Thumbsucker (13 page)

My first class that morning was English. We were supposed to be reading
Moby Dick
. As Mrs. Rand chalked theme words on the blackboard—Whiteness, Sea vs. Land, Revenge & Pride—I opened my paperback copy for the first time.

“Who’d like to talk on Whiteness?” Mrs. Rand asked.

I opened my mouth and out flowed several ideas I wasn’t even conscious of having thought about. Whiteness stood for eternity, I said. It represented both innocence and extinction.

“I see you read the preface,” Mrs. Rand said.

This wasn’t true. I hadn’t read a line.

It happened again in biology. I pronounced “mitochondria”
correctly, despite never having heard it spoken before.

After school, I swept into the house to share my news. I found Joel in front of the TV watching a tape of his serves at tennis camp. The counselors had told him he showed promise but that it was buried under all the weight.

“You’re out of breath,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“I’ve changed. I’m better. It works. It really works.”

“Why are your eyes like that?”

“Like what?”

“So huge.”

The conversation depressed me. I felt inside my pants and found the pill I was meant to have taken at noon. An hour later, feeling better, I settled onto the couch with
Moby Dick
. When Audrey called me to dinner I said, “One minute,” but I kept on reading until eleven o’clock. I woke up at five and took another pill and by the time Mike and Audrey came down to breakfast, I’d finished all but two chapters of
Moby Dick
. No skimming or skipping, either. Every word.

I didn’t take nitrous oxide for my crown fitting; I preferred the new clarity of Ritalin. Perry Lyman held up a mirror afterward and showed me the jewel that was bonded to my jaw. He’d urged me to get a porcelain crown out of consideration for Mike’s budget, but I’d chosen gold. The new me deserved the best.

“How’s the medication?” Perry Lyman said.

“Great. I read my first whole novel last week. Also, I mowed the lawn the other day and managed to make a perfect crisscross pattern.”

“Mood swings?”

“No swings. Just up and up. Straight up.”

“Any other breakthroughs besides the mowing job?”

“Only little ones,” I said. “It used to feel like a hassle to put on underwear, but now I wear it every day. Also, the Pledge of Allegiance. It gives me chills now. I never really listened to the words before.”

“Don’t pull my leg.”

“I’m not. I’m being honest.”

Perry Lyman slid open the drawer in his desk where he kept his giveaway toothbrushes and dental flosses. He took out a fat red book and looked a page up. “You’re describing a common side effect: euphoria.”

I’d heard this word but was fuzzy about its meaning.

“Let’s keep an eye on that,” Perry Lyman said. “You don’t want to get to feeling so high and mighty you do something stupid like try to leap tall buildings.”

A shadow of the old distrust fell over me. What could be wrong with feeling good?

My wariness lingered during my next visit. After filing and readjusting my crown, Perry Lyman gave me a psychological test. He assured me that there were no wrong answers, but I knew better. There were always wrong answers.

“Now and then, when things don’t go my way,” he
said, reading from a clipboard, “I feel that life is blank. Fill in the blank.”

I couldn’t decide what kind of answer to give. One that made me sound confused and jumpy, confirming the original diagnosis, or one that made me sound calm and healthy? Cured. The stakes were high: if I didn’t respond correctly, I could lose my prescription.

I tried a nonsense answer first. Depending on how Perry Lyman reacted, I might get a clue as to how to play the other questions.

“A miracle,” I said.

Perry Lyman remained expressionless. “When I’m away from home, I miss my blank.”

I hesitated. “Family. I miss my family.” This was the cured approach.

“My teachers are blank?”

“Mature adults,” I said.

“You’re faking this. Don’t play games with me, Justin. This is serious.”

“I thought there were no wrong answers?”

“Don’t get cute.”

I switched my tactics after that and answered like a hyperactive person.

“When I see other people suffer, I feel …”

“Nervous?”

“My friends don’t know how blank I am.”

“Impatient.”

“Baby animals make me feel …”

“All jittery.”

Perry Lyman set the clipboard on his desk. “I’m giving the medication another week. I’m worried this isn’t organic, after all.”

Betrayal loomed. I thought back to my thumb.

My dentist was not going to break me twice. No way.

What Perry Lyman didn’t know as he arranged the IV drip was that I’d ignored his order to skip my pill that morning. What he’d told me he didn’t want to happen—a clash between drugs that would lighten my sedation—was precisely what I wanted. Given Perry Lyman’s proven ability to enter my brain and rearrange my thoughts, I was prepared to suffer increased pain in exchange for greater alertness.

As the fluid moved down the plastic tube the overhead lights broke into silver stars. The textured ceiling tiles became mountainous. Perry Lyman’s eyes and cheeks wrinkled and warped and dripped like melting cheese.

It wasn’t the urge to blab I felt this time, though sentence fragments careened inside my head (“… words, the opposite of food …, ” “… forward divided by backward equals sideways …”), but a deeper, fiercer impulse. I wanted to eat my dentist, to consume him. Next, I’d chew my way through the whole building, the cars in the parking lot, the landscaped grounds. I saw myself as a mammoth caterpillar lengthening and swelling with each bite until there was nothing
left but air and everything that had been outside, in my way, was finally inside, a source of strength and energy.

“Suction. More suction,” Perry Lyman said. The technician swooped in with her tools. The office roared.

As the hammering, cracking, and drilling went on, the sedatives seemed to get the best of me. Soon, it was not just dead tissue being removed, but diseased impressions, infected memories. The rank taste of deer meat was whisked out of my skull by a pair of sparkling diamond pliers. Next, I felt my need for Audrey gripped by steel pincers that sparked like jumper cables. It wouldn’t come loose, though, and slipped back down my throat, lodging in my stomach, where it burned.

“Flatten your tongue,” Perry Lyman said. “Stop talking.”

“How could I be talking? I’m not talking.”

My dentist howled. A peaceful blackout followed. When I came to he was bandaging his forefinger with a cotton ball and white cloth tape.

“You bit me,” he said.

I fell asleep again. When I woke up, it appeared that time had passed. Perry Lyman had changed from his lab coat into a sports jacket and seemed to be about to leave the office.

“I’m sorry I bit you.”

“I understand,” he said. “It’s not surprising, considering our history.”

“Is my father here to pick me up?”

“His friend got a liver. Your father’s been called away. Your mother’s at an all-day paramedic class.” Perry Lyman buttoned up his jacket. “You can hang out at my house. See my helicopter.”

“Are they out?”

“They’re out. Completely out.”

My cheeks were packed with bloody gauze as Perry Lyman walked me to the helicopter parked on a concrete pad behind his farmhouse. The craft had no doors, just a see-through plastic bubble shielding an instrument panel and two small seats. Using gestures to spare my swollen jaws, I asked Perry Lyman to take me for a ride.

“Maybe someday,” he said. “Now, about your medication …”

I crossed my arms, prepared to stand my ground.

“Personally, I don’t see much improvement. In fact, I see warning signs. But I’m not you. I used to try to be everyone, of course, but that got tiring. Awfully lonely, too. Conclusion: you do what you want. It’s your own chemistry.”

I took the gauze out. “Thank you.”

“Hush, you’ll bleed.”

“The pills make me feel like me. I never did before.”

“Then how would you know what it feels like? Shush. Don’t answer.”

Perry Lyman changed his mind about going up in the helicopter. We strapped on seat belts and put on cushioned
headsets with microphones that extended in front of our chins. We left the ground with the cockpit tilted down, as if we were going to crash into the trees, but a few seconds later we leveled off.

“To answer me, tap on your mike,” said Perry Lyman. “One for yes and two for no.”

I tapped.

I didn’t recognize the local landmarks; Perry Lyman had to point them out. The school was a black rectangle of roofing tar strewn with silver puddles. The golf course being constructed west of town was a collection of dirt piles and shallow trenches where the clubhouse and condos were going in. I managed to spot my house and yard because of the dozens of yellow tennis balls left over from Joel’s practice sessions against the wall of the garage.

“Like it up here?” said Perry Lyman.

Tap.

“Ready to set her down yet?”

Two taps. No.

“You’re like me: I go up, I like to stay up. Just fly in circles and see what I can see until there’s no more fuel. I hate the ground. The only reason it’s there is to take off from.”

Tap.

“Sometimes I worry myself.”

Tap, tap.

We flew for another half hour, buzzing the river, hovering over the bluffs. I envied the new life that Perry
Lyman had found and sensed it would be more lasting than my new pill. He’d told me once that Ritalin was just a bridge, that someday I’d have to come off it, but onto what? I watched him consult his gauges, move his stick. I didn’t have a stick. I was flying blind.

My learning to fly-fish that summer was Mike’s idea. I’d told him I wanted a hobby, not a sport. Me, I’d been pushing to attend a drama camp sponsored by the U of M, but something Mike said to me changed my mind. He told me how, after his knee operation, fly-fishing for trout had kept him sane by giving him something to focus on and care about besides the fact that he’d never play pro ball.

I wanted this: a pastime I could care about. Something to fall back on besides the pills.

To get me into the mood to learn, Mike gave me some magazines to read. What grabbed me were the pictures of the fishermen. In their caps and sunglasses and hip boots, their vests adorned with elaborate metal gadgets, they had the intelligent ruggedness of airline pilots, a look that was part engineer, part athlete. Fly fishermen, according to the magazines, were patient, meticulous, thoughtful. A cut above. They were forever making one last cast after getting skunked all day and suddenly hooking the trout of a lifetime, only to release it for conservation reasons.

First I had to learn to cast. I practiced in the yard. Mike stood next to me gripping my elbow as I stripped a few feet of line off the reel and raised my rod to forty-five degrees. Once I got the line into the air, the trick was to let it straighten out behind me and reach its full extension on the backcast.

I kept flubbing it. My fly, its barb removed for safety’s sake, bounced off my head as my fly line lost momentum and fell in sloppy coils around my shoes.