“No thanks,” said Dr. Chandra. “I’ve heard enough of those.”
“You’re just being a prude. It’s not like you think. It’s not pornographic. It’s philosophic. Well, maybe not quite that either, but it’s not what you think.”
“I have no interest,” he said. “Anyway, we’re not allowed, and I always do what I’m told.”
“I’m allowed. You’re allowed. The twelve-year-olds are not allowed. Which is as it should be, though like I say, it’s not pornographic. But I can see how it could be dangerous, you know. It makes you think the wrong thoughts. I find myself thinking the wrong thoughts. Bad thoughts. Not dirty thoughts. How many times do I have to tell you that it’s not like that? You want me to read you some?”
“I just want some more coffee,” he said. She sighed, closed the book she’d been holding open in front of him all the time they’d been talking, put it down, and took his cup. He stared at it but did not open it or even touch it. He’d seen the boy in the PICU, had taken the tour there just like everybody else, and wondered like everybody else what was going on with him, that his illness could resist Jemma Claflin’s Jesus-magic. The boy had a beautiful face. It wasn’t a surprise that people like Karen were falling in love with him, or that they wanted to know every last little thing about him, or that they would form reading groups around his sex diary.
“I have no interest in that sort of thing,” he said again to Karen when she gave him his coffee.
“Which is exactly your problem,” she said. “You have no interest.”
“Have a good day,” he said, trying to make it sound like he actually wanted her to have a bad day, but he always failed at that. His compliments only ever sounded like compliments. If he sat still for it Karen would spend an hour digging out the root causes of his unhappiness. It was always offered, he knew, in a spirit of earnest helpfulness, but her argument always sounded like an insult, and stung like one, and never inspired him to improve himself. It only made him want to go to his room, to sit on his balcony thinking about how he could hardly stand to be around his only friend in the hospital, and calm himself by staring at the water.
When he got back to his room he sat in his usual place, and stared out like usual at the horizon, but no peace came to him. When he closed his eyes he could see the boy’s face on the water. “I have no interest in him,” he said again, but when he went inside to ask the angel for lunch he asked for a copy of the little book as well.
I can still see Miami and I’m already bored. A new year for me Mrs. DiMange but everything seems the same. Still the same gray color in everybody’s face and on my face and still the same tired feeling when I look up at the sky. It should lift something out of me looking up like that it used to but never does any more. In dream number five you are looking up into that sky and the blue feeling is something you have gathered in your mouth and when we kiss it passes into me and I think, it’s like this. Also we are flying, or you are flying and I am riding you — yes, we’re doing the Jackson and it’s like in number seven but in that one you are floating on the water and every time I push into you the water pushes back and you cry out like a bird.
They’re afraid to leave me home, that’s why I’m here, floating away on a boat full of old anniversary couples. It has nothing to do with my birthday, except that I’d have an excuse to throw another party, not that I would. Nobody really appreciates it, when you go out of your way like that. Better to pick one person and do a whole party’s worth of shit for them, than to spread your goodwill among a gaggle of dumb asses. In number twenty-three I have a party just for you. It’s in my house and every room is decorated in a different way, always with things you like, only for you.
We are going to San Juan and Jamaica and Aruba and St. Thomas and Martinique. Who cares?
A day of discoveries, Mrs. DiMange. I am the youngest person on board. There’s food everywhere and you can stuff yourself at the Lido buffet all night long. The Alternative Theater does not show alternative movies — next I will puzzle out in exactly what way it is alternative, no one seems to know. The bartender in the casino won’t card me. There’s no one in the piano bar during the day and I can play all I want while the sun is up.
And another discovery — I went in to pee in the casino bathroom while Muz was slaving at the slot machine and it was very fancy — white marble and real towels folded by the sink and a little man who runs in twelve times a day to change them, and soap in a dish, and French-milled pucks in the urinals. They were the good kind, there in a row with nothing to block the view of your neighbor. In number 13 you walk in while I’m there and stand with a banana poking out of your pants. I am in disguise, you say, and I am in love, and then there comes a Jackson, you against the wall with your cheek pressed against the seams between the cement blocks. I was thinking about it, because it was so fancy, and I was redoing our bathroom in my head, taking out the truckstop décor and installing the new marble — just standing there. Not waiting for one because it didn’t seem like the right place. I get a sense, you know. I thought I could tell where things happen. It’s like there’s a glow, like how you know somebody’s interested, even though they’re standing in line next to you at the supermarket with their wife and their three kids. You look at them and they’ll follow you anywhere. It’s like that, but with a place and not a person.
He just reached out. It was fine. That’s enough of an invitation, standing there in a line of high-class urinals with a great big boner. I could hardly be offended, and he wasn’t so bad. He was dressed up for dinner in a white jacket and a black bow tie. I touched that first — it was real, the kind you have to knot up yourself. Seven black buttons on a shirt as fancy as any of the toilets. Silver rims — I thought I could see myself. Then I held on to him. He was bigger than me. Jack says soaking your dick in miracle-gro will make it bigger but I did that all summer and it made no fucking difference at all.
We need a little privacy, he said, walking backward through one of the marble doors. He stood on the toilet so the little man, when he came in to change the towels, would think it was just me in there, standing and thinking. I did a Bush 1 on him and then I climbed up and he did me too. It was fine. I saw him later in the dining room with his family. He raised his knife to me like a salute and he winked. I walked right past his table to go to the bathroom again and I waited for five minutes but he didn’t come.
Everything all right in there? Muz asked, when I finally came back, putting a hand on my sensitive stomach.
Fine, I said, but nothing tasted any good, and no matter what the waiter brought it wasn’t what I wanted.
Vivian did not like what she was reading. She had read the whole thing through twice already, but kept going back to it because she thought it must contain a clue to the boy’s past, and to their future. She had read it the first time looking for answers about the boat, but it said nothing about where everyone had gone. No mass leap from the decks, no zombie war, no death by starvation. Just the desperate notes of a boy in trouble.
“I do not like what I am reading,” she said out loud. She was at her desk, hunched close over the book, as if getting her brain close to the letters was going to make it easier for her to understand their secret meaning.
“I can offer you something far more pleasant,” the angel said.
Vivian shook her head and rubbed her eyes, then looked up at the pictures of the boy she’d taped across the wall above her desk, eight views of his sleeping face. If you studied them like she had, you could see that his expression was not the same in every picture. Here there was just a little droop of the eyebrows that suggested sadness, here a hint of a smile, here his eyes seemed shut tight, not just closed in sleep. The diary was a desperate message to his teacher — so full of love and yet how it condemned her, so Mrs. DiMange was the Great Satan of the hospital. But he was a message too, as obvious and as inscrutable as his diary, thrust at them over the waters just as another had been thrust up at them. And did he speak as lovingly, and damn as thoroughly, as this little black book?