Chapter 8
An innocent question ("Mom, do you think maybe I can go live with grandma in Texas for a while?") had turned into an improvised family meeting, which usually meant it wasn't far from devolving further, into an interrogation. Not that it would be a malicious interrogation. Nobody would get beaten with a wrench or have his family shipped off to Siberia—this wasn't Cold War-era Moscow—but, then again, what did Paulie know about the Soviet Union? His knowledge of interrogations was limited to the third season of Game of Thrones. Hence, even interrogations that would have made Stalin chuckle made Paulie distinctly uncomfortable.
Not to mention that the questioning was taking place awkwardly on the living room stairs, with Paulie trapped between his grim-faced dad, looking up, and his worried mum, looking down.
"I knew something was wrong," she said. "A mother always knows these things. I wish you would have come to us sooner. Your father and I, we want to help. We really, really do."
"Is it bullies?" his dad asked. He held a rolled up newspaper in one hand and a glass of orange juice in the other. Paulie ventured a guess that he had just finished reading about some bullying incident in Newfoundland or New York State. "Because if it's bullies, there are things we can do. You shouldn't feel pressured to leave just because other kids are being cruel. You're not the one contributing to a poisoned school environment. They're the poison."
It wasn't bullies. It was Dr Mizoguchi—the things he'd said and, more than that, the way he'd said them, with a gleam in his eye and razor sharpness to his tongue. "Yes," Paulie said, "it's bullies."
His mum descended several steps.
"What have they done to you? My, gosh. They haven't touched you, have they? Has it been physical? You'd tell us if it was physical, wouldn't you? It's just been name calling and that kind of bullying. Have they been taking your lunch money?"
When she was close enough, she hugged him. Paulie didn't mind the hug. It helped him pretend their life experiences weren't actually miles apart.
"It's because you're small. I always knew it," his dad said. Paulie didn't feel small. He considered himself average size for his age. "Obviously these other kids haven't the faintest idea about the great achievements of the small people in history. Napoleon carried the ideals of the French Revolution. Frodo Baggins saved Middle Earth. How big were they? They were your size, or smaller. Gollum, too. All played their parts."
Ever since running home from the Mizoguchi house, Paulie had encountered a rising sense of dread wherever he looked and whatever he did. The only thing that provided him with any respite was drowning, but he couldn't drown forever, could he?
"It's because of the thing with the lake," Paulie said.
"The other children are teasing you because of that? They quite obviously don't know what this family went through," his mum said.
"Bullying," his dad corrected her, "not teasing."
"Is there a difference?"
"Of course."
"But he said they didn't touch him."
"There's still a difference."
Talking about him, they were talking through him. Paulie sat down on the steps and rubbed his head with his hands. "It would be temporary. I don't want to move to Texas for the rest of my life."
His parents stopped discussing the interplay of teasing and bullying. "You can't just move the U.S.," his mum said, "even if you wanted to. Not without a visa."
"Especially since nine eleven," his dad said.
"Maybe we could arrange for you to visit your grandma for a few weeks during the summer."
"But anything else is out of the question."
"It's January," Paulie said. "Summer's still a long way off."
"What you need to do is stand up to those cowards," his dad said. "Running away from them won't solve anything. The only direction to run is towards Mordor, not away from it."
So it was hopeless. Paulie could live in fear, take a Greyhound over the border, or he could take George's advice about the whole thing and forget he was special—but how could he ever forget the fantastic landscapes he'd seen, the theories Dr Mizoguchi had told him, and the trips the combination of both took his mind on each time he closed his eyes to go to sleep.
Afterwards, he'd wake up in a cold sweat, confused about where he was and what was happening. He'd gasp for air, automatically aiming for the surface of the water he wasn't under. Sometimes he'd yell out. And in the mornings, having aborted sleep half a dozen times, he'd be sore and tired and waiting for the first opportunity to quit the world and drown.
In the days that followed Paulie's meeting at Akira's house, Dr Mizoguchi started leaving him messages, first on the phone ("Paulie, it's Akira's dad. He says you forgot something at the house and that you should come pick it up and stay for dinner," his mum would say after picking up the phone, then she'd check to see if Paulie's dad was around. If he wasn't, she'd flirt with Dr Mizoguchi for a while before hanging up.) and later on paper, in neat handwritten notes stuck to the outside of Paulie's bedroom window or slid inside his locker at school. The content of these was terse: "Must meet", "Vital, you know what", "Ignorance is death", "It is coming for you." The last two freaked Akira out the most because they reinforced the sense of impending doom that he felt and that he was trying desperately to convince himself was all in his head.
Yet despite Dr Mizoguchi's persistence, and despite Paulie seeing his thin Japanese silhouette behind every shadow the sun happened to cast his way, Dr Mizoguchi never made direct contact. He never accosted Paulie outside of school. He never knocked on Paulie's front door. Paulie assumed it was for the same reason that Dr Mizoguchi never communicated over the internet, either: the existence of spies, whom Paulie usually imagined as an international cabal of black-suited NSA types and pale-skinned l33t hackers gone over to the dark side.
When George came over to his house, Paulie locked himself in his room and pressed his ear to the bedroom door to listen to George's conversations with his mum. She would ask mostly about her son being bullied and George would say, "That's the first I've heard of it, but if someone lays a finger on him, I'll lay my fist on his face."
Pinder came sometimes too, which was weird. Usually Pinder just sent instant messages or an email, or shared tweeted pictures of cats saying things like, "What? Is got your tongue?". All of these Paulie left unanswered. He also deleted his Twitter account and religiously cleared his chat logs after every message, just in case. Who knew what was bugged and what wasn't. His Facebook account was a tougher beast to kill. It stayed active. As for Akira, Paulie considered him his father's tool, a set of obedient hands that baked cookies and were possibly capable of much, much worse.
That still left interactions with people at school, but Paulie kept those to a minimum. He cut class a lot. When he did go, he was always the quiet guy who sat at the back. The most any teacher could get out of him was an "I don't know. I didn't do the homework." They could do nothing with that. Therefore, they simply noted his lack of participation in their grade books and pestered other students instead.
Between classes, Paulie hid in the bathroom stalls, sneaked into the boiler room, or camped out under the bleachers on the girl's football field, the one the school board didn't care about. It was a cold place, but Paulie preferred the company of his own mind and the bitter wind to the company of his friends. He was sick of their concern, which sometimes sounded no more genuine than Dr Mizoguchi's nonchalant inquiry into the state of his tooth. He didn't suspect George or Pinder of anything nefarious, but at best they were a hassle and a distraction where frostbite was a more pleasantly passive worry. Tender earlobes healed themselves.
He existed this way for weeks.
His parents gave up trying to pry information out of him and settled on the useful narrative that he'd fallen in love, been publicly humiliated by his cruel object of affection, and that that was what had started the bullying. "The other kids are probably making fun of his broken heart, but he's
not going to talk to us about girls," his dad said. "Hobbit business is hobbit business, so unless you're Gandalf the Grey, you best leave it alone and let it sort itself out."
"I don't know," his mum said. "We could find him somebody, a nice girl who doesn't wear makeup, to hold his hand and blush when he whispers into her ear how pretty she is. Just like you found me. What do boys these days like in a girl?"
"The same thing they've always liked," his dad said. Then he lowered his voice, though not far enough. "Big melons."
His mum squealed, and the pair of them giggled all the way up the stairs to their bedroom, where they slammed the door shut with the obvious intention of attempting to make a baby George again.
Paulie put on his headphones.
He was glad his parents had each other. They were normal and they were still in love. For them, life would never be the unfathomable individual exercise in perseverance that it had become for him. His parents would never feel solitary. Indeed, he doubted they even remembered the those days. And if they were successful in making their baby, their family life would go on too. As Paulie saw it, he was a welcome—but not intrinsic—part of their lives, and they of his. They smiled to him, they cared, they provided him with food and shelter. He helped out with the chores. If he disappeared, they'd be sad for a while, but their sadness would end, and the money they saved by not spending it on him they could put to better use for themselves or for the child they were now trying to conceive.
In that frame of mind, Paulie decided to vanish.
It would be better for everyone. Most of all, it would be better for him.
Because he was already in the process of gradually extricating himself from his school life—would a teacher miss a student who never spoke?—and the lives of his friends, he decided to adopt the same tactic at home. An abrupt change would trip his parents' silent alarm. It was better to tread carefully over creaky floors.
This boiled down to coming home later after school. The final bell would ring, and Paulie would escape to his spot under the bleachers, where he planned the route he would take and the life he would lead once he left town forever. He fantasised about getting a part-time job and renting a small cabin somewhere in the woods, far from the city. It wouldn't be in the United States any more. Texas was off the table. His flight would now be to the west or north now, perhaps to the remote areas of British Columbia or the Yukon.
When he did get home, his parents usually didn't notice that it was later than it had been yesterday, and later still than on the day before yesterday. On the few occasions they did ask where he'd been, he had an answer ready: "I was playing intramural volleyball" or "I decided to join the school paper." These types of answers were twice useful. Not only were they acceptable alibis, but they also lowered his parents' vigilance. If he was getting involved in activities, it could only mean that his heartache and bully problems were easing. Calmed, his parents retreated nightly to their love nest.
As for Dr Mizoguchi's notes, they continued to arrive in the usual places with the usual frequency, but Paulie simply ignored them. He took them off his bedroom window without reading them, and he let them pile up in his locker like a bunch of losing lottery tickets in a wallet. For all he knew, the notes were blank or contained the secret to making money on the stock market.
At six forty-three on a gloomy overcast Tuesday evening under the girls' football field bleachers, as Paulie braved the blistering wind, busying himself choosing the routes he'd take travelling through Alberta and imagining the dazzling visions he'd experience once he was free to spend all his spare time drowning, one of Dr Mizoguchi's notes that Paulie had read came true.
It came.