“Are you bored?” Ethel asked Pickie Beecher.
“I am always bored,” he said.
“Well, keep cutting. We’re almost done.” They were snipping words out of the diary and putting them in a glass bowl on the floor. Pickie kept dropping them from too high, and then chasing the fluttering word as it drifted about her room. She had opened a window on the same day that the boat-boy had come into the hospital. She had just finally felt like it, was all.
She had the thought that the boy had something to tell her, and to tell all of them — a fascinating and horrible story, full of something worse and more exciting than mere zombies — and she wanted to help him to tell it. But a séance had yielded the usual silence, which made sense because he wasn’t dead. And the aluminum tiara that the angel insisted was the telepathy device she had asked for only made her hear a very quiet sort of murmuring that she could easily have just been imagining. She couldn’t get close enough to put a pen in his sleeping hand, and sitting quietly with a pen in her hand yielded nothing but page after page of straight lines. Then she had the idea of using his own words. They would isolate every last one of them in a bowl, and then draw them out one after another to assemble a message, and maybe even a conversation.
“My hand hurts,” Pickie said.
“Keep working.”
“You are a cruel master.”
“Don’t call me that. Friends don’t call each other master.”
“I have no friends, except my brother, and where is he?”
“Don’t start that again. Just keep cutting, we’re almost done.” For a while the only sound was of their scissors working as she snipped in her book and Pickie snipped in his — the boy had written on both sides of every page, so to avoid getting words that were whole on one side but truncated on the other, she got a copy for each of them and painted out whole pages in them, odds in the one and evens in the other. “You know,” she said, as she snipped apart the last two words and let them fall into the bowl, “I don’t cut because I want to hurt myself. I cut because I want to feel alive.” Pickie yawned. “Hold on,” Ethel said. “The good part is coming.”
They closed their eyes and fished in the bowl with their hands, pinching the slips between their fingers and laying them out on an empty game board. It was Chutes and Ladders, one of the many old favorites in the playroom that even the preschoolers had abandoned for the more sophisticated diversions of the angel.
Still cry different silver wonder four teacher were the words.
“What do you think it means?” Ethel asked.
Pickie seemed hardly to think at all before he replied. “Still because he still misses his brother. Cry to cry for him. Different because he is unique in his grief, though the absence of a brother is the commonest grief and the most essential loneliness. Silver for his brother’s silver eyes, never to shine in the world. Wonder for the lost wonder of his iron sighs, and the miracles that died with him. Four is the perfect number — it is everywhere and has nothing to do with the message. Teacher because his brother was to teach him happiness and now it is a lesson he will never learn.”
Ethel looked at him a moment and then gave him a hug, a gesture he tolerated like always. She gathered up the words and put them back in the bowl. “Let’s try again,” she said.
A double Coolidge from Matt and Gavin it’s not so often you can have them. Matt behind and Aaron in front it was almost too much they kept saying, are you okay and I couldn’t talk because I was too close, chasing something again and almost getting it. They were interfering with the questions so I gave up on the AP class and we went back to the simpler thing, just one at a time, each of them in turn I could not make them go quick or hard enough though I called out for it and they shouted back, and shouted to each other — not like love though it was like at swim practice somebody shouting at you the water makes the voice seem far away. Go Matt go a little harder a little faster you almost have it. Every hit I moved a little further up the bed until my head was against the wall, every hit I was a little bit closer it was you I was chasing, always you no matter who it is. What a mystery how it is never you but it is always you, I reach and reach I can hardly stand it. They’re not wimpy fags like usual they were a little too fainthearted for the double but they do a good job on the easier thing I can hardly tell when one stops and the other starts, they’re so smooth.
I almost get you. You’re hand is reaching out to me and like always I miss it I just barely miss it.
Our last night so I thought it would be nice to have everybody together. I was thinking of everything we could do, things I don’t even have a name for yet. Matt and Gavin and almost everybody else, I found them and each said okay, see you later, but everyone was late and for a long time I thought it would be just me. Then Scott and Mrs. Scott arrived and then Matt and Gavin I thought it was all going to be ruined they were supposed to come in fifteen-minute intervals because I hadn’t told anybody the whole plan. I might have a friend there, too, I said, somebody cool, but I didn’t say who but it was all okay I shouldn’t have worried even though Matt and Gavin were frightened of the girl I could tell.
I named three new things: McKinley and Buchanan and Cleveland. The rooms aren’t very big, especially the singles. That was okay, too. It was like I was swimming through them, suspended in a Bush or a Bush Jr., or a Reagan and a Coolidge — I was floating I was flying I was on my way. Let this be a lesson to you, you told me, how everyone is connected by love. Look at these strangers they would not be together except for you they would all be alone if not for you you are a teacher like me. I am a teacher like you.
* * *
Dr. Chandra was touching himself, though there should not have been anything in the pages of the journal that really excited him in that way — it really was a tale of woe, after all. But it was something he did when he was upset, and the sadness of the story combined with the way it brought back memories of his own teenage adventures with men three and four times his age to make it seem like the necessary thing. Though he told himself over and over as he did it — I am not thinking of that, meaning he was not putting himself in the place of those creepy old men, the way he sometimes in his masturbating imagination put himself in the place of the creepy old men who had pounded his face or his bottom, and imagined his own face, and his own lips crying out under the weight of a fat hairy married man. Really he wasn’t thinking of anything for a while, but was only aware of the thing in him that was, stroke by stroke, coming closer to being launched out of his soul — a sadness and an unease and a frustration. Then he did see the boy, not naked or bottom up, not even the pleasant curve of his arm or the beautiful taper of hair at the back of his neck, but whole, neither clothed nor unclothed. He saw him in a way he could not properly describe, since it was a vision that seemed to include so much more than merely physical attributes. And suddenly the work he was doing — the very familiar work of temporarily ameliorating his own sad-sack situation — was not being done for him but for the boy, and with the same single-minded and vigorous force of imagination with which he might otherwise be imagining just how it might feel to be screwed by William Jennings Bryan or Conan the Barbarian or the handsome Yemeni who worked at the Falafel King down the street from his apartment, he now saw a different life for the boy, absent of desperate random screwings and ruinous teacherly vaginas, and loathing, and sadness. He imagined the boy, now not just clothed and unclothed but somehow bodied and unbodied, utterly at home in the world, and this was an ultimate pleasure. Even to consider it from the great distance pierced by his suddenly unbridled imagination was too much for Dr. Chandra. He blew with a wracking shudder and a great moan, and then lay back on his bed, totally exhausted, feeling somehow, despite appearances, that he had done something right for once.