EIGHT
JEREMY SAT UNDER his favorite oak by the fence in the free area and tried to think about Romulan starship engines. Last night on Star Trek Counselor Troi—would he love to tie her to a chair and—had talked about how the Romulans used a “quantum singularity” to power their warp drives. He had read about singularities on the macro level—pluck her hair out one at a time—but he’d never heard of a singularity on a quantum scale. Jeremy leaned forward and clutched his head as if his skull would fly apart. A copy of Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman slid out of his lap in a puff of dust. He tried hard to keep it together, but the horrible—and make her swallow each hair until she was bald and puking—thoughts kept pushing in. It had been getting worse over the past few days, since the episode with those sicko internet sites. He was beginning to believe that he was losing his mind.
Something beeped next to his head. Jeremy jerked his hands away. The beep was his thumb on the “END” button of his cell phone. He stared at it. Had he just called someone? This kind of thing was also happening more often. He’d find himself in some part of the house and not remember why he was there. He’d be doing his homework and realize it was written in a mish-mash of English, French, Latin—never in his own handwriting. Sometimes there were pictographs he couldn’t identify. He thought they might be Chinese. Last night he had awoken to find himself sitting lotus position in front of his father’s den at just past four in the morning.
Now, as he sat in the shade of his favorite tree, he squeezed his eyes shut. In the darkness Jeremy panicked as quietly as he could. If he was silent in his terror maybe the madness wouldn’t be able to find him, like a game of hide and seek. Only, the seeker seemed to be skulking around in his mind.
A pair of shoes settled on the grass in front of him.
“Hi, Jeremy.”
Jeremy looked up at the new kid, Seung. He tried to smile and was about to say something witty like You need me to kick somebody’s butt for you again? but the words froze just behind his forehead. He could feel something in there squirm, and then he heard himself say in a voice that was not quite his own, “You ever wonder what it would be like...” to bugger a woman while she vomited her own hair, Seung?
Seung’s eyes dimmed. “What what would be like?”
“Pluck em’ out one at a time.”
Seung took a step back. “You okay, man? You’re acting really weird.”
The world strobed once, like the sun was a giant flash bulb, and Jeremy flowed back into himself. He shook his head and got up fast. “I’m cool,” he blurted, brushing off his khakis. “Think I’ve got a fever or something. You know that flu going around.”
The bell signaled return to class. “Yeah, really bad this year,” Seung lied. He hadn’t heard about any flu. Uniformed boys drifted toward the school building in cellular clumps. Seung started walking.
“Seung?”
Seung half turned, “Yeah?”
Jeremy looked at Seung, his face growing hot, his eyes burning. Help was all he could think of, he wanted to scream it, but the thing in his head started to roll over, an eel in his mind, an eel with teeth. “Nothing. See you inside.”
“‘Kay, man,” Seung said, and trotted away. As he moved closer to the school, he could feel Jeremy staring at his back, boring holes through his blazer. Maybe he should stop and go back. Jeremy had come to Seung’s aid when those other boys had tried to mess with him. Seung hadn’t needed the help, of course, but that wasn’t the point. He liked Jeremy, and something was wrong with him. He was sick, or...or something. Seung was the last boy at the door. He put a hand on the push bar and craned a look over his shoulder. The oak tree stood alone in the yard, a discarded book at its roots.
On the other side of the fence a taxi pulled up and Jeremy got in. He grunted to the driver and they drove off with a screech of melting tires.
SEVERAL MINUTES LATER, a man in his mid-fifties, home from work on his lunch break, answered a knock at his front door. Harry Braithwaite’s eyebrows lifted off as he found a young white boy in one of those fancy private school uniforms on the stoop. The boy smiled. Harry’s forehead wrinkled, but he smiled back and cast a look over the boy’s shoulder to the cab purring at the curb. He looked up and down the street. His neighborhood wasn’t all that safe a place for white folks at any time of day (not for black folks neither, God’s honest), certainly not a rich kid like this. “Help you, son?”
“Your daughter works for my father.”
Harry’s brow lifted further. “That so?”
“At his restaurant.”
Harry’s smile increased, gleaming and wide. “You know Tiesha?”
“My father considers it part of the tip when he cums in her mouth, black man.”
Harry’s lips lowered over his teeth. His fingers tightened on the doorjamb. The wood creaked. He couldn’t have heard right. Was this some kind of goddamned joke? The boy beamed up at him and hopped backward off the top step, belching low and guttural as he landed. He hopped back to the next step, letting out another burp. Harry’s rage crested and he took a step out of his front door into a cloud of rotten meat and feces. Harry gagged and stopped as if he’d run into a wall. The boy’s brow drew down, he lifted his palm to his lips and blew Harry a kiss. Harry retched and stumbled back into his house, slamming the door after him.
Harry leaned against the door, his heart trip-hammering. It felt like he’d been poisoned, listening to what that crazy boy had said. And that breath! God almighty, like gas from an exploded road kill in July. Something was so far from right with that kid he could hardly believe it. Something beyond just body sick. He scrunched up his nose and exhaled hard to clear it. He held his breath a minute, listening. Through the door, Harry could hear a car door thunk shut and the cab roar away. He let his breath out in a, “Shoosh!”
For a moment he just stood in his small, neat foyer and wondered just how he should react in a situation like this. His mother’s antique mahogany coat rack gleamed like a frozen molasses fountain in the low light. The floor creaked under his weight as he shifted from one foot to the other. There was something obviously wrong with the boy. He knew that as well as he knew rain hurt his knees. Harry figured he should probably take a boy like that to the hospital, but for the cab already driving off. At the end of it all, he couldn’t even be angry about what the kid had said. You didn’t blame sick people for their disease. It just wasn’t Christian.
Maybe if the boy did know his Tiesha, he could give her a call and find out if he was being taken care of. Maybe the boy was retarded or panic depressive, or whatever. Harry shook his head and walked back to the kitchen to get his lunch. He wasn’t much on eating now, but he still had the hard half of the day left over and not eating would just make it that much harder a few hours from now.
He got through his lunch and most of that day’s crossword in the paper. Half an hour later, Harry padded back to the door and grabbed his coat off the hook. He gripped the doorknob and burped, egg salad and lite beer. A little ripe, but nothing like that kid. What a stink. “Shew,” he whispered under his breath. Harry shook his head and opened the door.
The boy stood there, smiling.
Harry grabbed his chest.
“Part of the tip, black man,” he rasped through a broken, harmonized throat. The boy’s nose suddenly erupted, hemorrhaging over his teeth and down the front of his shirt. He giggled wildly, as if something had broken loose in his mind, the blood bubbling and flying from his lips. And just as suddenly, his eyes rolled up white and he collapsed on the stoop at Harry’s feet.
Harry Braithwaite, father of three grown children, thought nothing of what the boy had said about his youngest, or possible infection, or law suit. He gathered Jeremy in his arms, ruining his best shirt, and raced into the house to call the paramedics. From the smell—old, strong rot and something sharp, chemical—and the blood, it was like carrying a dead body. A warm one.
Harry lay the boy on his sofa, the ichor from his nose spreading into the fabric. He grabbed a lap blanket from the back of his reading chair and spread it over Jeremy, using his right hand to staunch the bleeding. With his left, Harry reached for the phone on its stand by the chair when the theme for Star Trek: Next Generation wafted tiny and electronic from the boy’s blazer.
Harry reached into the blazer and pulled out the phone. Tiesha was always trying to get him to buy one of these things, but he hated them. He said, “Help me? Hello? The boy...,” but the phone continued to ring. Harry pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at the confusion of buttons and keys. He mashed a callused thumb down on the largest button—an oval stamped with an old style handset icon—and the phone went silent, but the face and screen remained illuminated. Harry read the words Mr. Horton and a phone number in digital type on the little TV looking thing.
The phone said, “Jeremy?”
Harry smashed the phone into his head so hard he nearly boxed his own ear. “I don’ know who this is, but the boy’s in bad shape. He’s bleeding and out cold and I’m...” Without a pause, Harry dropped the cell phone and reached over for his good old rotary dial. He dialed 911 and blurted that he needed an ambulance at his address right away.
FROM WHAT MIGHT as well have been a million miles away, Horton listened to a strange man talk on another telephone to the 911 operator. All he knew was that Jeremy had gotten away from him at school and was now in some kind of physical distress. Bleeding. Horton sat in the driver’s seat of the Lincoln, its engine humming in the parking lot of the Ottawa Day School, and told himself that if he didn’t remain calm he would kick his own ass. He’d chosen a fine time to take a dump earlier and had lost the kid. Now his charge, his boy, Jeremy, was bleeding somewhere. If it wasn’t already too late, he might still have a chance to get control of the situation. He breathed, he listened.
The man gave his address to the 911 operator. Horton stopped breathing. The man repeated his address for the operator. Horton exhaled, moved the Lincoln into traffic and shoved his foot down on the accelerator. The Lincoln’s modified twelve-cylinder heart roared and pulled Horton along behind it. He maneuvered the big sedan through traffic like a boat through rock strewn rapids, one hand on the wheel, the other pressing the cell phone to his gleaming head. He drove, he waited, he listened to the man who had Jeremy thank the 911 operator and hang up. A VW Bug cut Horton off. He swerved into oncoming traffic and slipped back in front of the Bug just before meeting a sanitation truck head on. The driver of the trash truck had mouthed Holy Shi-. Horton glanced into the rear view, caught the license number of the Bug, translated the reverse in his mind, glanced at the driver and embedded her face in his head. For. Fucking. Ever.
The strange man came back on the cell. “You still there?”
“How’s the boy?” Horton said, his voice still, deep water.
“His nose was bleedin’ somethin’ fierce a second ago, but it looks like it’s done now. He’s still out, though.”
“Who is this?” Horton asked. This man could be anyone, could want anything. Horton was closing in on the man’s street. He took a hard corner at speed, thankful for the big car’s weight and the expensive custom suspension job he had convinced Mr. Mason to authorize. A regular Lincoln would have rolled in a turn like that.
“Who’s this?” Harry asked.
“The boy’s uncle.” Bodyguard said money. You didn’t say money to a possible kidnapper.
Harry breathed a sigh and apologized. He blurted everything he knew from the first moment he opened the door and found Jeremy on his stoop to where events now stood.
“Mr. Braithwaite, I want you to wait for me there, if you would please.”
“But the ambulance—”
“Won’t get there before I do.”
“Where are you?”
“About three blocks away if I heard you correctly. You told the 911 operator Superior Street, am I right?”
“You got sharp ears.”
“Please just stay put. I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Sure I’ll wait. You want to drive the boy yourself, then?”
“No...I—FUCK OUTTA OF THE WAY!”
Harry yanked the phone away from his ear for a moment. “Hello?”
“Sorry, Mr. Braithwaite. I’m driving very quickly and someone...doesn’t matter. I do want the boy to go with the paramedics, but I would also like a word with you.”
Harry glanced at Jeremy, apparently just asleep on the couch, a little worse for ware, but he looked all right now. The smell seemed to have dissipated as well. Good thing he’d left the front door open. The boy’s eyes were moving behind his lids, lively grapes. Part of the tip. “Yeah, I’d like a word with you as well,” Harry said.
A shadow fell across the boy. Harry spun around. One of the biggest white men he’d ever seen filled the front door. With his perfect bald head and sun glasses he looked like a skull floating above a three piece suit; a sleek Dia de los Muertos costume from some Mexican daydream. A siren wailed from down the street and tires screeched on a corner. Horton crossed the room and was kneeling beside Jeremy in two great steps. Without looking up at Harry he said, “We’ll talk at the hospital.”
* * *