I Am the Cheese (2 page)
Authors: Robert Cormier
| TAPE OZK001 | 0930 | date deleted T-A |
| T : | Good morning. My name is Brint. We shall be spending some time together. (5-second interval.) |
| A : | Good morning. |
| T : | Shall we begin immediately? I have been advised that you are ready. The sooner we begin, the better it will be for you. |
| A : | I’m not sure where to begin. |
| T : | First, you must relax. And then let your thoughts flow. Take your time—there is no cause for hurry. Go back if you wish—back to your earliest remembrance. (8-second interval.) |
| A : | It’s hazy—just a series of impressions. |
| T : | Let the impressions come. (5-second interval.) |
| A : | That night— |
| T : | Tell me about that night. |
| A : | It’s as if I was born that night. I mean, became a person, a human being in my own right. Before that, nothing. Or those impressions again—lights—smell—perfume, the perfume my mother always wore, lilac. Nothing else. And then that night— (12-second interval.) |
| T : | Tell me about it. |
He was in bed and the sheets were twisted around him and his body was hot, his eyes like raw onions, head aching. He cried out once or twice, softly, tentatively. He lifted his head toward the door. The door was partially open, allowing a slant of feeble light into the room. He curled up in bed, listening. He always liked to listen at night. Often he heard his mother and father murmuring in their bedroom, the bed making a lot of noise, and there were the nice sounds of his father and mother together, making soft sounds as if they were furry animals like the stuffed animals he always slept with, Bittie the Bear and Pokey the Pig, his friends. His father would say: “Hey, boy, you’re getting too old for all those toys, three and a half, going on four.” The boy knew that his father was joking, that he would never take his friends away. Anyway, his mother would say: “Now, now, he’s a long time from four, a long long time.” The tenderness in her voice and her perfume like lilac in the spring.
Now the boy cuddled in the bed with Pokey the Pig, his favorite, clutched to his chest. But something kept him awake, prevented him from sleeping. Out of the half-dark of the house, he realized that his mother’s and father’s voices were different, not soft and
murmuring the way they usually were at night, but louder. Not really louder but harsher. They were speaking in whispers but their voices scratched at the night and the dark. And he heard his mother say, “Shh. You might wake him.”
The boy lay still, as unmoving as Pokey the Pig.
The bed creaked in the next room, and he heard his father’s bare feet padding toward his room. His figure blocked out the slant of light. Then his father’s footsteps receded, the light spilled into the room again, and the boy felt brave and clever, knowing he had fooled his father. He wanted to tell Pokey how clever he was but he remained still and silent, not daring to move, listening not only with his ears but his entire being.
| T : | What did you hear? |
| A : | I’m not sure. What I mean is, I don’t know whether I actually heard the words or if I’m filling them in now, like blank spaces on a piece of paper you have to complete. I was barely three and a half, I guess. Anyway, I knew they were discussing me. More than that. As if they were discussing what to do about me. And I got all panicky and began to cry. But quiet crying so they wouldn’t hear me. (5-second interval.) |
| T : | Why this panic? |
| A : | Well, it’s as if they were deciding my fate. I thought they were going to send me away. I heard my mother say, “But what do we tell him?” And my father saying, “It doesn’t matter, he’s too young to realize what’s happening.” Did I really hear him saying that or did the sense of what he was saying come to me? Then they began talking about a trip, the three of us, and I felt better. It was winter outside, snow and cold, and I didn’t want to leave the house where it was nice and warm, but as long as we were together, I really didn’t care. |
| T : | Do you remember the trip? |
| A : | Vaguely again. I remember a journey. Endless. On a bus, the terrible smell of the exhaust. The doors hissed like a snake when they opened. Impressions. Crowded, with luggage. Faces, my father’s cigarettes, not the smell of smoke, really, but the smell of his matches, the sulphur of the matches. Strange … (6-second interval.) |
| T : | What’s strange? |
| A : | I was always aware of two smells, my mother’s perfume and the way my father always smelled of tobacco or smoke or the matches. But after that night, after the bus trip, I don’t associate my father with cigarettes anymore. Because my father doesn’t smoke. I’ve never seen him smoke a cigarette. But my mother’s perfume was the same. |
| T : | Do you remember anything else about the trip? |
| A : | Not specifically. Mostly, the mood, the feeling of the trip, as if— |
| T : | As if what? |
| A : | It was spooky, scary, but not in a haunted house sort of way. But as if we were being chased, as if we were running away. I remember my mother’s face as she looked out the window. She looked so sad, purple half-moons under her eyes. So sad. And the bus speeding through the night … (15-second interval.) |
| T : | Anything else? |
| A : | We never went back. Not back to what I thought was home. We were in a different home. A different house. A different aura to the house. It was still winter and cold and we were together, my mother and father and me, but everything was different. |
| T : | What it appears to be is this: Your family moved. From one part of the country to another. But not too far. It was still winter where you went and winter where you came from. A lot of families move. Men are transferred in their jobs. Your father could have been transferred as well. |
| A : | Maybe. |
| T : | Why are you hesitating? You appear—uncertain. |
| A : | I am. |
| T : | About what? |
| A : | I don’t know. |
But he did know. He didn’t want to confide the knowledge to the doctor, however. The doctor was a complete stranger and although he seemed sympathetic and friendly, he wasn’t entirely comfortable with him. It should have been easy to tell him everything, all his doubts, to get it all off his chest, but he wasn’t sure how to proceed. He wondered if he should tell him about the clues.
| T : | What clues? |
| A : | What do you mean, “clues”? |
| T : | What you just said—you used the word “clues.” |
He retreated into silence, stunned. Could the doctor read his mind? Impossible. Or maybe the medicine was doing funny things again. The medicine was always playing tricks on him. And now it was making him believe he was only thinking when he was actually speaking aloud. He would have to be careful. He would have to watch himself, to listen for his voice. The panic shivered in his bones and a terrible tingling took possession of his body.
| A : | I’d like to go back now. |
| T : | Of course. |
| A : | I’m tired. |
| T : | I understand. Don’t press. There’s plenty of time. |
| A : | Thank you. |
| T : | Everything’s going to be all right. |
END TAPE OZK001
“Aswell. Fairfield. Carver!”
The man calls out the names like the train announcer at North Station in Boston.
“Fleming—Hookset—Belton Falls!”
His voice is gravelly, as if his throat is full of stones, and his words leap over them: “Belton Falls is smack on the New Hampshire–Vermont line. Then the next stop—your last stop—right across the river is Rutterburg, Vermont.”
He consults the map again.
“You’re lucky, Skipper,” he says. “You’re going to touch three states—Massachusetts where you’re standing right this minute and then New Hampshire and Vermont. But you’re traveling at an angle and you only have to cover about seventy miles to do it.”
Seventy miles doesn’t seem far. Standing here in the gasoline station, anxious to be on my way, my legs itching to pedal that bike, seventy miles seems insignificant.
The old man looks up from the map. “How fast you figure you can go, Skipper?”
I want to get away but he’s a nice old man, white hair and a face with so many red and blue veins that it resembles the road map in his hands. I had stopped at the service station to rest and ask for a map and to check the air in the tires. The old man, who seemed to be just hanging around, was eager to help, using a gauge to measure the air and then hunting up a map.
“I figure I can make ten miles an hour,” I say.
“Lucky if you make five. Or even four,” the old man says. “I don’t think you’re going to make it today, Skipper.”
“My mother and father and me—we once stayed in a great motel in Belton Falls. If I can make it that far, I can stay there tonight.”
The old man squints at the map again. It flutters in the breeze. “Well, maybe. But there’s other motels before then.” He starts to fold the map. “Where you from, Skipper?”
“Monument.” It has turned cold now and the sun has disappeared behind the clouds.
“Let’s see—this is Aswell. How long did it take you to make it here from Monument?”
I really want to be going. “About an hour.”
He strokes his chin with the map. The map bulges in his hand. He has done a terrible job of folding it. “Well, from downtown Monument to this very spot is about five miles. But you had some good hills to coast down. Five miles an hour—probably the best time you’ll do all day.”
“Yes.”
He turns away and looks up at the sky and then back at me again. “What do you want to go for,
Skipper? It’s a terrible world out there. Murders and assassinations. Nobody’s safe on the streets. And you don’t even know who to trust anymore. Do you know who the bad guys are?”
I want to be going. I don’t want to listen.
“Of course you don’t. Because you can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys anymore. Nobody knows these days. Nobody. No privacy, either. Next time you use a phone, you listen. Listen close. You might hear a click. And if you do, then somebody’s listening. Even if you don’t hear a click, somebody might be listening anyway.”
I kick at the tire of the bike.
“Don’t trust anybody, Skipper. Ask for identification if a stranger comes near you. But you can’t trust identifications, either. They can forge anything today—passports, licenses, you name it. So if you have to go, Skipper, be careful. Be careful.”
He hands me the road map. “Keep it,” he says. It’s spotted with grease and not folded right but I tuck it into the basket, sliding it between the strap and my father’s package.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes, Skipper,” he says. “That cap you got on. Haven’t seen one of them for years. In the old days, we called them
tooks
. The wife used to make them for the kids, with cut-rate wool she picked up at the mill.”
“It’s my father’s cap,” I say. “He kept it all these years. I’m going to visit him—he’s in a hospital in Rutterburg and I figure he’ll get a kick out of seeing the cap.”
“That your father’s jacket, too?” he asks. “Looks
like one of them army fatigue jackets. I had a boy in the service. World War Two, that was. He wore a jacket like that. Looked too big for him, like yours. He got killed at a place called Iwo Jima you probably never heard of.”
The blue veins are bulging out on his face, all mixed up with the red ones. I want to leave. I am getting nervous. I feel bad about his son, but I don’t want to talk to him anymore. I’m afraid that he’ll start asking about my father. And my mother.
“I’m sorry about your son,” I say.
He doesn’t say anything but he wipes his hand across his face and sighs heavily as if he is suddenly very tired. “Well, have a good trip, Skipper,” he says, stroking the front tire. “If I was forty years younger, I’d go along with you. The spirit’s willing but the flesh is weak, like they say.”