Authors: R. A. Nelson
tender earthquake
Bed.
Confessing to Schuyler helps, but I still can’t sleep.
There is not a name for what I’m feeling. There is no description for it.
To call it
yearning
would be like calling the ocean
water
.
Whatever this thing is, it shoves you inside itself and you can’t measure its boundaries, because they go too far and you don’t have enough time. Or you move toward the boundaries and they move away.
There has been an earthquake in my life.
Catastrophic, civilization-ending. At least my tiny civilization of one. Followed by massive aftershocks. The fissure is still there, raw and crumbly.
No one can predict when the tremors will start again, least of all me. A thousand years from now? Tomorrow? Here?
for the dead
Graduation is a day.
That ’s all.
I’m not sure what I expected, but this Disneyland queue wasn’t it. With a name like Livingston, I’m always in the forgotten middle of everything. Seven high schools attend baccalaureate together. In our gowns, the Civic Center is awash with a chemical warfare of color combinations. Here are the Burst Blood Vessels; over there, the Screaming Bile. I’m with the Neon Pumpkins.
For once, it’s Dad who gets teary eyed. He doesn’t remember the things you are supposed to remember; he remembers we were supposed to have a colony on Mars by the time I got this old. Terraforming other planets. Travel from New York to London in under fifteen minutes. What happened? He mourns the things people his age would have given to people my age by now.
Mom takes a hundred million pictures: Schuyler and me, arm in arm. Me accepting my ten-pound diploma, Zeb Greasy’s football-sized handshake, strangers smiling, empty folding chairs. When Hub Christy lumbers across the stage, a Macedonian phalanx rises to its feet in the cheap seats and hyena calls:
“You made it!”
I’m the only one who doesn’t throw her pasteboard hat.
My grandparents have all been dead for years. One of them lived until I was six and another until I was eight. They didn’t last long enough for nicknames or savings bond graduation presents. I wonder what they would think of me now, the silent four of them. All I have of them is pictures. I know what they looked like when they were twenty. Or thirty-five—
Mr. Mann sits with the other teachers. I never see him look my way. His suit is black. His eyes are black. Alicia is nowhere to be found. Hiding in Sunlake, I suppose. Locking and relocking her sliding glass door.
They announce my scholarship.
I’m too ashamed to tell anybody I lost it. I never filled out the paperwork.
sexual skeletons
After.
So high school is gone.
We’re sitting in Schuyler’s bedroom, gowns crumpled on the floor. I’ve been here hundreds of times. There’s a different feeling now. A sense of interests gone to clutter, a soul hovering between kid and man. Schuyler’s embarrassed about it.
“Got to get rid of some of this junk,” he says.
For as long as I can remember, this room has been a museum: heaps of dirty fossils like miniature grist wheels or emery grinders, Ping-Pong-ball solar systems, a starfish dangling on a string.
“You never get rid of anything,” I say.
“That’s not true.”
“You know it is.”
I flop back on his bed. Directly above me, thumbtacked to the ceiling, is a poster of M20, the Trifid Nebula, taken by the Hubble. I gave it to him. For the millionth time it reminds me of a backlit snail—if a snail were the Ultimate Ruler of the Universe and had posed for a Maxfield Parrish painting.
Schuyler flops on the bed next to me. This is the first time it feels odd. We’re so close, our arm hairs are touching. His dark, mine tawny. All I can think about is—I look away at the bookshelf.
“You still have your grandma’s Cenozoic wedding books about what it takes to make a good wife.”
“A good beating,” Schuyler says. An old joke between us that has lost its juice. He kicks a thin book with a socked toe. “You know everybody parks their trash in here.
Winning at Power Golf
, for Hrothgar’s sake.” Schuyler’s been reading
Beowulf
lately, figuring he can leapfrog freshman comp in college.
Is this what the future looks like? An embarrassed past?
“The future is nothing but a mythology,” I say.
“Translation, please?”
“Can you really make a new life just by throwing out all the junk from your old one?”
“If you throw him out on his ass.”
“Quarter.”
“
Ass
is no longer a cussword. I heard the president say it.”
“Only one gluteus at a time, please. Try saying it in front of my parents.”
Schuyler laughs and props himself on his elbow. “Point taken. Okay, at least you’ve got your sense of humor back. So, on the subject of asses—what are we going to do about Mr. Dick Waddius?”
“That’s another quarter.”
“
Dick
, as you know, is a diminutive form of
Richard
. And if anybody ever needed to be made to feel diminutive, it’s him. We have to make a plan.”
“Okay.”
Schuyler’s an INTP on the Myers-Briggs sorter.
Can become very excited about theories and ideas,
his profile says. I’m an INTJ. The difference between a P and a J? I want answers. I like closure. I believe you take theories and ideas and make them real.
I’m looking at an article tacked on his bulletin board. The headline is blown up to max wattage:
I know the first line by heart:
“Russian scientists are unable to disprove a teenage girl who claims she has x-ray vision and can see inside human bodies.”
Schuyler has always said that’s me, only I can do it with the human soul. Right now I’d do better with the spleen.
There’s a knock at the door. Schuyler’s mom. She’s twenty years younger than my mom and beautiful, except for her protruding front teeth.
“Pick those up.” She points at the gowns. “You’ll want to save them forever.”
“Most certainly, memsahib,” Schuyler says in his best Hindustani. We’re still on the bed, but miraculously the distance between us has instantly grown by the length of a cucumber.
Ms. Green slouches against the door. “So what do you two want?”
She’s talking about the after-graduation dinner our folks have promised us.
What do we want?
“NPH,” Schuyler says when his mom has gone.
He’s christened a new acronym.
“NPH?”
“Nuclear Public Humiliation. That’s the plan! That’s your revenge. Only, now you’ve got me to help.”
I’m unbending government paper clips, reshaping them into tiny zip guns, thinking, Is that what I’m after? Is it that mindless and simple? Or is it something much bigger and deeper?
“It’s not about revenge,” I decide. “It’s about making sure he understands. Again and again. Until I know why.”
“Why he did it?”
I nod, but this nod is a lie using body language.
No, I think. Not why he did it.
Why he ever stopped.
mouth work
Focus.
“First, we need some information,” Schuyler says.
Now we’re in my bedroom. We Google Mr. Mann on the net:
Accountants, a psychologist, somebody who knows what
Detection and Classification of Motion Boundaries
means, a college swimmer from West Virginia, a championship wrestler circa 1948.
“What the crap is a Bastyr homeopath?”
“Okay, maybe he doesn’t exist after all,” Schuyler says.
I slap him. But playfully.
“So let’s try the Little Woman.”
“
Little
is the operative term, all right.”
A search on Alicia recedes in the opposite direction. Not one listing.
Schuyler leans back in my desk chair so far the casters squeak. “Maybe she’s too young.”
“Not funny.”
“No, really.”
“No, really, shut up about it.”
“Okay. Well, anyhow, that’s a bust. What next?”
Kitty Nation comes into the room and curls past my legs, purring. “So we’ll just have to stake out their place. Look for the best opportunity.”
“
Naturellement.
But you promise, nothing too freaky till I get my sea legs under me?”
I touch my hip. It’s still sore. “I know. I know. But it won’t be quite as satisfying.”
“Or dangerous. Or idiotic. I still can’t believe you climbed up on his deck like that.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
“No.”
“Come on. You wanted to catch them, didn’t you? Catch them doing the nast—”
I stomp his toe and put a finger to my lips. “Shhh—!”
Mom pokes her head in the door.
“Children, could I get you something?”
“Something to drink, sure. Thanks.” I wait until the door shuts. “Be careful!” I say when she’s gone.
I get up to rest my eyes and stretch my legs. My room is just as bad as Schuyler’s. Besides the trophies, everything I own is potential trash: jumbled books, old star charts, a Hitachi keyboard I’ve never used, a folk guitar missing two strings, my embarrassing watercolors Mom is so proud of. I did a couple from a book just to show I really was going to a class.
“So what was it like?” Schuyler says. He stands and arches his back, lacing his fingers behind him, his sternum pointing at me.
“What?”
“The whole thing. With Mr. Mann, you know.”
“Keep your voice down! She may be old, but she’s still got ears. I told you what it was like.”
“I mean—”
“I know what you mean. You really think I’m going to tell you that?”
I turn away and stare out the window. Two rock maples are leaning toward each another, joining leafy hands, framing the view with a natural arch.
“You can skip the gory details,” Schuyler says. “Just what was it like? Being with somebody like that. So much.”
“I can’t believe you’re asking me this. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Come on. Maybe it’ll help.”
“You’re pissing me off, Schuyler.”
“Seriously, it might.”
“You don’t want to help; you want to be entertained.”
He frowns. “That’s not fair. We used to talk about this stuff all the time.”
“We did?” I force myself to remember. All those guy-girl trading-secrets-with-the-enemy chats seem like a hundred thousand years ago. “I don’t care. I told you, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay, just the first time,” Schuyler says. “What was it like? Just tell me that. Was it like what we thought it would be like?”
Suddenly my temples are pounding. There’s a red fury building behind my eyes. I sit on the edge of the bed clenching my jaw. I refuse to look at him. The carpet needs vacuuming.
“We were stupid,” I say.
“How stupid?”
“Stupid. Just stupid.”
“So educate me.”
Educate me.
Teach.
The room fills up with red. I stand and walk to him mechanically. Drape my arms over his shoulders. Look into his eyes without seeing, without feeling.
“What?” he says.
I kiss Schuyler hard, grabbing his head, forcing my tongue between his lips. I crush my mouth to his, rocking my face almost violently from side to side. It’s all I can do to keep from taking his lips in my teeth, biting hard, letting everything out I’ve been holding in. I want to make him scream, pour it all into him, make him burn in sweet pain, the kind of pain I’ve known.
He’s trying to pull loose; I kiss him harder and harder.
Finally he rips his mouth away. I can taste copper on my tongue. Or maybe I just want to taste it.
Schuyler collapses into my chair. The lower half of his face is red and puffy. I can’t identify his expression. I’m not thinking with my brain; I’m thinking with my skin, my bones, my hair. My face feels flat, detached, not a part of my body anymore. Reason lags behind emotion.
“Nine,” Schuyler says. It’s the most noxious thing he could think to say. The world’s most evil, obscene number.
“Is that what you wanted?” I say.
Mom comes in.
“Children, I—”
The three of us look at each other in shock. A stranger stepping in at this moment would be hard pressed to decide which of us has been the most wronged.
I know.
the inertia tree
Leaves.
Here it is. My last tree fort.
There are no railings, no walls. It’s high up here.
One Sunday a few years ago, Dad came out and built this platform in the crotch of this pecan tree. We used to build all sorts of things together: tree houses, play forts, a toolshed observatory with a roll-off roof. Things changed. This fort was his last attempt to jump the spark gap between father and daughter. I was nearly fifteen.
We still loved each other; that wasn’t the problem. Somewhere along the way, we’d lost our point of contact, two astronauts whose inertia was carrying them apart.
I reach into space.
The rope in front of me is red and white. It was once a rope for towing water-skiers. This is my last swing, my last surviving piece of little kid backyard summers. I used it for a day, just to make him feel good. I was past that sort of thing, irretrievable.
This is where Schuyler finds me.
“Nine?”
His mouth is red. Something about the angle of the sunlight makes him look eyeless, a being from another world.
“Go away.”
“Why? What just happened in there? That’s the second time you—what did I do?”
“Nothing. It’s not about you. Go away.”
“No.”
“Okay, you can sit there and count the grass.”
He pleads with his hands. “Why are you so mad at me?”
I scoot to the edge, dangle my bare legs next to the ski rope. I loop the rope about my neck a couple of times. It would be easy to let myself slip off and fall into emptiness. And then—what beyond that? I uncoil it.
“I’m not mad at you. Not really. I can’t explain it.”
If I thought I could, here is how I would try:
With Mr. Mann, I was in a very big place. Always, every day. Now I’m in a very small place, even smaller than the place I used to be before he came along. I’m constricted and small, and I never want to do anything ever again outside this small place.
“Do you understand what I mean?” I say, as if I’ve been speaking out loud. Maybe I have.
“No,” Schuyler says. “But I don’t want to leave.”
I shrug. “Then I guess you can come on up. I promise not to bite.”
He touches his lip. “I’m not so sure about that.”
He climbs the ladder and sits next to me. It’s crowded up here. I can’t look at him. I look at the head of a nail that is bleeding rust down the bark. Nobody has been up here in a long time.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say.
“I didn’t say anything.”
I want him to go. I want him to stay. I lean my head against his shoulder. He flinches. His shirt smells good, like a strong detergent, something clean. I need to feel that way again.
“Schuyler, tell me I’m not going crazy.”
“You’re not going crazy. You’re already there.”
“I’m not joking. Help me.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
We squeeze hands. It’s a bargain. I pull the rope through my fingers.
“You kids want your peach tea up there?”
Mom.