The Sleeping Sickness

Me?  I was a prize baby.  I lived with my parents and infant sister in the yellow house on Leicester Street, where we kept a little pea-patch in summer.  My father was an electrician and my mother stayed at home.  I was a neat, clean boy, affectionate and sensitive, with a nasty run of luck.  First came the car that broke my leg and knocked my eye off-kilter when I was six.  When they brought me back from the hospital—where the leg hadn’t set properly—I was nervous, afraid of thunderstorms and being alone.  I was afraid my father might be burned, that my mother might be dead, that my baby sister might fall and crack open her head.  Then came the long fever of the sleeping sickness.  There had been stories in the newspaper that year—rumors of a strange epidemic, charts with lists of numbers.  Although it was never explained to me, I understood there was some vague connection between those numbers and my own unrelenting torpor—the sleep from which I’m not sure I have ever really awoken.

I remember the sense of a nightmare gradually coming true.  My mother woke me up in the evenings to force mush down my throat.  I slept for a month.  I dreamt of death, coffins, seizure, and the Holy Ghost, the one that lived in the ground beneath my bed.  Other times I dreamt that the doctor climbed in through my window and stole part of my brain while I was sleeping.  When I had the strength, I watched for the doctor from an upstairs window, and when I saw him coming up the stoop I would hurry and get back into bed, as if he were coming to punish me.

Afterward, I fell asleep in the daytime, standing up, at school or in the street.  I would fall asleep even when a plate of ice-cream was set before me—“sleepiness in a boy may go no further than that,” pronounced the doctor.  A month later, a boy named Julius threw a frozen snowball at my head.  It was then I started lighting fires.  I couldn’t help it—who was I to tell them it was no longer me?  I—or the boy who I had become—yelled at school, threw my shoe out the window, and called the teacher a “fuck.” I stole canaries, watches, money, rifles, spectacles, flowerpots, a Bible, and records.  I smoked.  I teased and slapped the baby.  My mother said I needed whipping and my father gave me the strap.  They sent me to a farm in Indiana, and the farm sent me back home, where I had a little gang of friends.

One night, we stole a dinghy from the wharf and rowed out to a boat called the Nancy M.  We were hungry, and took some sandwiches from the safe.  Then we lit some rags with a match, and escaped in the dinghy.  Out in our little boat, we ate our sandwiches and watched the fire light up the purple sky, bits of boat like embers plashing down into the black water.  They wrote about us in the Munkhton County Telegraph—you can see me in the picture.

Sometimes I dreamt there was a girl trapped on that burning boat; that it was so awful the newspaper hadn’t printed it.  Worse things happen than what you expect, the dream told me.  Perhaps the truth was concealed in some indecipherable chart.

After that, it was jail, or the funny farm, or, as it turned out, a new place in Pennsylvania, the Franklin Hospital School for Boys and Girls.

That was where I met Anne.

And let me tell you this: for just one peep through the keyhole at Anne in the therapeutic tub, pinching or biting a startled nurse and then assuming a look of angelic innocence, I would suffer a thousand spontaneous naps in Midwestern stables, dreaming of seizure, while a hailstorm of frozen snowballs rained down on my unwitting head, and an armada of Nancy M.’s sunk in a bottomless lake of fire.

That was a long time ago.  The old fever has cooled and left dry cinders in my bones.  I am only an old scarecrow now, watching over a patch of mummy-peas.  In winter I am a snow-man.  By day I stare at the sun until my eyes turn black, and at night the moon sits like a cold stone in my mind.  My memory, like the moon, waxes a little, and then wanes; my voice is only the frost rising from my lips at daybreak.

But when I think of my babyface, my limpid roundelette, and what we did together, or might have done, one night in the barn, I shiver.  It is not a real shiver—only the night breeze, tickling my ribs, two sticks of wood, with a lick of chilly fire.

*

She arrived in the morning on a Tuesday.  It was already my second month at the Franklin School.  Four o’clock was swimming-time for the boys, while the girls did calisthenics outside on the lawn.  And so my first glimpse of her was through a window fogged by warm chlorine mist, as the tepid liquid lapped against my skin.  My left arm and leg were badly stiffened after my illness (only the first tremors of the devastating fissure to come), but the daily swimming pool soothed and softened those wooden limbs until they undulated in the warmth like velvety underwater plants.  It was like I’d fallen asleep, standing in my floater, and begun to dream.  And as I melted there I gazed through the misty pane at Anne’s haloed body, twirling and scampering on the lawn in a bright lemon jumper, the wild-limbed debutante performing for the other girls, until she had a little accident on the plush blue-green lawn and the nurse had to take her inside.

This is how she said she ended up at the Franklin: She went home with her friend Julia on the trolley-car; they had been to see the baby bears at the zoo; they came home and ate supper; Julia’s mother cooked it for them; it was chicken.  Then Anne went to her home.  And when she woke up she found she was in the hospital school.

Now my little chicken, my Anne, could tell tales.  She liked to talk to anyone who would listen.  I was eleven, and I hoped it would be me.  She said, There once was a Green Lady who lived in the woods.  She was the daughter of a White Lady.  She got a little baby boy and said, “Now you will be my slave.” The little boy said he wouldn’t, but the lady insisted.  She told the child to get a hatchet and then to lie down.  The little boy said he didn’t understand and asked the lady to show him.  When the lady did that, the child cut off her head.

Lop it, little one!  Off with the Green Lady’s head!  The way she placed her teeth on her plump lower lip to end the word “off” made me giddy in the knees.  Anne was a nut.  She loved attention.  Her face was the face of a baby doll.  She danced and sang and ran around until the Nurse had to come and put her, biting and scratching with her lovely needy little fingers, in the Pack.

She said she was from Canada, but in truth, she was from Pittsburgh.  Sifting out the facts from her fabulous fiction, this is what I learned: She came from a wealthy family; her father was a doctor and local politician, and they spent their summers in Maine.  When she was eight, she had a fever for eight weeks, talking and crying in her sleep.  When she woke up, she started running away from home, sometimes in her nightie, sometimes in her bathing-suit.  At the end of her journeys, a nice policeman would bring her back; she never struggled when caught.  On these trips, which could run upwards of forty miles, she always brought flowers—from gardens, stores, wherever she could get them—and whatever other little trinkets she had found.  The large-hearted girl sometimes gave the flowers and trinkets to strangers.  From the five-and-dime store she stole a doll and doll-carriage which she abandoned, minutes later, in a moving-picture theatre.

Anne’s parents weren’t happy with her peculiar habits.  She frightened off a series of governesses with a butcher-knife and public masturbation.  At home, her father fastened a ball and chain to her leg.  My shackled, melodramatic honey would crawl out to the white stone balcony, threatening to throw herself off.  She wet the bed, the sofa, the living-room rug.  She gave the goldfish beer, cut up candle-shades, and scattered cornflakes on the floor.  Her best memory was of a friendly uncle who took her into town for ice-cream and pop.  At a Sunday school entertainment, our budding starlet leapt onto the church platform and launched into a naughty song and dance, to the amusement of the children, before the pastor pulled her off.

She did other things that no one liked to speak of.  She wandered into traffic and begged strange boys for automobile rides.  Her hygiene suffered.  She refused to sleep at night—sometimes her mother, a religious woman, would appear in Anne’s doorway draped in a white sheet, as if to scare her daughter to sleep.  The last stroke was when a neighbor child took Anne’s doll and ran into a house with it.  Anne went down the street to the home of the local sheriff, who was napping, and took a loaded revolver off the kitchen table.  She told her mother that she was going to shoot the child and get the doll back.

Her mother was hospitalized for nerves.  Anne, after a brief, unhappy stay in an expensive sanitarium, was off to the Franklin School.

No trolley.  No chicken.  No Julia.

At 6:30 A.M. it was wash and dress, and a whole ninety minutes until, after breakfast and housework, I could glimpse Anne in the courtyard, I on my way to the school room, she on her way to gymnastics and hydrotherapy.  Those of us who could were supposed to jog, but I exaggerated the lameness in my left half, so that I could limp slower, and increase my chances of a glimpse.

Lessons grew tedious and intolerable.  The housemother, a fat moustached lady named Miss Cook, gave us talks on Japanese life—a cousin of hers had recently returned from Japan—and made us cut silly Japanese lanterns out of colored paper.  My only relief was to see Anne cutting up the scraps of paper and scattering them, rainbow-like, across the linoleum, before jumping up and impersonating a Japanese baby.  Hands together in prayer-fashion, she wobbled round and round in little mincing steps, bowing and crooning, until she lost her balance and went pitching forward into the group of transfixed children.

The girl loved babies.  She told stories about baby boys and girls, baby bears, baby chickens.  She said at home in Canada she had three pups you could pet and give milk, and she herself would wiggle and waggle like a pup (and sometimes pee) whenever anybody tickled her—especially Mr. Hyne, the psychologist.  I knew she liked him.  She smiled coquettishly at him and tugged on his sleeve whenever the bearded and spectacled old man came to supervise supper.  She told other children that she was Mr. Hyne’s best girl—that he was going to marry her and take her to live in a big apartment house with her baby brother and four baby chickens.  She said Mr. Hyne gave her nickels, quarters, and writing paper, though our weekly allowance was only eight cents.  Other times she said Mr. Hyne was going to take her on a train and give bread and milk to their baby.  She insisted that the psychiatrist come on the sliding-board and the see-saw with her; she implored him to make her a merry-go-round.  When she was irritated because Mr. Hyne wasn’t paying her enough attention she would call him a bad boy and threaten to have the dentist pull out all his teeth.  If another girl had the misfortune of glancing at Mr. Hyne in a way Anne found suggestive, she would quickly find a set of teeth sunk into her forearm or leg.

Not that Mr. Hyne was without competition.  There was a small, pink-cheeked boy named Tom who told us he had set a forest fire that indirectly caused the death of a woman.  Just a shrimp in terms of size, he was the greatest fighter in the Franklin School.  He called himself Tom Thumb, and said “I could run around the brim of your hat.” He tried to impress Anne by climbing like a monkey on the back of his chair until the livid Miss Cook took hold of him and firmly replaced him in the seat.  Once he asked Anne if she would like him to beat me up, and after considering the offer, she heartwarmingly declined.  Luckily, in a final attempt to win Anne’s favor, Tom jumped from an upper-story window, and after refusing treatment in the infirmary, he had to be taken away.

With Tom out of the picture, my chances seemed improved.  Anne, because of her looks and audacious charm, was the most popular girl in the hospital school.  Spring came early that year, and under the direction of Miss Cook, the boys put on a Valentine Party for the school.  We planned everything ourselves—written invitations, entertainment, prizes, and refreshments.  The theme of our party was the Return of Spring, and every child was to come in costume—the boys as animals, and the girls as flowers.  Knowing Anne’s inclinations, I went as a puppy-dog, pinning droopy ears to my hat and a bushy tail to my belt.  Anne came as a dandelion, with a necklace of bright green fronds.  We put on a little play, with roundelays of dancing animals and flowers.  And of course, Anne took center stage, wiggling and waggling, a garland of yellow paper in her golden hair, lurching through the group in a wild, joyful, stumbling parody of the other children.  It nearly ruined the party, but I didn’t care.  And when it came time for the boys to award the prizes, my beautiful, awkward, enuretic dandelion was elected Queen of Hearts.

She said, I’m the prettiest of the bunch.  And it was true.  Did she know that in addition to her new title, she had won my heart?  That she was the sole, ruling queen of my weary, nervous heart?

Sometimes Anne had to have an extra “rest period.” This meant that if she wet herself at school, and the teachers thought she did it on purpose, she would have to lie in bed, in all her clothes, for part of the day.  The routine was quietly approved by Mr. Hyne.  It meant that I wouldn’t see her out on the grass, from the pool, or crossing the courtyard.  It seemed painfully unfair to me, and thinking about it would worsen the stiffness in my leg and arm until I could hardly move.  In the classroom I grew so anxious thinking of Anne confined in her wet bloomers that I vomited on the paper.  The more distracted I became, and the more I was urged to concentrate on the problems before me, the more easily and thoroughly I would vomit.  The other boys nicknamed me “Niagara Falls.” But it couldn’t be helped.

Far worse was the punishment for fibbing.  If, for instance, Anne got caught for hiding a wet bedsheet and stealing a dry one to replace it, she would be put “on silence” for the day.  This meant that Anne could still be with the group and play, but that no one was allowed to speak to her or answer her questions.  And Anne never tired of conversation.  How horrible it was for us to be forced to play the role of Anne’s torturers!  But such was the case one Friday in the week following the Valentine Party.  Miss Cook announced, through the teachers of each class, that Anne was to be “on silence.” On Friday afternoons everyone in the school had to go to the Liberty Room for the Director’s weekly address.  The Director was a tanned, silver-haired man named Dr. Richards.  Anne sat three rows in front of me, and as Dr. Richards spoke I watched the soft, slightly oily nape of Anne’s neck (her hair was tied in a ponytail; she despised bathing) as she fidgeted and whispered to the girls on either side of her, who could communicate with their eyes but kept their lips sealed shut.

The subject of the Director’s address was the behavior of the children in the Franklin School.  He droned on at length: In talking to each of you I have found a great misunderstanding.  You cannot guess what it is.  Most of you told me you were here because you had been sick.  You have been sick but practically none of you are sick now.  You are not here because you are sick but because of the things you did when you were at home, and some of which you continue to do here.  I need not tell you what they all were, but they were things like running away, being irritable and cross, and having temper tantrums.  All these were simply bad habits which made it hard to have you around home, and often made others dislike you.  They made you difficult and unpleasant to live with.  When you are unhappy you are most likely to use bad habits and express yourself in unpleasant ways.  Bad habits usually mean unhappiness.  If you are happy and try to make others happy, you will develop good and satisfactory habits.  You are here in order for us to learn how to make you happy and therefore also in order to develop good habits.  If you are deprived of something or punished, it is not done because we dislike you, but because the things you have done are unpleasant and disturbing to others and when others are disturbed you cannot be happy yourself.  If any one of you can think of any way in which we can help you more satisfactorily than we do, we wish you would tell us.  We are trying to help you form more satisfactory habits, and to teach you to get along with others.  This will help you to go home if you want to, and also to become happy.

To become happy—with my Anne put “on silence”!  And now, at the end of life, when I have no tongue, no voice, when I have nothing but silence, save the sound of the breeze….a terrible hatred for Dr. Richards bloomed in my soul, and I imagined lopping off his suntanned head with a hatchet.  When the address was finished I was so stiff I could hardly move from my seat.  But there was Anne shuffling out of the Liberty Room amid a crowd of children, and I felt it was my chance.

I limped up beside her and said, Hi Anne.

She eyed me nonchalantly.  Want to see what I did today? she said.  I said that I wanted to.  She pulled me into the lunchroom off the corridor and retrieved a square of paper from a pocket in her jumper.  She unfolded the paper.

Look, she said.  Isn’t it swell?  Her crude drawing, done mostly in blunt maroon crayon, appeared to be a kind of goat with antlers.

Wow, I said.

It’s Miss Cook.  She thinks she has discovered me this time, but she hasn’t.  Her bloomers are hanging down and the smoke is coming out of her head.  The trouble is in her and not me.

It’s beautiful, I said.

The little match boy is inside her hat, see?  He makes the smoke come out from her hat.

Yes, I said.  Something swelled deep in my chest: for a frightening second I thought I would cry.  Could I have been her little match boy?  Then she talked for a few minutes, glancing distractedly around the room, about her baby brother Tony, and what a rip he was, and how there was a twelve-year-old girl Anna May who came to take care of Tony, and how her mother never got mad unless another child threw rocks and dirt in Tony’s face, and how her uncle (who gave her ice cream, of which, as a facet of the “silence” punishment, she was currently deprived) carried Tony to town to buy him shoes.  I nodded, enraptured, hoping she wouldn’t stop.

Then she said, Bye.

I looked into her inkdrop pupils, and saw that the left one was larger.

Wait, I said.  With butterflies in my stomach, I dug from my pocket the eight cents I’d been saving out of my weekly allowance.  Borrowing money was forbidden, and Anne was running low after making restitution for a scarf she had cut up.

Here, I said, and placed the humble gift in her grimy outstretched palm.

She closed her fist on the pennies and scurried from the lunchroom, leaving a faint scent—which is now to me but the memory of a scent, flickering in the old grain sack of my brain—an enchanting mixture of urine, laundry soap, and freshly clipped grass.

We met for brief meetings in the yard.  I fawned on Anne, drinking in the sweet attention as she pranced, preened, pawed at the other children, hopped on one leg, interrupted, threw marvelous tantrums until they put her in the Pack.  She told me sad, fantastic tales about her family and friends, some of which were real, some made up: It was far away in Mexico.  There was a man and his wife.  The wife gave some poison to the little child and the little child got sick.  Then the father took the same stuff and gave it to the mother and she died. She said that at home she had three streets of friends, ninety-five boys and ninety-four girls.  Once in the garden she found a small grasshopper and showed it to me.

It’s a baby, she said.  She asked me if I thought she should eat part of it.  I said that I didn’t know.

Look how small and pretty and green it is, she said.

I agreed that it was very pretty.

She said, I’ll let it go and see if I can catch a grown up one—and, to my relief, sagely tossed the insect into a shrub.

She said that when she grew up she wanted to be a midget, and that she would allow me to marry her in a church with the doctor and her uncle in attendance.  She would buy lamps and pictures for our house while I played marbles and games.  Rapt, I listened as she devised elaborate yet perfectly reasonable hierarchies of punishment for our baby, which would be named Edward.  She asked me if I would tickle her bottom, and I said that I guessed I would if she wanted me to.

But what most occupied me in the days following our first exchange in the lunchroom, was the trip to the farm-camp which was less than a week away.  Each summer the children at the Franklin school were taken to an inoperative farm in New Jersey.  It was generally agreed that the outdoors was therapeutic for our condition.  But only those who had, according to the staff, made “progress,” were allowed to go.

For Anne that meant regular bathing; improved sweeping and mopping; better concentration in stitching and arithmetic; no biting or stealing; no spots or dust on her clothes; and most crucially, an auspicious number of “dry nights.” She was allowed no liquids after supper and no highly seasoned foods.  In the current system, the night nurse (a nervous woman who could sometimes be talked into things the normal nurse would never allow) woke up Anne three times during the night for a trip to the toilet.  But even with these wake-ups, there were usually several nocturnal leakages.  The assumption (based on Dr. Richards’ philosophy) was that if Anne wanted to come to the farm, she knew what she needed to do, and would somehow do it.

Following nightmares in which a gnashing, cornered Anne flung a saucepan of boiling beans into the face of Miss Cook, I awoke to the sinking prospect of wallowing stiff-legged in the muddy shore of a leech-infested pond for two weeks in her absence.  Mr. Hyne, lurking on the periphery of our love, continued to observe her and sometimes interview her, making notes on her behavior and dreams.  My vomiting habit returned, and after being put in the Pack for picking a fight with a Greek child named Emile, it seemed that my own admission to the farm-camp was at risk.

Before bedtime, I whispered ardent vows; I said I would do anything.  I said that, if necessary, I would burn down the hospital school for her, so that we could escape together on a train.

She impressed everybody.  It rained, and Anne led the girls in setting up a little tea-party in the hallway, with boxes as tables and milk (as “tea”) poured into paper cups.  Miss Cook watched approvingly, and Mr. Hyne smiled and stroked Anne’s hair.  She even earned a reading certificate from the Free Library of Philadelphia, which lent books to the school—her favorites were The Tale of a Monkey on a Stick and The Little Hunchback Zia.  The twenty or so of us approved to go to the farm were taken on a shopping trip for supplies, and each child packed his things neatly in a suitcase.

We went by bus from the local station, which was crowded with families leaving for their summer vacations.  One of these, a mother and father and two gangly, suntanned girls carrying an assortment of luggage, stopped to watch us as Miss Cook directed us onto the bus.  They talked under their breath, but you could hear them.

Look, said one of the girls.  He’s cock-eyed.

Ssh, girls, said the mother.

What’s wrong with them?

I think they’re crazy, said the other girl.

Ssh, Susan!

I took a seat near the back and looked at them through the window.  They were still standing there, all four watching us, as the bus pulled away.

The farm was situated on a secluded, wooded hillside in the country.  We were put on a summer schedule.  The boys and the girls lived in separate cabins.  We took our meals together in the community building, a long one-story structure made from logs.  During the day, the boys dammed up a creek that ran through the farm, to make a swimming hole.  Miss Cook supervised from the grass, making sure no one swung on the tree-limbs and snapped them.  The girls tended a garden of tomatoes, summer squash, and peas.  Races and contests were tried but discontinued due to unfairness, since some of us had been more damaged than others by the fever.  Instead we were taken for nature-walks and taught how to cook an egg using tinfoil.  Mr. Hyne commuted once a week from the city.

The one place we were forbidden from going was a big disused barn behind the community building.  We were told the barn was a fire hazard, and dangerous—it had poisonous snakes and nails which, if stepped on, would cause lockjaw and possibly death.  Anyone caught snooping there would be immediately sent back to the Franklin and placed on silence.  Naturally the barn became the object of some curiosity.  One afternoon there was a rumor that a boy named Hans, who had asthma and walked with crutches, had obtained some dirty pictures through an older brother in New York, and was going to show them in the barn.  But when I and two others, that evening before supper, snuck around the back of the community building and into the barn’s high crooked doorway, there was no Hans to be found.  (He later claimed the pictures had been discovered and taken away by Mr. Hyne, and that his brother had promised to send replacements.)

Nevertheless, the barn increasingly occupied my daydreams.  It loomed grey and secret in the wild uncut grass.  I watched it in the morning and at dusk, and it seemed to watch me back, as if it concealed some grave mystery.  Thinking about the barn made me queasy in the stomach, and after lights-out I lay awake, formulating a vague plan.  Vivid, unreal pictures formed and dissolved in the darkness of my brain.  Perhaps I felt some dim, urgent chance slipping away.  I must have understood that our time at the Franklin was limited, that some of us were approaching the age-limit of thirteen.  This will help you to go home if you want to, and also to become happy.  No one knew exactly where we would be sent when the time came.

In any case, this is how I remember it happening: I sat up in my lower bunk, put on my socks and shoes, and silently walked out of the sleeping cabin.  I have no idea what time it was.  My mind was as blank as the moon as I walked across the grass to the girls’ cabin and opened the unlocked door.  Perhaps in that perfect, certain emptiness I sensed what the interminable future would be like; or perhaps I was sleepwalking, suspended in my own dream like the numb, speechless moon, floating like a ghost over the grass.

I didn’t say a word, and I didn’t touch her—I just stood over her bed and looked down at her.  Without seeing me, she kicked her feet a little, emitted a weak grunt, and rolled out of bed.  She started toward the bathroom, and I moved to touch her on the shoulder: she lurched, turning toward me in horror, as if I were someone she half-recognized.  A few of the other girls stirred in their moon-dappled beds.  The cabin was stuffy and warm.

She squinted at me.  Oh, she said.  She licked her lips and rubbed her bleary eyes, emitting a powdery, beddish smell.

It’s me.

She frowned, glanced around the room.

She whispered, There was a star shining around my room so no one could come and get me.  So the nurse couldn’t wake me up again.

Her restless, hot hand found mine and gripped it tight.  She allowed me to lead her through the doorway of the cabin and out onto the damp grass.  Cicadas thrummed in the trees and crickets scissored their legs in the humid air.  The moon was yellowish, egglike, ringed by a soft blur.  I limped toward the barn, holding her hand with my good one.  We might have been two somnambulists, but that my heart beat so fast, like a hot animal scrabbling in a cage of ribs.

It was black inside the barn, suffused with the dusty, ammoniac reek of old hay.

There’s a loft up there, I said.  I groped for the ladder.

At home, she said in the dark, my grandmother lives upstairs in two rooms and a kitchen.  My father plays his toot for her.  She brings my baby brother upstairs and gives him soup and candy.

Shh, I said.

It can be our house, she said.  If we get hungry we can find some bread to eat.

I don’t think there’s bread up there.

If they hear us and come upstairs, we will be asleep, like bears.  Like foxes.  My mother read me about a little girl who was eaten by a big, big bear.  In thenewspaper.

I felt her milky breath, the whispered “s” and the quick little plosives, near my face.

In the pitch dark of my mind, as I stand here in a moonless night, I see the vague forms, like shadows, of two children of the sleeping sickness climbing a steep, rickety ladder.  We were far from home.  Someone a long time ago had snuck in the window and stolen a piece of our brains.  We were intolerable to the community.  Our families didn’t know us.  With strange limbs and obscure feelings we made our way up through the swooning, unsafe darkness to the platform, which smelled of pine.

Densely clustered stars speckled a crooked patch of night where part of the roof had fallen through.  The only sound in the loft was our breathing, and the squeak and throb of our blood.  Anne stood in her pale green nightgown, picking at something on her elbow.

When I was little, she said, Anna May said babies came from skeletons.  She said the mother died, and then you buried her, and then they took the bones and made them into a baby.  But Anna May was lying.  I said, ‘That’s a fairy-story.  I know that’s not where babies come from.’ Did you think you came from a skeleton?

Her fingers grazed my stiffened arm.

I’m not sure, I said.  I don’t think so.

I wandered around the dim loft, poking at things and rummaging.  My leg knocked a shovel leaning against the wall, and when I crouched down to pick it up I found a rusty can.  I pried at the jammed lid with my fingernails.  When it came free, the odor of chemocraft chilled me with an image of the little girl trapped on the burning boat, her long hair catching flame, and the warm wet sheet of the Pack against my skin, and the gangly girls at the bus-station:

What’s wrong with them?

 

Look.  He’s cock-eyed.

My faced burned.  I picked up the shovel and looked to where Anne was standing.

What is that? she said.

It’s a shovel.

What are you going to do with it?

I’ll make a little fire, I said.  So we can see.

I must have whispered too softly for Anne to hear.  She said nothing.  Perhaps I only spoke in my head.

Do you want to see something?

I drizzled some chemocraft into the scoop of the shovel; she undid a button of her gown and showed me a nipple.  The powerful whiff of chemocraft and the rich animal smell of strawdust and mud, along with the sight of the small nipple, a dark-blue spot in the shadows, made me dizzy, and I cupped my head in my hands.  As the blood returned to my brain, I fumbled in my pockets for a match.

I wanted to tell her about the girl on the boat—how she wasn’t real, that she was only trapped in my dream, screaming in a locked cabin as we chewed our tunafish.  Or what my mother’s face looked like the first time I woke up to find her gazing down at me as if I were someone she didn’t know.

I dropped the match: a little explosion leapt in the shovel.  The chemocraft popped and sputtered like roasted corn.  Little clumps of straw lying on the floor singed, lit, and smoldered.

She said, Now we’re going to play.

I stared into the blooming points of fire, their underbellies oozing like soft bluish slugs.

You’re going to be the father, and I’m the baby.  I have to do whatever you say.  If I’m bad you have to stand me on my knees.  Now say, ‘Baby, you lay down.’

Licks of fire snaked up the warped and knotted boards, casting our huge, trembling shadows on the floor.

Inexplicably, I giggled out loud, frightening myself with the shrill sound, and wet my pants.  I immediately shut up.  I felt the warm, damp patch spread across my thighs.

Say ‘Baby, you lay down.’

Okay, I said.  Baby, you lay down.

Once prostrate on the floor in her greenish nightgown, arms straight at her sides, I could see the dirty, almost black soles of her bare feet.  Lying there in the firelight she looked abnormally tall—and now, watching myself look at her, I see her as a grown-up woman, long after the hospital school had washed its hands of her, discharged her back to her family or the halfway-house or maybe, doubtfully, a foster home.  No more wake-ups from the night nurse.  No more stitching and tea-parties and efficient weekly checklists: General Physical Health; Schoolwork; Occupational Work; Household Activity.  I see an older woman in the streets of some tidy Pennsylvania town with a courthouse and main street and alleyways, washing dishes or mopping floors or sitting, if she couldn’t do that, on a park bench.  Her parents dead, or hiding away their last days in the cottage somewhere in Maine.  Touching people and herself, stealing lipstick and trinkets—When others are disturbed you cannot be happy yourself.  Wandering into the road in a fancy soiled frock, sucking her thumb; eyeing the strangers in the cars as they pass by with rolled-down windows.  Hey baby.  Hey dollface.

If I’m very, very bad you have to…..

What? I said.

Lick me where I pee, said Anne’s voice.

She sounded like she might cry.  I remembered the smell of strawberry ice-cream set before me, just before the onset of a violent sleep, and thought,Something is about to happen.

The gathering conflagration threw into harsh relief the deeply shadowed corners of the loft—and in one of these, behind Anne, I thought I glimpsed someone.  It might have been Anne’s mother, come to scare her back to sleep; or the doctor come back to punish me for being out of bed; or Mr. Hyne, the psychologist, who believed he knew our deepest secrets—crouching, looking at us through the twists of bitter smoke.

I knelt down by Anne.  My body was sweating from the close heat, and hard bits of straw impressed themselves into my knees.  It seems strange that in the midst of that fire, I was freezing up inside, in my bones.  You have been sick, but practically none of you are sick now…..

Her fingers were like soft wax.  I spoke in her ear:

Did you tell him about your dreams?

Who?

Him, I said, pointing toward a dark nest of shadows.

He won’t tell, she said, her eyes closed, as the loft around us brightened, spat and sizzled, raining down soft glowing splinters, sending up black, curling flakes toward the gaping star-hole in the ceiling.

I moved to pick up the shovel, with its brimming scoop of chemical fire.  The weight in my hands seemed to moor me against a drift more powerful than my body or mind.

Anne, I said, as the form emerged from the shadows, its spectacles two moons of reflected fire, each cold rim encircling a miniature apparition of Anne and me, superimposed against a wall of light.  He looked down at us as if we were only half-there, or were already gone, collections of dream-fragments in his file.

*

Perhaps this is the same patch we kept when I was a baby, and I am not able to recognize it.  I watch the moonlight which changes the color of the plants.  The months pass in through the back of my head, under the brim of my cap, and out through my nose and teeth and eyes.  If I told you I had been on this stick forever, that would be a lie.  And yet my life is but a few moments.

I cannot fall asleep in this patch of mummy-peas, because I have never woken up from the long dream of my childhood.  My mouth is stuffed with a lump of coal.  For me, that is the taste of eternity.

But look!  Here are the lightly soiled frills of the dresses worn by the girls whose boyfriends lead them into the pea-patch by moonlight.  A rustling, a soft laughter.  A bit of colored frock glowing in the corner of my eye.  A bit of sundered shoelace.  A glowing ember.  I cannot turn my head to look, for my neck is a stiff stake.  The air is cool at night, and the soil moist, under an open sky, when the flesh of the peas is tender and sweet and nestled snugly in a lightly downèd pod.

O, to taste the moist, muted sweetness of a sweet, early pea!  The heels of the boots tied with string to my legs nearly knock together at the notion.  But these pods have been given over to pests.  I feel only a thin ache, as weak as the brittle straw that pokes against a flap of grey cloth.

Or the echoes of old voices stirring in my ears, which are the stems of pumpkins.

I am alone in these peas.