Chuck began visiting Dr. Finkelstein on both Mondays and Thursdays. His mom said she was having concerns about his psychology. (That was a big word for his personality: his psychology.) The doctor kept rubbing his forehead, his three red sunspots. He wondered what Todd Rosenthal could have done to Chuck. Why had Chuck gotten angry enough to break his leg?
Chuck took out a note card and wrote his answer down. Who told you I broke his leg, because I didn’t.
“But why did you push the boy off the tower?”
He did something bad, Chuck began, then crossed it out. He tore something of mine apart and hurt its feelings.
“But only people have feelings,” Dr. Finkelstein said, “not objects.”
This was the most ridiculous thing Chuck had ever heard. Objects were quieter than people, maybe, but no less sensitive. The one big difference was that objects could not move. They weren’t able to fake their feelings or hide them. It was people who could lie, people who could pretend. People could laugh like friends and then beat you up. People could say they were your dad and hit you. Sometimes the faces of people seemed unreal to Chuck, inhuman. They were like masks they wore over their real faces. Masks to show how old or how young they were. Masks to show how healthy or how sick they were. People could cry out of sadness or happiness or anger. But then they could smile for the exact same reasons. The strangeness of people went on and on and on. Objects, on the other hand, were mostly simple and good. Chuck was always kind to them—it was a rule. They needed his help to make it in the world. They had no one else to look out for them. That was why he was so upset about the book. He had tried fixing it and had let it down. It gave off more light now than it had before. Why, then, had he taken it at all, he wondered? He was no more than a thief and a kidnapper. The book would be better off with anyone but him. He might as well give it away to a stranger.
A week into his suspension, someone knocked on the door. Chuck was not supposed to answer it, but he did. A tall man in church clothes stood on the porch. He stooped over the way that grown-ups without kids do. “Why, hello there,” he said, his hands on his knees. “Can you tell me if your parents are at home?”
Chuck shook his head no and began shutting the door.
“Wait,” the man said, and reached into his leather satchel. “Will you give them this flyer when you see them?” He passed Chuck a slip of paper, yellow like butter. The paper read, “For the Lord God will illumine them.” Beneath that was the name and address of a church. And beneath that was a cross surrounded by tiny lines. And beneath that were Chuck’s fingers reaching from his hand. And beneath that was his hand sticking from his sleeve. He was reading the flyer when he had an idea. He held up his palms to say, Wait right here. Then he went to his bedroom and got the diary. He came running back across the living room with it. He turned it over to the man in the suit.
Aloud, the man wondered, “What’s this you have for me?” He looked slightly confused, but fanned through the book’s pages. He tried to return it, smiling encouragingly, his hand outstretched. Chuck backed away, and the man’s smile tightened in confusion. He was about to speak when Chuck shut the door.
The man wasted a few minutes knocking and shouting hello. The doorbell rang nine times, though Chuck imagined a tenth. Finally the noise fell away, and he looked outside again. There was only the empty porch and a fraying spiderweb. The man must have moved on to the next house. Chuck had been worried he would leave the book behind. But, his worries aside, it was no longer there. It wasn’t on the doormat, wasn’t poking from the mailbox. It wasn’t leaning against the stairs or the brick wall. Obviously, he had given up and taken it with him. Chuck hoped that he would give it a loving home.
It was a Thursday, which meant one thing: Dr. Finkelstein. Chuck’s appointment was supposed to last from four to five. His pretend dad had to drive him to the office. “I’m missing two hours’ pay for this crap,” he complained. “That’s two hours of food coming straight from our refrigerator. Two hours of working lights, two hours of running water. Two hours of goddamned gasoline for the goddamned Plymouth Reliant.” He kept honking the horn and shouting “Jerk!” at people.
The doctor was still in another session when they arrived. They lived in the waiting room for a few minutes. Both of them sat down, Chuck and his pretend dad. Chuck skimmed a news magazine he found on the table. Someone, a Chinese soldier, had been shot in the head. Light was gushing from his temple in a sideways fountain. Some children were starving, their stomachs glimmering like crystal balls. Their pain had made them simple, honest, candid, like objects. Chuck had seen it happen many times in his life.
A patient came out, and Dr. Finkelstein called Chuck’s name. He asked Chuck to join him in his office, please. A surprise was waiting on top of the doctor’s desk. He had gotten one of those clacking metal desk toys. It looked exactly like the one Ms. Derryberry had owned.
The doctor set it in motion, and Chuck immediately relaxed. The V-shaped threads rocked back and forth, back and forth. Again and again the silver balls fell tapping into place. The sound filled Chuck with a gentle, swaying, hammocky feeling. “A neat little gadget, this, isn’t it?” Dr. Finkelstein said. He cracked his knuckles and continued. “So let’s get started. On Monday we were talking about your chores at home. Will you write down your least favorite chore for me?”
The only one I really hate is cleaning the tub.
“The tub!” Dr. Finkelstein said, rolling his eyes in exasperation. “Yes, there’s nothing worse than having to clean the tub. Is there anything else you dislike about living at home?”
When my pretend dad yells at me or my mom.
The doctor’s face became animated as he read the note. He was interested, but he tried to pretend he wasn’t. Unless he was only pretending to be pretending he wasn’t. Sometimes people played elaborate games to hide their true feelings. The doctor jotted something down on his pad of paper. “Your pretend dad?” he prompted, reaching for the desk toy. He pinched hold of one of the hanging metal balls. When he let it go, the toy rediscovered its rhythm.
Chuck explained the difference between real dads and pretend dads. He wrote down some of the clues he had uncovered. How real dads never filled the house with their shouting. How they didn’t twist the hair on their sons’ necks. How they ate dinner without flicking their food at anyone. How they didn’t secretly wish that their sons were dead. Or not dead, exactly, but that they’d never been born. Chuck filled card after card explaining things to Dr. Finkelstein. Most dads were real dads, but Chuck’s dad was pretend. The clues, though small, all came together to prove it. The doctor kept reaching for the toy and restarting it. Before Chuck knew it, he’d used up the whole hour.
“We’ll have to stop now, I’m afraid,” Dr. Finkelstein said. “Can you send your mom in alone for a minute? I need to discuss something with her, something having to—”
Chuck finished his note while the doctor was still speaking. My mom couldn’t take time off from work this afternoon.
“Oh, then your dad—your pretend dad—then he’s here? That’s fine, just fine,” the doctor said, twisting his shoulders. There was a popping noise and a button of light. The light flashed open where his spine joined his neck. “Ask him to step inside for a second, would you?”
Chuck left the office and sat down on the couch. He waited while his pretend dad talked to Dr. Finkelstein. The door, a bulky oak, let hardly any sound through. Chuck heard his pretend dad shouting two words: “completely ridiculous.”
He came out brushing the doctor’s hand from his arm. His teeth were set so firmly his jaw was shaking. “Move,” he said, stomping past, and Chuck followed him outside.
They sped home in a thick smell of burning gasoline. His pretend dad left the car slanting across the driveway. The engine continued to run after he removed the key. It rattled and coughed and then sputtered to a halt. He said, “So I understand I’m not your real dad. Imagine my surprise,” and he pulled the car’s emergency brake
. “I guess that means you’re not my real son, either.”
He yanked Chuck across the bench seat by his elbow. With long, angry strides, he hauled him toward the house. He was as indignant as Chuck had ever seen him. Chuck tried to keep up, but it was too hard. His shoes kept leaving scars of dirt in the grass. The scars didn’t glow, which meant the grass wasn’t hurt. A root made Chuck stumble, and he tripped and fell. He became a plant, dirt, a fish in a puddle. There were bits of leaves stuck to his blue jeans. He had grass in his hair and between his lips. His pretend dad lifted him to his feet, armpits first. Chuck was sure—pretty sure—he intended to kill him. He realized it was something he had always seen coming. He wanted to have one last Coke, one last cookie. He wanted to hug his elephant and all his bears. He wanted to say good-bye to everything that loved him.
His pretend dad opened the door and shoved him inside. There was his mom, standing wide-eyed and gaping at them. She was opening the mail with a miniature wooden sword. Someone must have given her a ride home from work. “What’s all the ruckus, you guys?” she said to them. “Good lord, Chuck, you’re covered head to toe in dirt! That’s it, into the tub with you right now—chop-chop!”
Reluctantly, his pretend dad’s fingers loosened their grip on him. Chuck had little doubt his mom had saved his life. He felt like he was waking from a bad dream. Miles of jagged rocks had been rushing up at him. The wind was beating like a flag in his ears. The ground was going to separate him from his skeleton. Then he was lying in bed, eyes open, wide awake.
He went to the bathroom and took off his clothes. The chafed skin of his armpits shone in the mirror. He filled the tub with water and heaps of bubbles. He could hear his parents arguing, that awful tumbling noise. The running water made it impossible to recognize the words.
In the tub, the bubbles shifted every time Chuck moved. They were like clouds changing their shape in the sky. A little rhinoceros rose up inside them, then knelt over. It seemed to lift its horn before it was overwhelmed. Its life was short, temporary, just a few seconds long. There were flies that hatched and died in a day. Chuck had seen a program about them on TV once. He turned the faucet off and heard his parents shouting. His pretend dad was saying, “Don’t give me that business. He gets it into his head to push some kid—”
“Who was picking on him, don’t forget,” his mom interrupted.
“And we get stuck with a thousand-dollar hospital bill.”
“Which means you get to knock him around why again?”
There was a pause while his pretend dad punched something. “You cannot—cannot—ask me to justify myself to you.”
Chuck turned the faucet back on to muffle their argument. It was just him and the water and the bubbles. Blowing on the bubbles made a cave appear inside them. Waving his feet made the heat roll through the tub. Eventually, his parents’ voices grew too loud to be camouflaged. His mom’s came first, sharp and full, like a siren. “If that’s the way you feel, why don’t you leave?”
Then he heard his pretend dad saying, “Maybe I will!”
Finally the door slammed shut like a paper bag exploding.
Chuck stayed in the warm water for a long time. The bubbles slowly swallowed one another, sinking and spreading open. Eventually, they were just a few islands of white film.
After the heat vanished, he climbed out of the tub. The house was so still he heard the air conditioner ticking. The silence seemed too big, too eerie, and he shivered. He wasn’t sure he wanted to open the bathroom door. The thought of what he might find made him afraid. He pictured his mom lying in a pool of light. A pool of white light, a pool of red blood. He imagined his pretend dad speeding away in the car. Chuck would be an orphan with the sad parts included.
He ran to his bedroom and crawled under the covers. He wished his mom had given his stuffed animals back. At last, though he wasn’t sure when, he fell asleep.
He woke much later, in the darkness of early morning. It was 5:52, according to the clock, and then 5:53. He got up and walked quietly into the living room. Both his parents were there, lying senseless on the couch. They were hugging, their bodies curled together like two tadpoles. His pretend dad must’ve come home while Chuck was sleeping. He must have kissed his mom and apologized to her. How had Chuck ever convinced himself that anything would change? He tiptoed back to his room, but he wasn’t sleepy. He lay on his side, his hand beneath the pillow. Soon, bit by bit, the dawn began filling the curtains. He thought that his heart would stop beating from sadness. There it was, the sun, coming up just like always.
Ryan Shifrin
As one has to learn to read or to practice a trade, so one must learn to feel in all things, first and almost solely, the obedience of the universe to God. It is really an apprenticeship. Like every apprenticeship, it requires time and effort. He who has reached the end of his training realizes that the differences between things or between events are no more important than those recognized by someone who knows how to read, when he has before him the same sentence, reproduced several times, written in red ink and blue, and printed in this, that, or the other kind of lettering. He who does not know how to read only sees the differences. For him who knows how to read, it all comes to the same thing, since the sentence is identical. Whoever has finished his apprenticeship recognizes things and events, everywhere and always, as vibrations of the same divine and infinitely sweet word. This does not mean that he will not suffer. Pain is the color of certain events. When a man who can and a man who cannot read look at a sentence written in red ink, they both see the same red color, but this color is not so important for the one as for the other.
—Simone Weil
Judy was coughing up blood again. He held a tissue to her mouth, watched it darken, then replaced it with another. For a moment, as her stomach rose and fell beneath the covers, everything was quiet. From out of the lull she asked, “Is it May already?” and then, “Who brought the garden inside?” and in a sunburst of intuition he realized that she saw the seven stained tissues on her bedside table as roses, the same lustrous red as the apothecaries their mother used to cultivate when they were kids. It was another five minutes, another handful of roses, before one of the tissues came out speckled a watery pink. At last she was able to close her eyes and rest. He left her to her garden dreams, slipping out into the daylight.
A half hour later, distributing his leaflets, he came to a house where a dog began to bark, its chest concussing against a frosted glass door. For an instant he was eight years old again and Judy nine, facing the old bull mastiff that used to lunge at them from behind Mr. Castillo’s chain-link fence, listening as he called out, “Max! Leave those children alone! Heel!” Except that Mr. Castillo’s dog’s name was not Max, it was Duke, maybe, or Buster.
Was there anyone else who had been there and might remember, anyone but him and Judy?
He backed away and continued down the block.
Every day was the same: young parents and vacationing students, the elderly and the unemployed, all answering their doors to him with open stances and quizzical eyes, as if he might be delivering something they would only then realize they had always secretly desired. Then he would ask them if they had heard the Good News, and their postures would stiffen, their features grow hard. God was a word that embarrassed people. He knew missionaries who were able to use it without sounding pushy or insincere, letting it shine in their voices like some small, familiar object, not the sun but a nail head, a key ring, a strand of silk—something that reflected its light rather than generated it. But he was not one of them. He had seen too many people retreat behind their faces as he spoke, and now he found it nearly impossible to open his mouth without steeling himself for rejection. God—his timidity had stripped all the grace from the word. So instead it was Good News he said. And he smiled like he thought a man filled with peace might smile. And though most of the people he met were polite enough to accept a leaflet from him, he had learned not to expect anything more.
; Only twice that day did someone actually engage him in conversation. The first was a woman who saw the Bible he was carrying and asked, “Jehovah’s Witness?” and when he shook his head asked, “Mormon?” and when he shook his head again asked, “Methodist?” When he told her the name of his church, Fellowship Bible, she pointed to herself and repeated, “Methodist,” shutting the door. The second was a man who took a flyer and read it out loud: “ ‘1 John 1:5: This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.’ ” He was one of those people who did not fold or crumple the page but laid it gently on a table, as if he were attempting to balance a coin on the surface of a puddle.
“What’s your name, son?” the man asked.
“Ryan Shifrin, sir.”
“Ryan Shifrin. I want you to promise me something. Can you do that?”
“I think so.”
“I want you to promise me that you’ll never darken my door again. And I want you to promise me that you’ll tell your buddies to stay away, too.”
It was not the promise Ryan had been hoping for, and at the end of a long day of no thank you’s and not interested’s, he had just enough billy-goat tenacity to ask why.
“Because you’re making a grand mystery out of total horse-shit,” the man answered, “and don’t get me wrong, that’s your constitutional right as an American, but I resent you bringing it into my home.”