They passed the can of beer back and forth.
— So you’re saying I went through a conversation where I asked Dinah Polanski to kiss me —
— You asked her to kiss you?
— While you were going out the window of the bathroom?
— Well… yeah.
— And why did you do that?
Some people had cruelties inflicted on them because cruelties had been inflicted on them in the past. These initial cruelties acted as magnets for further cruelties. You saw the wound, you saw the way victim loved the wound, you saw the way he tended it, how lovingly, how pridefully, and you couldn’t do anything but reopen this wound. In fact, it was almost pleasurable to be the source of renewed trauma for this unfortunate, because it was something the victim knew well. Therefore, you were reassuring him even while you were inflicting discomfort. That’s how it was. Friendships turned on a dime. When Gerry ran off and left Julian on the golf tee, on the winter tee, when Gerry went to join the throng beside the creek, he knew he was doing something awful, but the worst part was that he had no remorse. There was a total absence of sympathy for Julian. He couldn’t even imagine there was an inside to Julian Peltz; he couldn’t imagine that Julian wasn’t just some ugly kid with braces on his teeth who worked at the library and who was constantly hanging around. It was only later that Julian’s face, receding in sheets of night, floated through the heavy conscience of Gerry Abramowitz.
Wearers of sheets prepared for a migration across the river. Down into the river they went, allotheistic teens, shawls wrapped snugly around them, to ford the river called Tokeneke, rock by rock. Toward what goal did they proceed? Toward Nicky Foster, on the far bank, where, lubricated by the consumption of beers, Nicky was preparing to set fire to his familial acreage. In its entirety. He had a gallon of high-octane fuel, he had a tiger in his tank. His pyrotechnics would begin with a bonfire, and then it would engulf the entire far side of the river. The fire would have to travel almost a half-mile before it would hit the Goodells’ house, over on Hamilton, and the local volunteer fire department would arrive way before that. There were spots where there were no trees anyhow, just underbrush. Nicky would call the fire department himself, since he had learned the number for all local emergency personnel in the pursuit of a certain merit badge in his troop of boy scouts. There would be no accident or injury. And his audience, the faithful, would be transfixed by his spectacle. The first drenched handful of them, one or two sliding down the muddy bank and back into the river, now labored to reach Nicky’s side. They clutched at roots and branches, pulled themselves from the creek. Where was Julian Peltz now? In that forest somewhere, so that he, the other Jewish kid, could serve as the appropriate sacrifice for Nicky Fosters destruction of property? Tied to a sugar maple and left to broil?
It was like Gerry had offered him up.
Polly Firestone, her name afterward an emblem for the excesses of the Fosters’ party, stretched out a hand to Nick Foster. Nick helped her up onto the bank. She fished in the pocket of her nondescript corduroy trousers, which she wore underneath a twin-sized sheet, for a disposable lighter, one made by a large multinational plastics corporation. Nick took the proffered lighter, struck it in the conventional way, and before the rest of the kids were even up on the bank, the bonfire lit up that Halloween. A pair of cedars was engulfed. Some eyebrows were singed. It was all more than they had ever expected in their short, careless lives.
His mother’s paper on the circumstances of the party and the reaction to it in the local press, which later appeared in the Deviant Behavior biannual (volume nineteen, number two), turned on a line from Nietzsche, as Gerry interpreted it in his middle life, Rejoicing monsters, they are capable of high spirits as they walk away without qualms from a horrific succession of murder, arson, violence, and torture, as if it were nothing more than a student prank. His mother’s prose was subdued, with a faint trace of wistfulness: The songs of contemporary youth worship imaginary possibilities immanent in abstraction: liberty, heroism, revolution. But more practically the freedom connoted in these lyrics, to take the first example, is the abandonment of pregnant women, the abuse of controlled substances, the victimless defrauding of banks and financial institutions, narcissism, selfishness, untimely death. A lineage might be supposed in which libertarian and anti-governmental rhetoric leads directly to destruction of property and violence against parents and leadership entities. See below, e.g., deposition statements of defendants in what I’m calling the Foster Case. I have appended the testimony of one boy, sixteen, who I’ll call Jim, accidentally injured when abandoned in the woods by other party-attendants. The reliable conclusion is that restriction is the proper environment for youth, that time of life that I can only refer to as ethical apprenticeship, during which privileges such as decision making and liberty ought to be controlled, abridged, even eliminated for a period of about seven years from onset of puberty, while ethical and normative values are instilled. Arrest, according to this formulation, is benevolent, arrest is compassionate, arrest is creative, arrest is planning for a serene future.
Gerry Abramowitz, the legal aid lawyer of Providence, RI, insisted on the language of identity politics, Percocet or no Percocet. He was a disabled person, not a handicapped person. And yet, in his privacies he thought of the injured arm not as some poignant but surmountable problem, but as the Claw. Finally, all places and times of youth had been reconsidered until they did nothing but refer to or predict or reflect back upon the Claw. The useless and homely Claw. Everything was Before Claw and After Claw, and these places he was remembering that were Before Claw, they receded at an alarming rate, like distant galaxies, hurtling toward a margin of space where, in a dazzling and romantic nothingness, they were refracted distortedly: Connecticut, the years when he was in college, the year when he lived in Hoboken, in brief faux-connubial bliss, the following year in Jersey City, all Before Claw, before the weekend when he decided to go look at autumn foliage, alone, because he couldn’t find anyone to go along. What a stupid way to spend a weekend. If he had just stayed home, if he had gone to see movies in the city, then he wouldn’t be doubling up on Percocet, remembering. Everything Before Claw was better than the monochromes After Claw, everything was sweet and acute in the time before. Now daily life was pale and thin, a low-sodium canned broth; After Claw was all survival, how admirable it seemed to survive another year, to have a few friends whom you had known for a while. After Claw, shampooing was a victory; After Claw, knowing the birthday of two or three people was the height of solicitousness; After Claw, being polite to the guy in the dry cleaner up the block was very good; After Claw, thanking a bus driver was remarkable; After Claw, trying a new cuisine was adventurous; AfterClaw, remembering to vote was heroic; After Claw, feeling like taking your clothes off in the presence of a lover was an astonishment (easier to watch television); After Claw, the Weather Channel was the most serene and beneficent institution on earth; After Claw, it was the little things: not having a malignant tumor, not having your hair fall out from chemotherapy not having a colostomy shunt; After Claw, a child that didn’t scream was beautiful, as was a geranium that blossomed once, a cardinal that landed on the feeder, a mailbox without a letter from the tax authorities, a cereal that tasted okay, a government that did something about poverty, a neighbor who told you to close your windows before a storm, a friend who wanted to talk, a sky that cleared. After Claw, everything that was before was better than it had actually been; After Claw, all was poignant and diminished and sad, and all that was Before Claw, was shiny, new, and lost.