? You located an existential hero! You captured Callum in a nutshell. You know Callum in a way that Callum doesn’t even know Callum. When you look at people, you know exactly what they are about. People are going to love that about you. Nobody likes to go about the world being anonymous and unknowable. They want to know that they are being seen for who they really are. You are a man of the people. You are going to be a leader, mark my words.”