He breathed in and out frantically, staring down at the water, at his legs beneath the water, at his penis.
"Ambitious." The voice came from above. He was flooded with gratitude and love. Everything was going to be all right.
"...was 'bitious if it were so it were a grievious fault and—"
"Grievous."
"Huh?" He looked up into Father's face, searching for signs of anger. "Isn't that what I said?"
"Grie-vous," the man intoned. He had a wonderful voice. It filled the small room. It made the water vibrate. "Grie-vous," he boomed again. Then he wrinkled his nose and upper lip and made his voice nasal, tinny, ridiculous. "You said gree-vee-ous. Where did you learn that?"
"I think Gideon Peppy said it."
"I think so, too. No more television for you, young man, especially the Peppy Show. That man is single-handedly destroying the language."
The man lifted his son from the bathwater and set him on the mat. He wrapped him in a big fluffy white towel that said THARSIS HYATT on it. All their towels had the names of hotels on them.
"Now, take it again, from 'it were a grievous fault, and...' "
"...and grievi—and grievously hath Zeezer answer'd it. The boy continued through Marc Antony's funeral oration, happy as a kitten with a bowl of cream, stumbling only over "Lupercal" and "coffers." As he spoke his father's big hands pummeled him and rubbed him dry through the big towel, powdered him, sprayed him, combed his long yellow hair.
"Very good, Dodger," he said, after the boy had gone through it three times. "But you must never say it that way again."
"All right."
"You must never 'say' it at all. From now on you will hear the words. You will learn what each word means, and what they mean together, and you will make the words live. Memorizing is all very good, but we are not phonographs, are we?"
The boy agreed, having no idea what a phonograph was. Then he was lifted, still wrapped in the towel, and brought to his tiny bedroom, where he stood shivering—the landlord, through some misunderstanding, had stopped providing heat three days before—as his father found a pair of blue flannel pajamas with fluffy tassels on the feet, two sizes too small, and held them while his son stepped in and zipped them up in front.
"We'll get you some new ones next week," his father said. "You're getting to be a big boy." He put his son in bed and tucked the big comforter under his chin.
"Good night, Dodger," he said.
"G'night, Father." The man left the door slightly ajar, as he always did, knowing his son was prone to bad dreams.
Dodger lay there in the dark, looking at the sliver of light on the ceiling that came through the door, and thinking about Junior Zeezer, Octopus Zeezer, Marcus Bootless, Mark Anthony, Cashless, Sinna, Kafka, and the Smoothsayer. He knew those names were wrong but he found it helped him remember them to think of them that way. The real names made no sense at all to him. Neither did the play. That didn't bother him; none of the plays Father read to him made any sense, except Titus Andronicus (Tightest and Raunchiest, in Dodger-speak). Now, there was a story, with guys chopping off hands and pulling out tongues and stabbing each other with swords and stuff. It was almost as good as television.
But not Junior Zeezer. Oh, there was all those guys stabbing Junior in the Senate (also in the heart and the back and the gut, if Dodger understood it right), but most of it was no better than Hambone, which other than a neat ghost and some sword fighting didn't make much sense to Dodger, either.
His trouble was that, though he had a vocabulary ten times larger than most children his age, he didn't know what half the words meant.
Now his father said he was supposed to hear the words. Know what they mean, one at a time and all together. The prospect excited Dodger. All his life he'd been hearing these stories by Shaky-Spear, stories none of his friends knew, stories he couldn't tell his friends because he didn't know what they meant himself.
Now he would know. He suspected that learning what they meant would involve more time underwater.
But maybe that was just for remembering. He was getting so good at remembering now that some bath times went by without getting dunked at all.
The boy shivered, and pulled the covers more tightly around him. Soon he was asleep.
Dodger was four years old.
It's me again. Mister First Person.
And who are you? I might hear you ask. A certain amount of confusion at this point would be only normal.
"Your name is just something to put up on the marquee," my father always said. "It doesn't mean a thing." He proved his point by giving me a handful of them: Kenneth Catherine Duse Faneuil Savoyard Booth Johnson Ivanovich de la Valentine, to mention just a few. Alias K.C., Casey, Ken, Cat, Kendall, Kelly, Kenton and Kelvin. A.K.A. Valencia, Valentine, Van den Troost, and Jones. In various combinations of these and others I may have neglected to mention, I had enough noms de theatre, de plume, and de guerre to make a list longer than the memory of most big-city police computers.
"It gives you options," said my father, a man who was known throughout his life simply as John Valentine. "I have an enormous ego," he would say, with a twinkle in his eye. "I can't stand for the applause to go to anyone but John Valentine. But I am able to do the jail time, when it comes to that."
Well, I can't do the time. I've never stayed in jail longer than it takes to make bail, get new paper, and catch the first available transport to a distant planet. This has prevented me from compiling the sort of credits that might lead to critical adulation, but after all, as my father also used to say, "The performance is the thing."
But as I said earlier, all my friends call me Sparky.
Or, before that, Dodger.
But speaking of the printed page, here's a request to the typesetter:
Could we lose the italics?
Thank you.
I've noticed that, in books, when the point of view is switched, the new part is often set in italics. Well, I don't like italics much, and I'm just going to assume that you, the reader, are smart enough to know when I'm in first person and when I'm using third. Hint: examine the pronouns.
There is this odd thing about me: I usually dream in the third person. Frequently the dreams are in black-and-white, not Technicolor. The dreams are thus a little like out-of-body experiences. I see myself doing things, rather than seeing the things I do. I've spoken with other actors about this, thinking it might be an occupational disorder resulting from spending so much of my time thinking about how a motion or gesture would look, about makeup and staging and presence and all the other aspects of my craft. I found only one other actor who dreamed like I do. Shortly after he told me that he put a bullet through his head, and I stopped asking the question. I didn't like the way people looked at me when I asked, anyway.
That's why I'm putting parts of this in the third person: because I dreamed it. And the reason I'm back in first is, I woke up. Far too soon.
I didn't know it at first. Apart from the grogginess natural to the dosage of "deadballs" I'd taken, there is nothing in space to give one cues as to elapsed time, particularly in the Outer Planets; Pluto would have vanished from sight during the first hours of acceleration. After that, there was nothing visual to show time's passage until arrival at Uranus.