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I am in The
Contraption. My eyes, which the doctor
has put drops into to dilate, are pinned open.
Dad sits behind me, in the dark, tapping his foot on the floor. The chart is the only thing illuminated in
the room. My eyes are getting so dry, I
can feel them shriveling up. They will
roll down my cheek any minute now and bounce across the cool floor. I know this will happen. They are getting very dry.
The eye doctor tells me to
read the letters. Little b. Little b.
Little b. He flips something on
The Contraption and I read again.
Little d. Little d. Little d.
There is not much time left until my eyes turn into raisins and drop
from their sockets.
“Again,” he says. This time there are numbers. Seven.
Seven. One. Seven.
I hear my father cough, like he does before he goes on the air. My dad is The Voice of the City on Channel
2. He uses a fake voice when he does
the news. He always coughs before he
does it. Tonight he’ll tell all of the
Bay Area that his son’s eyes shriveled up like raisins and fell out of their
dry sockets. Wall Street climbed
twenty-five points in heavy trading, he’ll say, and that will be that.
“OK, chief,” the eye doctor
says. “One more chart and then I’ll
give you some 3D glasses. You like 3D,
don’t you?”
I don’t say anything because
the time is now. If I move my mouth
they will fall. I can’t afford to move
a muscle. He places a new chart in
front of my eyes, my raisin eyes that will soon be my glass eyes, and tells me
to read. Big D. Big D.
Big D. Big L. Big L.
My father coughs again, like he did before he told everyone about the
president resigning.
“One more,” the eye doctor
says, but I can’t take it. I begin to
scream “Raisins!” because I think that’s all I’ve got left, two dried up black
raisins. I scream until my Dad finally
tells the doctor to get me out of the damn Contraption before I burst a blood
vessel.
“Dyslexia,” the eye doctor
tells my dad, “is manageable.” I search
for a hidden toaster in Highlights
Magazine but can’t find it because my eyes are dilated and I’m wearing 3D
glasses.
Third grade and I’m in a
class for retards. There is Natalie
Hash who has two plastic arms with mechanical hooks on them. She tells me that she was run over by a
steamroller and kisses my ear until I wet myself a little and push her
away. Joe O’Neil stutters and
blinks. I stay away from him. Kirk Hartman, Natalie tells me, has a
vagina. I don’t believe her. I feel out of place.
>Mrs. Blass is our teacher,
and she’s very nice. She has long black
hair with streaks of blond. I tell her
that her hair looks like a picture of the Milky Way I have on my wall. I tell her that my dad met Neil Armstrong
and that one day I will be an astronaut.
She smiles at me and pats my head like Dad pats our dog. It makes me feel pretty good.
I exercise every day with
Kirk Hartman. We walk on balance beams,
we throw a tennis ball off a wall, and we learn to write the “new”
alphabet. This seems dumb to me because
I’ve been writing it differently for two years without a problem. But, Mrs. Blass tells me I need to learn the
right way. She pats my head and when
she is just out of hearing range, I give her a little bark. Kirk laughs, but I hit him on the arm and
tell him not to hear me.
I keep the “old” alphabet in
my head because I think it works better.
The letters mean more to me than the new ones do. Since I am forbidden to use it at school, I
use my alphabet for other things. I
change the shape of some letters, sawing off the rough edges here and there,
curling loops around others. Some
letters get assigned to words. My
favorite letter is X, so I give it to Mrs. Blass. Except I change it to look like a ballerina doing a pirouette and
I color it black and gold to match Mrs. Blass’ hair. The problem is I can’t draw it like I see it. It ends up looking like a nine. I assign my sister Kelly the letter R, but I
flip it upside down and put a star on either side of it.
After school, I always walk
home with my sister Kelly. She is two
years older than me. We throw rocks at
each other while we walk and sometimes we stop and spit on bugs. We get along better at home than on the way
there. Kelly is very smart. She is in advanced math and is already
learning pre-algebra. She wears a
calculator watch. I’m not real
confident with time yet.
Mom is very active in the
community, so there are days when we come home and she’s not there. She says she has civic responsibilities
because Dad is The Voice of the City.
When Mom is not home I feel nervous.
I worry that Kelly will choke on beef jerky, or our dog will have
puppies and I won’t know what to do. I
spend a lot of time in my room looking at the maps of space Dad gave me on my
birthday. Neil Armstrong told my dad
that NASA is always looking for good astronauts, and I think I might like to do
that when I get older.
Dad doesn’t spend much time
at home. He anchors the news at 6 and
11. He also makes documentaries. He did one about stewardesses that won him
an Emmy for local broadcasting. He is a
very important man, my mom says.
One day I hear my dad tell
my mom that he deserves everything he’s got.
That he’s worked damn hard to give us all a home and something he calls
“creature comforts.” I am sitting in
the family room playing with my army men, arranging them in the creases and
folds of an old comforter. Dad lights a
cigarette and sits down on the couch across from me. He watches me arrange the men for a battle I will wage
silently. I prefer to set the men up
and then just look at them, imagining bullets ripping through their plastic
bodies, heads spinning wildly down the seams of the comforter. Each of the two hundred men has a name, but
as a group they are the letter Q. There
is little in the way of modification to that letter, because it is a very
sinister looking letter. It is slithery
and mean.
“Ray,” my dad says. “Before your sister gets back I want to have
a man to man chat.” He flattens a
pillow on the couch that he wants me to sit on. I allow for five men to die before I take my place next to
him. “Son,” he says, and I let a
helicopter drop a bomb on a small village of Kelly’s Barbie dolls. “I’ve been offered a wonderful opportunity
to work for the network in Los Angeles.
So, next week I’m going to move down there and start looking for a new
house for all of us. You and Kelly and
your mother will stay here until the end of the school year.” I fix my eyes on my father’s left foot,
which has just swept over the heads of Alfred and Nick the Stick; their screams
echo in my head. They were good
soldiers. “What do you think about all
of this?” my dad asks.
“I think it’s fine,” I
say. “You’ve got all you’ve deserved.”
My dad gives me a strange
look and then puts his arm around me and squeezes me tight. “You’re going to be the biggest little man
in the house,” he says and kisses my head.
Two more men die when a recon mission comes under heavy enemy fire.
My dad and mom become the
letter Y.
I tell my classmates that my
father is moving away to become an astronaut.
Natalie tells me that her arms are made from the same materials that
NASA uses and then tries to kiss me on the lips. I bite her chin and draw blood.
It tastes salty and warm, not unlike the sauce for French Dip. Mrs. Blass yanks me into the bathroom and
makes me bite soap. She is beautiful
and I tell her that she moves like a ballerina and that she is X .
At a parent-teacher-student
conference the next day, Mrs. Blass tells my mom that she can’t help me
anymore. That I’m smart enough to do
anything I want, but there is a problem about application. She says that again. “Application.” While they talk, I draw a picture of Mrs. Blass spinning on her
tiptoes; her arm is arched up and the colors are perfect. I slide the picture across Mrs. Blass’ desk
and she picks it up.
“Do you see what I mean?”
she says to my mom. My mom smiles and
takes my hand in hers.
When we get home, Mom tells
Kelly and me to write a letter to our father.
I write mine in the old alphabet and seal it in an envelope before Mom
can read it.
Three days later, Dad and
Mom have a fight on the phone. I listen
on the extension in the family room.
“You’ve gotta see this,
honey,” he says. “It’s almost like an
alien wrote it. There are parts that
look like the alphabet, but they are all backwards and twisted up.”
“He’s very confused is all,”
she says. “You should have seen the
people he had in his class. It’s a
wonder he’s not worse. His best friend,
a boy named Kirk Hartman, is a hermaphrodite of all things.”
“I think maybe we should
take him to a therapist.”
“He’s not crazy,” she says.
I am moved to a new
classroom where the kids are not retarded, but I am singled out because I used
to be. Two boys, Scott Sorensen and
Phil Miglino, pin me down during recess and write “retard” on my forehead with a
thick black marker that smells like licorice.
A girl named Hollis, who has buckteeth and stringy hair, tells me she is
going to marry me and then runs off making gagging noises. I miss Mrs. Blass and my exercises with
Kirk.
I make friends with a very
fat boy named Jamie Smith. He vomits on
his desk the second day I am in class, which makes me feel a little less
focused on. I go to his house after
school to play.
We sit upstairs in his room
and color pictures on large pieces of poster board. He draws Godzilla attacking a boat in the middle of the sea. I tell him that no matter how tall Godzilla
might be, he absolutely could not stand up in the deepest parts of the Atlantic
Ocean. Jamie responds by ripping up my
sketch of the Apollo landing on the moon.
Ten minutes later we are friends again.
Jamie and I spend a lot of
time at the Quick Stop buying slurpees and corn nuts. One afternoon, we see Kirk Hartman there playing pinball.
“He has a vagina,” I tell
Jamie, though I’m not sure I believe that.
“Do you want to kick his
ass?” Jamie asks.
“Sure,” I say.
Jamie grabs Kirk by his
collar and yanks him out to the street where our bikes are parked. Kirk looks at me like I’m crazy, but all I
can do is laugh. We drag Kirk down a
rocky gully behind the Quick Stop and then tie his hands behind his back with
my bicycle chain and lock. Jamie
punches him a couple of times in the face and then tells me to pull off Kirk’s
pants so that he can see if Kirk has a vagina.
“Ray,” Kirk says, but it
comes out sounding funny because Jamie has knocked out his two front
teeth. “Ray,” Kirk says again but I
pull off his pants anyway. He has a
penis. Jamie pushes me aside and lifts
up Kirk’s penis and then I see it. A
vagina, just like Natalie Hash said.
Jamie laughs and then brings his knee into Kirk. I look down and Kirk is staring right at
me. I turn and run back up the gully,
get on my bike and ride home.
At six o’clock that night,
Van Humber, the new Voice of the City, announces that a young boy has been
found beaten to death behind a Quick Stop in Concord. I hide in my bedroom and listen for police sirens. I listen to every sound the house makes,
breaking each noise into parts. The
refrigerator is Click-Hiss-Click. The
phone is a scream of even pitch. My
mother’s phone conversation floats into my room. I take apart the words she speaks by sound, breaking them down
until they are nothing but grunts. I
visualize each letter in every word melting into slush.
Kirk Hartman is O. I take that letter out of my alphabet and vow
to never touch it again.
We move to Los Angeles the
day after school ends. I’ve made quite
a turnaround, my teachers all agree, and its true. I have won the spelling bee, tested well in math, and am considered
a fine artist. The teachers tell my mom
that it is good that I stopped being friends with “that Smith boy” and started
concentrating in class. But I
concentrate because of him. Because at
recess he follows me. Because it is all
I can do when he stares at me in class.
Because I close down and put him into a little tunnel and find something
else in my head.
I decide that I will make
some changes in Los Angeles. I will
make friends with the cool kids and try out for sports. Math will become my new favorite subject. Secretly, I will keep a journal written
solely in my own alphabet. By the end
of the summer, I’ve added several new letters to my alphabet and expect to top
100 by Christmas break.
School comes easy after I
tell everyone who my father is. One of
my teachers, Mr. Schreiber, tells the class that my father seems very
trustworthy on the news. I fall in love
with Julie Glass when she tells me that her mother thinks my dad is sexy.
At home, I play with my Star Wars action figures when my parents
are around. When they aren’t looking, I
scribble new letters into my journal.
One night my parents have a dinner party with a few “big guns from the
Network” and Kelly and I sit at the kid’s table with the other children. I get nervous because we are supposed to eat
with the correct fork and I keep forgetting which of the three is correct. My mom’s eyes are on me while I am eating,
so I dare not mess up. Kelly confides
in me before dinner that this whole evening is a “really big deal” and that I
shouldn’t say anything stupid or start screaming about raisins. She thinks that is pretty funny. We don’t have much in common.
Finally, my mom comes over
and excuses us from dinner. My stomach
hurts, I tell her.
“Honey,” Mom says. “You know where the bathroom is. Just spray some air freshener when you’re
done.”
I grab my notebook and sit
on the toilet for an hour. I write a
letter to Kirk Hartman in my alphabet.
I tell him all about Los Angeles, and about my new friends, and about the
new math I’m learning where letters and numbers work together. Sometimes, I write, I can’t get the
equations to stop running through my head.
It makes me feel like a robot. I
imagine I am the robot from Lost in Space
and everyone depends on me. I tell Kirk
that I am sorry I let him down.
The door opens and a tall
man with steel gray hair is standing in front of me, his hands fumbling with
his zipper.
“Oh,” he says. “You startled me.” He leans down and looks into my journal. “What do you have there, a coloring book?”
“No,” I say. “I’m writing a letter.”
“Well,” he says, still
staring at my journal. “Would you mind
if I squeezed in here for a moment?”
“Sure,” I say and leave the
bathroom. My mom is sitting at the
kitchen table talking to a woman with hair like Mrs. Blass.
“Ray,” Mom says. “Come in here and meet Mrs. Stone.” I walk over and shake Mrs. Stone’s hand.
“I am pleased to meet you,”
I say.
“He’s such a little man,”
Mrs. Stone says. My mom smiles and says
something quietly to Mrs. Stone that makes her blush and giggle a bit. I reach up and touch her hair. It is thick and wiry feeling, nothing like
how I imagined Mrs. Blass’ hair to be.
I see my mother’s hand reaching for mine, but I’ve got to feel the
blonde streak. Will it be soft and
warm? I think it will. It isn’t.
It is grainy and rough. I pull
as hard as I can until my dad has grabbed me and Mrs. Stone is shrieking and
her hair is on the kitchen floor.
We go every Tuesday to see
Dr. Lupus for “behavior modification.” For the first half hour, either my mom
or my dad sit with me and the doctor and we discuss how to be a better person,
how to do the right things, how to know when we are “getting close to that
scary place.” “That scary place” is
mine alone, according to Dr. Lupus. I
must learn how to control my desires, he says, and act like a good young man.
The second half-hour, Dr.
Lupus and I just talk. One day, I
decide to give him something to write about
“I have my own alphabet,” I
say.
Dr. Lupus stops
scribbling. “Really?”
“And I witnessed a murder.”
Dr. Lupus sets his journal down and pulls his chair
closer to mine. He looks
frustrated. “You see, Raymond, this is
exactly what we are trying to accomplish,” he says. “We all know how creative and smart you are. You don’t need to create scenarios to shock
people. Just concentrate on being
yourself. Simplify things.”
“All right,” I say.
My dad changes his name to Nick and gets hired by
CNN as a correspondent. He becomes
known for going places no one else will.
He breaks stories in places like Kuala Lumpur, United Arab Emirates, Libya,
Somalia, and El Salvador.
I coast through grade school
and middle school because I am popular and smart. The teachers want me in their classes to use as a good example
for others. I try out for sports and
sometimes I do well. I can swim the
backstroke very quickly. Math makes me
the envy of other students because I develop a series of body twitches for
multiple choice tests. The teachers
think I get nervous at test time, but I’m just giving out answers. My school gets an award for testing extremely
high in state run math exams, thanks to me.
Kelly learns to drive when I
am in the eighth grade. She takes me
and two of her friends to school everyday.
One of her friends, Misty Lawler, sits in the backseat with me. She wears short skirts and lets me touch her
underwear. She becomes—by my official
count—letter number 489, which resembles an isosceles triangle and an obtuse
triangle intersecting one another.
Geometry is my new specialty.
I get a letter from Jamie
Smith the last day of ninth grade. He
tells me he’s found Jesus. He tells me
that one day very soon he will tell the world that I killed Kirk Hartman. He tells me that Jesus came to him in a
dream after he’d smoked some really good weed, and that Jesus told him to
recant. He tells me that Kirk Hartman
has been seen as a mist, appearing for just a moment then dispersing, behind
the Quick Stop, which, he says, is now a Pizza Hut.
I burn the letter.
My dad gets shot in the head
by two guerrilla warriors in a jungle just outside of San Salvador. His remains are sent to us in three boxes by
the El Salvadoran government. At Dad’s
funeral, I read a poem that I title “The Voice of the City Will Never Rest.” One of his colleagues tells me that I am a
very brave boy and a talented writer.
My dad, post-mortem, becomes
letters 599 through 612. My mom stays
Y, but I alter the letter slightly to reflect the sudden death of my father.
In high school, I become
cool. I tell everyone how great the
Ramones are, how fluid their simple three-chord progression is, and how much I
identify with what they are saying. On
my locker I place stickers for bands like the Sex Pistols, The Damned,
Generation X and Discord over every inch of space.
My grades drop
dramatically. In order to become cool,
I’ve had to make some sacrifices. I’m
following Dr. Lupus’ advice. I have no
need for history, so I fail it. I have
no need for PE so I fail it. I have
some need for English, so I get a D the semester we talk about Chaucer and an
A- the semester we focus on current literature. I have a great need for math and score high on the tests. I start tinkering around with computer
science.
I become cool by wearing the
same outfit everyday. Dark blue jeans,
with an ironed crease down the center, and a plain white shirt, pressed. On cold days I wear my leather jacket. Kelly tells me I look like a freak. I tell her that I finger bang Misty Lawler
on a regular basis. She tells mom and
now I walk to school.
By the end of tenth grade, I
have 845 letters, plus I have added an addendum for people I dislike or am
afraid will hurt me. Jamie Smith
becomes the inaugural member when he writes me a second letter.
He writes, Dear Ray, Jesus is dead. Kirk Hartman is alive. I saw him last week behind the Quick Stop,
which was a Pizza Hut, which is now a coffee house called Nectar. Kirk says we should all get together.
I ask my mom if maybe we shouldn’t move to the East
Coast so that she can be closer to her parents. “They’re not getting any younger,” I say. She cries, much as she has every day since
my father was used for political purposes, and tells me that I am cruel.
Jamie Smith is my first
algebraic formula to be used. He is
officially 2(3x + 8) (4x -2x+7)=n. I
vow never to solve for n.
Kelly graduates and moves to
Seattle to attend the University of Washington. We are friends again because I volunteer to help her pack and
because I say that I would love to drive up north with her to keep her
safe. She takes me up on the first
offer but not the second, which is fine, because it was more of a token
suggestion than a real desire.
I attend summer school and
make up all my Fs. When I find out that
if I continue to let my grades drop I will not graduate, I decide being cool
also means not failing out of high school.
I still wear my allegiance to punk rock music on my sleeve, but at home
I listen to John Coltrane and Otis Redding.
They are the only things that stop the numbers and the letters. Under my bed, there are 26 full notebooks of
alphabet and addendum and letters to my father and Kirk Hartman. I wonder if they know each other. I imagine there are separate heavens for
different kinds of death. Maybe people
who die violently or under mysterious conditions share a level of heaven. Maybe my dad and Kirk play catch and talk
about me. Maybe my dad tells Kirk that
I finally kicked that dyslexia thing, but boy, I’m really obsessed with numbers
and letters and equations and alphabets.
>One night I hear my mom
talking to someone on the phone. “Life
will be so much easier when he goes to college,” she says. “I’ve never deserved any of this.”
I take the SAT in my junior
year, one year early, and score 1480.
“That’s Ivy League stuff,” my guidance counselor says. “You’ve really buckled down, Ray.” I tell him that I owe it all to my belief in
power through education. I am wearing a
pair of chinos and a light blue Oxford button down. My hair has grown thick and wavy. I have on topsiders. I am
The Boy You Want Your Daughter To Date.
I have removed the punk rock stickers from my locker and replaced them
with stickers about world causes. My
favorite is “One People, One Planet, Please.”
Misty Lawler sent it to me from FSU.
She sprayed a squirt of perfume on it, that, she assured me, contained
no animal byproducts.
By the beginning of my
senior year, I have 67 notebooks under my bed.
I have started writing short stories in my alphabet. I am developing a program on my computer
that will be able to read my language.
I come home from school on a
Tuesday and my mom is sitting on the floor of my bedroom. All 67 notebooks are scattered on the floor
around her. She is crying.
“Ray, what are you?” she
says.
“I’m your son,” I say,
because that is all I can say. In my
mind I am running equations. Solve for
X. Solve for X. But all I see is Mrs. Blass. How do I solve for X?
My mom lifts up a notebook
and there is a drawing of Kirk Hartman and his letter. I have not seen it in years. “Ray, do you know what happened to this
boy?”
“Yes,” I say. Behind the Quick Stop, which became a Pizza
Hut, and then something called Nectar.
“I thought you stopped all
this years ago,” she says.
“I never stopped,” I
say. X minus Y equals what?
“Dr. Lupus told me that
you’d grow out of this,” she says.
“That puberty would fix you.”
“It’s not like I’m torturing
animals,” I say. The slope of Y equals
mx+b.
“This ends today,” my mom
says.
“You didn’t deserve this,” I
say and I mean it. I mean my dead
father. I mean me, who will probably
end up as a special on the Discovery Channel.
I mean these notebooks filled with an alphabet longer than some
languages. I mean the air she breathes,
the food she eats. I mean it all, for a
moment.
The last time I use my
alphabet is my freshman year in college.
I’ve mothballed it for over a year, because I saw how sad it made my
mom. I use it in my head sometimes just
to make sure it’s still there, and it is.
I can count nearly a thousand letters during a lecture on revisionist
history. But I don’t write it down, I
don’t write the letters to dad or Kirk in it.
I just save it for the times when I feel nervous.
It’s the nerves that do me
in.
My roommate introduces me to
his sister Tina. She is 22, a junior
majoring in Psych, and she thinks that Otis Redding is God. We have a built in connection with a man who
died too soon. After our first date, we
drive back to her apartment off campus.
I kiss her eyes and her neck.
“Wait,” she says and gets up from the bed. She fumbles around in the dark for a minute and then I hear Otis
come through the stereo. Tina is singing
along to him as she crosses the bedroom.
“I’ve been loving you, for
soooo long,” she croons. When she is
back on the bed, her top is off. We
spend the next two days just like this.
The next day, I’m walking on
campus looking for the vendor who sells rice bowls. Usually, he parks in front of Science II, but there is a sign
saying he is now stationed outside the Psych Department. I have a rice bowl every day for lunch, so I
trek across campus.
I sit on the grass and eat
my rice bowl and watch two squirrels race around the branches of a tree. I feel good about most everything
today. The sun is out. I have my rice bowl. My mom is in Italy with three girlfriends
(according to the postcard). I have
spent 48 hours experiencing great pleasure.
I might rush a fraternity in the winter.
Jamie Smith walks out of the
Psych building holding Tina’s hand.
They stand beneath an awning and she kisses him on the cheek. He takes a step back and smiles. Makes a gesture with his big hands. Frowns like a clown frowns. She kisses him on the lips. He takes the stairs back up inside the
building.
My rice bowl spills at my
feet. The squirrels pounce. 2(3x + 8) (4x -2x+7)=n.
Tina sees me, frowns like
people frown, and starts making a line to me.
I run across campus, through
the student union and all the way to my dorm room.
The walls are blank white
and I want to fill them up. I want Tina
to know that she has made a tragic mistake, that she has been in bed with a
killer. I want Tina to know that there
are some emotions you don’t play around with, that tenderness is a privilege,
not a right. I write her a long letter
using as many words as I can muster. I
access the addendum. I fill the walls
with my alphabet. Every last inch of
empty wall is filled with my words, my symbols, my algebraic formulas.
When I was a little boy, my
dad told me that there are spaces we all fit into. This was when we were driving home from the eye doctor’s
office. He said that when he was a child
he couldn’t catch a ball very well, or run very fast, but he could speak. He said, “There are things you can do that
don’t take great physical skill, Ray.
You capitalize on what you do well and then you become what you want.”
Maybe Dad had his own
alphabet somewhere. Maybe sometimes he
couldn’t tell if he was seeing a lower case d or a lower case b. I’ve written him a thousand letters—not an
official count, because I don’t do that anymore—and in each one I apologize for
things I’ve done since he died.
That wasn’t Jamie Smith out
in front of the Psych Building. He’s
either dead or in prison, I know that now with some certainty. I’ve never taken the time to solve Jamie’s
equation, maybe out of fear, maybe out of faith, but I think I’d find the
answer to be pretty anticlimactic.
So I live a normal life. I have a wife, a child, a gold dog. But sometimes, especially when I watch my son struggle with his
first words, I yearn for my alphabet.
For the way my mind could twist away for hours assigning, creating,
modifying. Compulsion tells me to assign
my wife and child a letter, something solitary and distinct that I could base a
whole new alphabet on. But I
resist. I simplify. I solve for X.
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