16
IT WAS A WARM BLUE NIGHT IN MAY. Edwin sat on the black, rippling root of the fat old tilted tree at the end of Beech Street, watching white spots of the shattered moon on the rippling black water. By his right foot lay a piece of waxpaper on which sat four slices of moonlit cucumber, three moonlit radishes, and half a pepper, moon red and moon green. I sat on a moonlit root beside him, brooding moodily over the unsatisfactory course of our conversations. Ever since that night on the steps of Franklin Pierce, his restlessness had increased until there was no knowing what he wanted. His mirth and mild levity, insulting to begin with, had taken an unpleasant turn toward crude clownishness and vicious mockery. At the same time he was capable of sudden seriousnesses, disarming solemnities, that were downright embarrassing to me. On one such evening, after hours of unparalleled poisonous nastiness, Edwin suddenly began speaking in a rush of sincerity; and instead of parting at his front door I followed him into the house, where we continued our discussion first in the cellar and later, when his parents went up to bed, upstairs in the living room. It was on this occasion, as reported long ago in the last lines of Part One, that Edwin told me I had “saved” his “soul” by making him think of his life as a biography — that is, a design with a beginning, middle, and end. But the next night he was at it again, saying how “stupid” and “boring” biography was — as if he were talking about Go Fish or Monopoly — and responding to my quiet remarks with snorts and silences. And this very evening, on our way to Beech Street, he had been, oh, unspeakably vicious, he had called me things I cannot repeat, he had treated me with such merciless malice, such eager loathing, that it was as if my very existence were hateful to him; and now he sat on his rippling root, crunching his vile vegetables as if he were devouring the bones of an enemy, and watching the shattered moon with a look of grim satisfaction, as if he were taking pleasure in the dissolution of the universe.
In the dark blue sky, a few yards away, the luminous half-moon looked suspiciously precise, as if it had been carefully separated from its missing half along a perforation. A nearby star, twinkling for all it was worth, resembled a flickering dot in a faulty neon sign. I reflected, not for the first time, upon the exaggerated reputation of the trite night sky, so empty of mysteries, so smug and small, in comparison with the terrible blue infinities of a blazing summer noon. On the pale field across the stream the moonlight lay like a sprinkling of sugar on a vast sugar cookie. The color reminded me of Arnold Hasselstrom’s hair, and again I saw those pale strands blowing in the chill November wind that came in over the steamblasts from the green radiator in Miss Coco’s room, ten thousand years ago. I was reflecting upon what it was that had attracted Edwin to that disobedient boy, when suddenly a shot rang out.
It was only Edwin, chomping on a plump radish. The sight of that moonlit medley of raw vegetables filled me with rage. I had reached the word “those” in the statement “If you have to eat those filthy things, at least close your mouth,” when Edwin, turning to me suddenly, said with rude eagerness: “Jeffrey, suppose a person knew the day he would die.” I distinctly remember that his mouth was full of radish.
17
EDWIN’S NOTION OF SUICIDE was strictly esthetic. So at least it seemed to me from the confused effusions of the next several nights. It was not so much the act that interested him as the design imposed by that act upon his entire life. “You know how you see the end, when you’re writing,” he said, cogitating under the moon. “Well, suppose life was like that. Then every day would be — special.” Yes, it was the idea of design that led him on; it was as if he wished to imprison, in the glass globe of Art, the dancing and unpredictable waters of Life. None of which, incidentally, kept him from doing his homework faithfully each afternoon right through the end of June.
Was Edwin serious? Oh, as serious as ever he was, when he was playing; dead serious, I almost said. Certainly a new energy took hold of him that swept him through the next ten weeks and smack into the arms of the predestined day: he threw himself into the idea of doom with infectious zest. That very first night, at the end of Beech Street, he decided on the date: August 1, his eleventh birthday. It was clearly an artist’s choice. After school the next day we learned from MY STORY: A BABY RECORD that he had been born at 1:06 A.M. The night was passed in a discussion of such matters as the means of suicide (I favored the gentle sleeping pill, Edwin the bloody gun) and the suicide note (I favored the voluminous justification, Edwin the brief farewell). It was I who jokingly suggested, at this time, a splendid line that brought a smile to his lips: “I aspire to the condition of fiction.” After that night, the event itself seemed to drop out of Edwin’s mind as he began to steep himself in the excitement of his new sense of existence. His most trivial acts, he seemed to think, glowed in the backward-reflected lurid light of his foreseen death; they “fit in,” you see, to the main design. He continually urged me to record some silly remark of his in my biography. “Jot that down, Jeffrey,” he would say, sitting crosslegged on his bed and leaning back against the wall with his hands clasped behind his neck. He was only half joking.
As for me, I was a most uncomfortable participant in this latest game of his. There was something unwholesome about it, something that crept into my brain and made me dream of bright green bugs on black moss; though once or twice when I expressed my reservations, Edwin turned to me angrily and called me a “spoilsport”—his mother’s word. Which raises, I suppose, the whole question of Edwin and play. For you see, it was at this time that the simple games of the Early Years were first revealed to me in a sinister light. I thought of little Edwin gazing in the ground glass of his father’s Graflex, and removing photographs from the long blotter roll, and staring at his three-dimensional Viewmaster reels, and brooding over his colorful comic books; and it now struck me that this early habit of viewing the unshaped world in a shaping frame had produced in him a desire to view his entire life in the same way. His novel, I began to realize, was one such frame; and now he wished to carve from Time itself a final frame. But surely, you say, it was only a game. Surely he had no intention — oh, no doubt, no doubt. Innocent games, guilty games — how can a mere biographer unravel it all? So much is certain, that despite my forebodings, I could not escape being drawn into the current of his excitement. Frail Edwin generated a powerful force of personality when he was playing; you either kept out of his way then, or were swept into his stream. And so despite myself a kind of mild excitement began to take possession of me, as long ago when I had set a secret fire.
Winter after winter I had watched the flames in the Mullhouse fireplace, but not until the summer after my fifth birthday did I dare to summon the forbidden demon. I had discovered the matches some months before, in a white metal drawer in the kitchen, but mama’s stern injunction checked me as I reached. Checked me, but fevered me too, so that what was forbidden in deed was performed in imagination many times. A mild excitement took possession of me and began to grow until my fingertips tingled with the forefelt tension of a scraped wooden match. One bright day mama was out. In a kind of numbness, but with perfect lucidity, I opened the white metal drawer and removed the matches. I carried them downstairs into the hot dim cellar; through a high window I saw blades of green grass against a bright blue sky. As if I were repeating mechanically an action performed many times in the past, I found a piece of old newspaper and a dusty jar. I crumpled up the newspaper and stuffed it into the jar, whirling suddenly at an imagined noise. I moved against the wall under the high window so that no one happening to look in could see me crouching there. Easily, and without surprise, I struck a match. At first the hard ball of paper resisted the flame, and I nearly burned my fingers as I tipped the blackening stick deeper into the opening of the jar. I dropped the match and struck another. An edge took fire. The ball of paper seemed to writhe in pain, and as the flames began to shoot up over the lip with a madness I had not foreseen, my hurt mind writhed, and I watched in terror, for it was as if my sin had taken upon itself a shape of flame that would consume me in an orange blast. But in the very center of my terror was a relief so deep that it was like the end of terror.