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“Of course you do. Lord, I had arguments with her, too. It’s not a big deal.”

  “But we get along okay, basically.”

  “She says you stay out till all hours and come back like you’ve been drinking.”

  “That’s not true. She just wants to get rid of me so she can carry on with her Ivy League boyfriends. She has them all wowed, and then they drop by and there I am, all imperfect and abnormal. It embarrasses her and makes her think of some way she can get rid of me and start all over.”

  His face tightened like a hard fist, and I knew he didn’t like to hear me talking about my mother that way, even if he didn’t like her himself. He relaxed, though, and looked down in a way that made me stop talking. He nodded. “Sure. What you say is probably true. But there’s more to it than that.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, feeling sullen, and wanting to be somewhere else, away from adults with their wooden, creaking plans for other people’s lives, and yet, at the same time, not wanting to feel sullen, wanting to appreciate my father and enjoy his company, and also wanting him to think that I was a mature, sophisticated person, not some foul-tempered delinquent.

  “She says you threw a jar of mustard at her.”

  My mouth hung open all by itself.

  “That’s what she says,” he added, looking up at me like he was trying to read my mind.

  “A jar of mustard.”

  “She says you yell at her, and that she has no control over you, and that she is afraid of you.”

  “A jar of mustard,” was all I could say.

  “She says your grades stink.”

  “That’s not true,” I blurted, and then I sank back. I didn’t want to lie right then, and I clasped my hands like I was getting ready to pray. “Actually, my grades haven’t been all that good.” Excellent excuses bobbed into my mind: idiot teachers, thumb-worn books, doodled and defaced by decades of bored juniors, dull, itching, pimple-picking fellow students. But I didn’t want my father to see me making excuses, either, so I moved the saltshaker a little closer to me and didn’t say anything.

  “So, to make a long story short, there are problems. Right?”

  Neither of us said anything. He wanted me to agree with him, but I felt like my mother had complained about me to a higher power, and I hated her for it. I stared through my reflection in the window and watched the headlights and taillights glide by outside. They look comforting, cars do, at night when a person looks out at them and watches them go by, silent and pretty, like something that isn’t really there, an illusion of other people living simple, quiet lives.

  “The situation is that you don’t have to decide anything right now.”

  “It wasn’t a jar of mustard.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “It was not a jar of mustard. You believe anything she tells you, don’t you.” I suddenly had tears, and I couldn’t talk, and I felt humiliated that my father was seeing me with tears on my face. I gripped myself hard.

  “Tell me what happened.” His voice was soft for the first time, and I hated him for caring.

  “It wasn’t a jar. You picture one of those fat jars made of glass hurtling through the air exploding against the wall, almost killing my mother.”

  He watched me.

  “Isn’t that what you picture?”

  He looked thoughtful for a second. “Something like that.”

  “That’s not what it was. It was a plastic squeeze tube. One of those cylinders with a nozzle that you stand on a table when people eat hot dogs.”

  “You threw it at her.”

  “Yes, but it wouldn’t have hurt her anyway, and I missed. She got one little speck of mustard on her eyebrow. Just one. That’s all. She said I was a homosexual. Just dropped it out. It was the end of a long argument about her not having a job. I said she could get one if she really wanted one.”

  My father held up a hand like he didn’t really want to hear the entire argument verbatim. He rubbed his temple with his finger. He held out his fingers like they were needed to help the words get to me. “You give me mixed messages. You get along, you don’t get along. You do well at school, you don’t do well. And do you know what? I don’t care.”

  I waited.

  “I don’t care,” he continued, “because all I am looking for is a good excuse to have you come live with me. I want you around. I want you to be a part of my life. You’re almost a man. I want to see more of you.”

  The words made his face change color, a pale, lunar white with specks of pink, and I saw that he cared for me very deeply. I resented his caring, but I also felt pleased that he was paying so much attention to me. I also realized that he was serious. He wanted me to live with him.

  “I’m doing pretty well. I design safety devices for airplanes. Ejection seats, things like that. I have a nice house in Newport Beach. You can walk to the ocean. It’s not a ratty city like this hellhole.”

  I opened my mouth to say that Oakland wasn’t such a bad city, but I shut it again.

  “You would like it there. I wish I’d grown up there instead of that stupid apartment off Fruitvale. I have some money, Peter. Not tons of it, but enough so that, for the first time in my life, I can really help you. If you get your schoolwork in order, you can go to college. I can afford any school you want. I feel like I owe it to you.”

  “I’ll be a senior.”

  “I know. You don’t want to leave and take up another life right now. I appreciate that.”

  I nodded dumbly. He wasn’t understanding what I was thinking, though. I wasn’t really thinking anything. I was numb. His caring for me seemed like such a waste on his part. I felt sorry for him.

  “The situation is this: I want you to fly down and visit me in a couple of weeks. Just walk around, see what the town looks like, just spend a weekend doing not much of anything.”

  I looked at my swollen, goofy reflection in the spoon.

  “I’ll send you a ticket. What do you think? Can’t hurt to pay a visit, can it?”

  The steaks came after a while, my father looking over his shoulder to see why things were taking so long, talking about airplanes and Chinese tungsten and drumming his fingers on the table like the world would be a lot better if he could run it and get things done on time.

  When I put my hand on the door knob, my hand was trembling, and so cold the brass knob felt warm. I let the door close behind me softly, and I let the darkness of the stairs take me in like I was made of sugar and I was slowly dissolving.

  “Did you have a nice time?”

  I felt the banister. “It was all right.”

  My mother leaned in the doorway of her bedroom. The light was behind her; I could not see her face. “Nice of him to come see you,” she said, sarcastically but in a voice so smooth you would have to know her to understand what she meant. “He’s a success now. Isn’t that a wonderful thing?”

  “He’s not so successful. His clothes are too big for him.”

  “So are you. He’s wasting his time with you. You ought to be put to sleep.”

  “Thanks.”

  She sighed, and it was as though all the misery of all the times, everywhere, stood there in the doorway wearing a blue bathrobe. “Oh, Peter. You know I don’t mean that. You’re just so much trouble, that’s all. And I worry about you.”

  “You lied to him.”

  “Oh?”

  “You told him I tried to kill you.”

  “What?”

  “With a jar of mustard.”

  She laughed.

  I locked my bedroom door, and sat on my bed. I wished Lani was there to talk to, but all I had was half a bottle of Cream Sherry, really terrible, sweet-sick brake fluid.

  I could, I knew, kill myself. This was a very real thought. It seemed like a logical alternate route. But as long as Mead’s parents thought Mead was alive, it was almost like having Mead alive and well, happy somewhere.

  I practiced his voice. “Hello, Mother …”

  And I shivered. I fe
lt like Mead. I felt clever, and quick.

  I wept, calling Mead’s name.

  7

  Walking in the darkness, the body feels alive, but as it approaches the well-lit place, it begins to change; it slows and thickens and stops. The body stands for a long time, as if it never has to go anywhere ever again, and it doesn’t, really, because now it is not a living body, but something else. No one can see. No one sees the important, obvious thing standing in the dark beside a hedge.

  Then the transformation. The arm lifts, falls. The rot-wet lungs inhale. The dead guts grumble and the foot goes forward to the place on the sidewalk where the light just begins. Blood rises into the tissues that have not tasted blood since the terrible change and they warm and swell, and feeling wends along the nerves invisibly, like massive amps along a frayed cable.

  And by the time the first number is touched, the change is complete, and the tongue is poised, the ears alive with the electric tones the finger makes on the face of the telephone.

  The phone rings. It is like the first sound ever made in the world, a dry purr that lasts just long enough for a heartbeat, a soft noise, but metallic, too, the love coo of an old robot.

  It rings once.

  Only once. The phone is answered quickly, and the woman’s voice says, “Hello?”

  Her voice is different this time. More afraid, and more hopeful. “Hello?” she repeats. “Mead, is that you?”

  “Mother. Yes, it’s me.”

  And it is Mead. It is Mead, standing at the telephone in the dark, listening to his mother’s sobs. “Mead,” she says. “Where are you?”

  “Don’t worry, Mother. Please—don’t worry. I’m all right.”

  The streetlight barely ignites the darkness. Blue-white smears the dark at the end of the street where a gas station is still open, a twenty-four-hour station with a man in a glass booth, waiting.

  A car door opens, too quietly. A head leans, and a voice asks, “What are you doing walking around in the middle of nowhere?”

  Nothing makes any sense. I am not Mead, but I am not anyone else, either.

  “Are you all right?”

  The voice answers. “Sure. Of course I’m all right.”

  “Get in. We can drive up into the hills and look at the view.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “Come on, get in. Don’t just stand there like a zombie.”

  I don’t move, my body not quite mine.

  Angela drove up Lake Boulevard, across the Warren Freeway, into the hills. The spice of eucalyptus was everywhere. The tires crushed leaves and seedbells under its tires. The air had the taste of delicious medicine.

  “Who were you calling?” she asked at last.

  “Calling?”

  “You were on that pay phone.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course. That one beside the insurance company?”

  “I was calling no one.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “I was calling up Time. You know, that voice that tells you what time it is. I don’t carry a watch.”

  But the truth was—as soon as I had made one of those calls, I tried to forget about it. The few moments in which I became Mead frightened me, and I wanted to deny that they had ever happened.

  Just as I wanted to deny that Mead was dead.

  “Do you have to be anywhere by eleven or twelve or anything like that?” Angela asked.

  “My mother’s out on one of her marathon dates. She dates these businessmen. I think she’s hoping to find a rich one. But she never really likes them. She keeps finding a newer, richer one, and then he’s not the right man, and then she finds another one.”

  “She’s fussy.”

  “I guess so. I think she still misses my father. Even though she hates him. I also think she resents men, in general. She’s sick of them.”

  “I don’t blame her. Men are pretty awful. Especially the people my parents know. Stockbrokers and realtors and people who have parties at the Super Bowl every year. Rich guys in cowboy boots.”

  “Sometimes I think my mother hates practically everyone.”

  “She sounds like a lot of fun.”

  “She’s very complicated.”

  “I thought you didn’t like her.”

  “I don’t, usually. But I have some sympathy for her. A lot of it, actually.”

  “You sound tired.”

  “I feel terrific.”

  “You sound more than tired. You sound very peculiar.”

  “I work at it. Sounding peculiar is one of my major ambitions.”

  “You ought to be very pleased. You’re very successful.”

  “You like me because I’m odd. So I work at it. I don’t want you to be disappointed in me.” I was at least partly right. I’m normal-looking, not all that special to behold, thin and pale, with hair that looks a little bit blond in some lights, but is really plain, cardboard brown most of the time. Angela has the kind of looks that turns heads. You see men look at her as they drive by, their lips parted in mid-speech.

  The view from the hills was enough to silence both of us. An airplane light winked slowly across the glitter. The Bay was a big empty place, and the Bay Bridge glittered over the blackness. Usually a sight like that moved me, calmed me, made me feel that a living, twinkling map—the real world—was at my feet.

  “You aren’t being very friendly tonight,” Angela complained.

  “Maybe we should go.”

  “The view isn’t so good tonight, is it? Sort of yellowish.”

  “The view’s all right. Maybe a little yellowish, but not too bad.”

  “You’ve been having problems with your parents. I can tell. I’d have more problems with mine, except that they’re gone so much of the time. I’m lucky.”

  Angela was lucky, I thought. Her life was still a life. She had a future.

  We drove back, listening to the car stereo, the windows rolled up against the scent of the trees.

  8

  “I don’t particularly care if you learn Latin or not,” said Mr. Lindner. He touched his mustache and sat on the front of his desk. “You must realize that some people are not cut out for Ovid. It happens. Not everyone is intellectually graceful,” he said, rising and stepping around his desk to sit, like he wanted to demonstrate his own mental fitness by moving his body in a tight, efficient manner.

  “I know,” I said, shifting my books in my hands.

  “But I do ask that students not come to class high on whatever drugs they choose to use when they recreate on their own time.”

  “I’m not using drugs, Mr. Lindner.”

  “I ask this because I have pride in myself as a teacher, and because I have standards. No hats. No gum. And,” he glanced at his nails, “no drugs.”

  “All right,” I said, turning to go.

  “Don’t go yet, I’m not finished. If I can sacrifice five minutes of my lunch, you can, too.” Mr. Lindner was a trim black man, dapper, with a collection of gold cuff links and dozens of shoes; I hardly ever saw him wear a pair of shoes I had seen before. He taught in a quiet voice, and could recite Cicero on Old Age or the Virtues of Children while staring at students as he paced among them. Most of what he did, in speech and dress, was calculated to prove how superior he was to any human being in the world, and no one argued with him. He was a short, slim, perfect man, and brilliant enough to wear his contempt easily, like a well-knit tie.

  I sat in a chair sideways, and waited for him to finish leafing through his grade book. “Why, Peter,” he began, enjoying the sound of his voice, “did you elect Latin? Of all the subjects in the world, why this one?”

  “I don’t know.” I didn’t know. It had sounded exotic, and I had read it easily for the first few months. Many of the words were like English words, like “villa” for house, to give an example, and anyone with a brain could stumble along. But now we were in deep waters, studying the subjunctive mood, and other such subjects, and I was lost.

  “It i
sn’t the sort of language I would have expected you to want to learn.”

  “I thought it would be easier.”

  “It is easy. Easy as walking across the room.” He stood and walked to the blackboard as if to show how a person could walk through Latin, striding across first, second, and third declension nouns as if they were so much hardwood floor. “As easy,” he said, erasing Vir/homo with a flick of the eraser, “as that. If, Peter. If. If the student studies.” He said the word “studies” so well that it stayed in the air, a kind of charm that kept both of us from moving.

  “You have not been studying. I don’t know what your background is, or what you hope in terms of higher education.” He pronounced it “Ed-You-Caysh-ee-un,” and he let that word, too, wrap itself around me like a snake. “You are not stupid. Not at all.” He plucked a piece of chalk from the tray. “But you have not been”—and here he snapped the chalk in two and looked at me like I was the largest piece of bird dropping he had ever witnessed—“studying.”

  I cleared my throat, but I had nothing to say.

  “By studying Latin you learn not only the language of Virgil, but you develop intellectual strength. You become more capable of learning other subjects. So that when I see you staring off in class, doped out of your mind, such as it is—”

  “No. I’m not doped out of—I swear it.”

  “I don’t care, Peter.” He repeated very slowly, “I don’t care.”

  I fiddled with my books.

  “But if you come to class in that condition again, I will throw you out. You may leave.”

  I forgot my locker combination for a moment, and spun the dial mindlessly. I had not smoked, swallowed, or in any other way taken in any drug known to man on that morning. But I was worried that I had appeared drugged. I would have to perk up; I would have to pay more attention to the expression I had on my face. Expressions are important. A person can look alert or stupid, and why not look alert if you have any choice in the matter. I should be supple enough to put on any expression I want to.

  Angela leaned against the locker at my elbow. “What did Lindner want?”

  “He says I’m not paying attention in class.” My locker opened itself, and swung like it was a thing with a mind. “He was complaining about that. I guess I had a vacant expression on my face. Sometimes a person does, you know. Have a vacant expression. It doesn’t mean anything.”