In the Land of the Living (13 page)

Mr. Herhal was looking at him with scarcely veiled desperation. No one would raise a hand to answer him about the Magna Carta. “What does the book say about this?” Mr. Herhal said. “Leo? What does the book say?”

“It says that feudalism gave rise to constitutional democracy because the nobility were to a degree independent from the monarch and that they codified their rights in the Magna Carta,” Leo said. “But I don’t really see how that’s so. Baboons are to a degree independent of their monarch. Ants are to a degree independent. Constitutional democracy and the social contract was an idea before it was a system of government, it was an Enlightenment idea, and that idea sprang from the secularism of the Renaissance, not medieval piety and divine right and all that.”

He couldn’t look at Michelle. He was afraid he might blush. He wondered if she still went out with Josh Helpern or if Josh had moved on. He heard Josh was on to someone else now. He heard the scratching of Michelle’s pencil resume, and with his left forearm he covered his own drawings of Captain Change, which were just storyboards and not real drawings—but he could make real drawings, he really could! He would not speak to her. He’d tried to overmaster that nervous feeling with his speech about feudalism, but he’d been arrogant and now he looked like an ass. She thought him an ass. It was over between them.
Michelle, we’ve been through so much during the last twenty-five minutes. Is it really over?
What a pathetic fool he was, a nonentity, unfit for survival in the human race, a Cipher in the Snow. He wrote these things in the margins of his notebook, as if by writing them they could be precipitated from his mind, or out of reality even, onto paper, where they became mere shapes of symbolic graphite, and not true.

Why was he like this? In health class they had to make an album cover that expressed their personal selves and choose an animal that represented their personalities. He’d called his album
Undertoe.
He’d chosen a turtle.

The nervous feeling had come in sixth or seventh grade and had not gone away; he was on year three or four of it now. He’d been happy at first, he’d been president of his class in the seventh grade and slow-danced with a cute girl named Heather with a turned-up gentile nose and afterward smelled her perfume on his banana-yellow polo shirt—how he had breathed that perfume in an opiate trance and refused to wash the shirt until the Heather smell of her had faded away—and then things kept getting worse and he made more and more lists of his worries:

And it had gotten quite bad. In Rome he’d almost lost his mind. (It was only a month ago that he’d almost lost his mind, just after camp ended, but it seemed like more now that he was sitting in school again.) In the impure darkness of the churches of Rome, metal crucifixes transected the air like scalpel blades, people whispered in occult passageways, and old rags and bones in glass cases that were supposed to be holy seemed instead to be cursed. Jews were not supposed to fear damnation, and anyway angels and devils belonged to the Great Chain of Being, and signified the Ptolemaic order in the universe (how he longed for the innocence and order of a math textbook then). But try as he might he couldn’t stub out the smoldering conviction that a chaotic magic of devils and angels far more ancient than Ptolemy lurked in the darkness of the churches. He would not step on cracks, especially in the church floors, because that superstition seemed to him not at all childish but rather august and ancient. He knew the Devil would try to outsmart him, would sow his malevolent power exactly where it was least expected, within the clichés of floor cracks, broken mirrors, fallen picture frames, but outside his own traditions; the Devil would ambush him not in the boring bourgeois daylight of a synagogue with photographs of businessmen on its walls but in the dark Catholic air that smelled of the thurible, like burned brass, charcoal, styrax gum, candle wax, rose oil, flame, earth, stone, sweat, tears, historic skeletons buried with gold swords. He had to be smarter. He feared contamination by certain chemicals and diseases and cursed objects (such as an oxidized green nickel he found on the carpet in his hotel room in Rome) and he compulsively washed his hands to rid himself of chemicals, grease, and germs. But more than anything else, he conducted rituals to avoid dangerous thoughts: anytime he found a fallen eyelash on his shirt, for example, he kept his mind a blank while he swept the eyelash away because he couldn’t remember whether wishes made on eyelashes were supposed to come true or were supposed not to—either way was dangerous because it could cause the death of loved ones (he could involuntarily wish for his mother to die and his wish might be granted, or wish for her to live and the opposite might come true)—and because he really couldn’t help thinking of the Devil every time he farted (it had become automatic sometime after he saw
The Exorcist
) he always said to himself after farting
flo, flare, flavi,
which he felt protected him from the Devil like a Latin prayer to blow the evil away. Demonic magic was imminent in every church and crucifix and fart; symbols were dangerous portals that could not be opened or even looked through; the thoughts must be controlled in the presence of symbols to keep the door closed on Death and the Devil; but a door could fly open at any time; it was very, very dangerous; one had to be vigilant. He wrote pages and pages of theories on his compulsions, but they were not meant to understand, they were meant to keep the Devil away.

He remembered the foreign smell of the Tuscan air, like arugula leaves or a spice he didn’t know the name of, and the caretaker’s advice to bar the door “because of Gypsies”; like a dream, the little house required that you unbar the door and actually go outside to climb the stairs and so if Gypsies came, Leo and Mack would have to deal with them alone and could not get to their parents. In the daytime there were empty rows of cypress trees, which were beautiful, yes, but he felt himself like a tree of suffering all day and all night, like Cyparissus, who shot his pet stag, like a tree with a poison nail in its heart and copper up and down its water column. One day in the shower, while his eyes were closed, his tube of Neutrogena shampoo jumped up and hit him in the face, banged right on his right eyeball. There was no one else there; he was forced to conclude the Devil had flung it at him.
This must be what it is to lose your mind,
he thought. On the walls of the hotel room in Venice, red and green roses wreathed the green lines of the wallpaper and in the roses he saw skulls, because they were in Italy, where Satan lived, underneath the Vatican.

In the hotel room, Mack agreed to make up a silly story where they each did the dialogue for one of the characters. Leo would try anything not to think about the Devil, so he said he would be Ixion and Mack could be Tantalus, but then he realized he was thinking of Hell again, because Ixion and Tantalus were in Tartarus, which was Latin Hell, and Mack didn’t want to be Tantalus anyway. So they decided to just be X and Y. They laughed for a little while until the “X”s began to look like crosses on the notebook page and Leo ran out of jokes.

Franco, the tour guide in Rome, had hairs on top of his nose and other places Leo didn’t know hairs could grow, and Franco trotted out his rehearsed little list of facts, with which Philip politely agreed, saying, “That’s right,” and then elaborating, and in the act contradicting and replacing Franco’s dates and facts with new ones that were presumably more accurate and certainly more interesting. Philip taught Leo about the ruins of the Forum from that mental encyclopedia of world history he’d amassed—and there was something relaxing in the idea of ancient Rome, before Christ and Satan and all the bad things began, and something relaxing about Philip, whom Leo had resented just a couple of years before, Philip who never minded change, who swam in the waters of change like a salmon while Leo’s mom got constipated if they went as far as Florida. His heels had beaten the pavement of every European capital in wind, rain, or sun with boundless energy and he was indestructible; he ignored a knife cut on his finger or a burn on his leg and went straight on without fail, without fear, thinking of the ancient Romans and the Visigoths and Raphael and the Borgias and wanting everyone else to see and enjoy, and having five different restaurant reservations, and then making unnecessary excuses in Italian to cancel them (usually fake medical emergencies), and dabbing at his nose, which ran constantly because of his polyps, and changing the hotel room to get a better view. In Rome they had stayed in the same hotel as Kurt Waldheim, and all the Zajac aunts and uncles whispered that he was a Nazi.

When the touring was over at the end of the day, Leo wanted to die and his soul went into withdrawal, and he was more ashamed of this instability of self than anything, this copper inside him; he would do anything to scour it off his soul and family name. When they got back from Italy they sent him to a psychologist, who said it was to do with his dead father.

And, lo, the psychologist said, “You’re ahead of the game intellectually but you’re behind the game socially” and that wounded Leo like a razor cut to his knees. And he thought he would show that shrink: he would kiss a girl now or die.

The bell rang.

“What did you draw?” he said.

“Oh, nothing,” Michelle said, and stuffed her notebook into her bag, but not before he saw: she’d drawn Josh Helpern’s name and a design that looked like a heart. “You know a lot about feudalism,” she said.

“I have a medieval mind,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s a joke.”

“There’s a lot going on in that mind of yours, whatever it is,” she said.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“I just mean,” she said, “you do a lot of thinking.”

“Yeah, probably too much,” he said.

“I’ll bet there’re a lot of interesting things going around in that head of yours.”

“I guess,” he said.

“I was thinking you should do more talking,” she said, “not less thinking.”

He had to think about that.

That day that he blushed before Michelle and disparaged the Magna Carta in history class, a kid said something mean to him, something about his backpack, something he didn’t hear completely, something like “Mr. Wears His Backpack on Both Shoulders” (when he in fact wore it religiously on one shoulder like everybody else even when it had fifty pounds of textbooks in it). The kid said it in health class (where they had last week watched
Cipher in the Snow
). He would let it go unchallenged. He would not stoop. He would let the kid be wrong. And yet that wrongness abraded the mind. It remained in the universe when it should not, radiating out into space forever like all those episodes of
The Beverly Hillbillies,
going on and on inexorably out into the cosmos and embarrassing all humanity before the superior races of the Andromeda galaxy.

It was a Friday.

That night his brother the ice-man went out (he never said where). His parents went out. His friends were going bowling. They had invited him, belatedly, but it seemed the plan had been conceived without him. So let them go. He picked up the picture of his dead father and then the one of his dead grandfather and namesake looking out from in front of sea rocks. Every other night of the week he studied until midnight at his desk or in the computer room. Under no circumstances would he work on a Friday or Saturday night.

“Mr. Wears His Backpack on Both Shoulders,” the kid had said. Another time the same kid had said, “You know
his
report card: all As and a B in gym.” And the kid and his friend had laughed and laughed. All As and a B in gym. Of course it was true. And he felt branded with a scarlet letter “B” on his breast, though he knew it was ridiculous, though he knew that his sensitivity itself was the very feminine, weak, socially vulnerable part of him that caused him to hang back and get those Bs in gym, the weak part that demanded extirpation. He ought to have said in a friendly, teasing, manly way: “Better than all Cs and an A in gym, muthafucka,” like Josh Helpern might have. Or maybe Josh wouldn’t have cursed, maybe he would have said, “Sucka.” But he couldn’t have said it in a friendly way like Josh, who seemed at ease at all times, he could only have said it with all the tormented murderous spite he truly felt, so he said nothing. And the other one had said, “Look at him, he probably got girls crawling all over him, probably got hisself a car,” and he wasn’t sure if that was stated sincerely or in ridicule or envy or what, and it had been worse than that, because then the first one had said, “He ain’t never kissed a girl, neither. Just look at him. He wouldn’t know what to do.”

And the shameful truth was: he was sixteen (but just sixteen) and had never felt a girl’s lips against his own.

Though it took over forty-five minutes sitting by the phone with a bounding pulse, he did finally dial the number. And when Kathy Main’s mother answered, he didn’t hesitate and asked for Kathy (though it felt like someone had cranked a valve on his larynx so that the air squeaked out comically). When Kathy got on the phone, he asked her without preamble if she wanted to go to a movie. They had not spoken at all in two years, since he had been editor of the
Shaker B
and she had lined up to join the staff.

“Your name?” he’d asked.

“Kathy,” she’d said, as if they were meeting each other, and not just recording information on a list. She had bright blue eyes like his brother’s.