My mother was calling me. “Pau-aul!” she cried. She was one of those women who have a hard time raising their voices; it always came out sounding hoarse and friendless whenever she called me home. “Paw-lie!”
I hid in the brambles and studied the dark face of Timothy’s house, trying to decide what to do with my father’s things. My arms were growing tired, and I needed to go to the bathroom, and for now, I decided, I would leave the boxes at the basement door. I would come back later to ask Timothy, who on occasion appeared in the avatar of the faithful robot from Lost in Space, to guard them for me. Timothy slept in the basement of the Stokeses’ house, under a wall hung from floor to ceiling with his vast arsenal of toy swords and firearms, in a room strewn with dismembered telephones and the bones of imitation skeletons. I tiptoed around the side of the Stokeses’ house and into their weedy backyard. The moon was high and brilliant in the sky by now, and I thought that, after all, it was pretty nearly full. I approached the basement door, keeping an uneasy eye on the shadows in the trees, and the shadows under the Stokeses’ deck, and the shadows gathered on the swings of the creaking jungle gym. Since my last visit, I saw, Timothy had marked the entrance to his labyrinth with two neat pyramids of plastic skulls. My mother’s raspy voice fell silent, and there was only the sound of cars out on the country road, and the ghostly squeak of the swing set and the forlorn crooning of a blind Dalmatian that lived at the bottom of our street. Carelessly I dropped the boxes on the step, between the grinning pyramids, and ran back through the trees toward my house, heart pounding, tearing my clothes on the teeth of the underbrush, certain that something quick and terrible was following me every step of the way.
“I’m home!” I said, coming into the brightness and warmth of our hall. “Here I am.”
“There you are,” said my mother, though she didn’t look all that happy to see me. She laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. It smelled of butyric acid and dextrorotatory sucrose and also very faintly of Canoe. “I just got off the phone with Bob Buterbaugh, Paul. He told me what really happened at school today.” She had yanked her hair free of its ponytail and now it shot out in ragged arcs around her head, tangled like the vanes of a wrecked umbrella. “Do you want to explain yourself to me? Why did you lie?”
“Is Dad coming over?”
“Well, yes, he is, Paul—”
“Great.”
“—because he feels that he really needs to see you, tonight. But the two of you will have to sit outside in the car and talk, or go somewhere else. I’m not going to let him in the house.”
I was astonished. “Why not?”
“Because, Paul, your dad—you know as well as I do—he’s become, well, you know how he’s been lately. I don’t have to tell you.” As if she were angry, she folded her arms, and clenched her jaw. But I could see that she was trying to keep herself from crying. “I have to set some limits.”
“You mean he can’t come over to our house anymore? Ever again?”
There were tears in her eyes. “Ever again,” she said. Once more she crouched before me, and I let her take me in her arms, but I did not return her embrace. In the picture window at the end of the hall I watched her reflection hugging mine. I didn’t want to be comforted on the impending loss of my father. I wanted him not to be lost, and it seemed to me that it would be her fault if he was.
“He said he’s going to collect his things. So I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t get rid of them, eh?” She gave me a poke in the ribs. “He must want them after all. Hey,” she said. “What is it? What’s the matter?” She followed my gaze toward the picture window, where our embracing reflections looked back at us with startled expressions.
“Nothing,” I said. A light had just come on in the Stokeses’ house. “I—I have to go over to Timothy’s. I left something there.”
“What?”
“My Luger,” I said, remembering a toy I had lent to Timothy sometime last summer. “The pink one that squirts.”
“Well, it’s time to eat,” said my mother. “You can go after.”
“But what if Dad comes?”
“Well, what if he does? You can go over to Timothy’s tomorrow. He’s probably not allowed to see anyone anyway.”
In five minutes I bolted my dinner—one of those bizarre conglomerations of bottled tomato sauces, casseroles-in-boxes, and leftover Chinese lunches that were then the national dishes of our disordered and temporizing homeland—and ran out the front door into the night. I was sure that Timothy had found the cartons by now. What if he thought I had meant them for a present and refused to give them back? My father was going to be angry enough about my mother’s treatment of his chemistry things, but it would be worse when he found out that most of them, including his notebook, were missing. I sprinted across our yard as quickly as I could, considering my asthma, and went crashing through the maple trees toward the Stokeses’ house. There was a burst of red light as a thin branch slapped against my left eye, and I cried out, and covered my face, and ran headlong into Timothy Stokes. My chin struck his chest and I sat down hard.
He smiled, and knelt beside me. “Are you all right, Professor?” he said. He was wearing the same pair of white jeans and stained T-shirt, under an unbuttoned jacket that was too large for him and that bore over the breast pocket his own last name, printed in block letters on a strip of cloth. He pulled a flashlight from his pocket and switched it on. The beam threw eerie shadows across his cheeks and forehead, and his little brown eyes were alight behind his glasses. I saw at once that the antidote I’d administered to him that afternoon had worn off, and he showed no sign of having been subjected to any weird therapies or electroshock helmets. His face looked as solemn and stupid as ever. He wore a rifle strapped across his back and a plastic commando knife in his boot, and three Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos hand grenades poked through the web belt of his canteen, and in his right hand he was carrying, as though it were another weapon, the thick, black, case-bound notebook.
“That’s my father’s,” I said. “You can’t have it.”
“I already photographed all of its contents with my spy camera,” he explained. “I have every page on microfilm. Plus I ran an extensive computer analysis on them.” He lowered his voice. “Your father is a very dangerous man. Look here.” He opened the notebook and shone the flashlight on a page where my father had written, “Myco. K. P889, L. 443, Tr. 23,” and then a date from three years earlier. The rest of the page was an illegible mishmash of numbers and abbreviations, some of them connected by sharp forceful arrows. The entry went on for several pages in the same fashion, cramped by haste and marginalia. I had seen plenty like it before, and I had no doubt that it described a process that could be used to get rid of something that grew between the tiles of your bathroom, or on the skin of your pears.
“Did you see?” said Timothy.
“See what?” I said.
“Your father is Ant-Man,” he said gravely. “I’ve suspected it for a long time.” He unhooked the canteen from his belt. It was covered in green canvas and it sloshed as he waved it around. “This is the antidote.”
He clamped the notebook under one arm and with his freed hand unscrewed the cap. I inclined my face slightly toward the mouth of the canteen, extended my fingers, and wafted the air above it toward my nostrils, delicately, as my father had shown me. I detected no odor this way, however. So he stuck it right under my nose.
“It smells like Coke,” I said. “You put salt in it.” Timothy didn’t say anything, but I thought I saw disappointment flicker across his flashlit face. “What would happen if I drank it?” I added quickly, not wanting to let him down. There was something about the way Timothy played his game, the thoroughness with which he imagined, that never failed to entrance me.
“That’s what I’d like to know,” said Timothy. “What if it said in this book, here, that your father has been giving you the secret formula to drink, like one drop at a time in your cereal, ever since you were a littl
e baby? And what if that’s why you can talk to ants, too?”
“What if,” I said. I had always felt sorry for Ant-Man, a superhero whose powers condemned him to the disappointing comradeship of bugs. “Timothy, what happened to you today? What did they say? Are you expelled?”
“Shh,” said Timothy. The notebook went flapping to the ground as he reached for me, and drew me to him, and covered my mouth with his hand. His voice fell to a harsh whisper. “Someone’s coming.”
I heard the sound of a car climbing the hill. A pair of headlights splashed light across the front of my house. I yanked my head free of his grasp.
“It’s my dad!” I said. “Timothy, I need to get his stuff back—now!”
“Quiet.” Timothy loosened his hold on me and brought the canteen up to my lips. I took a step away from him. “Quick,” he said. “Swallow this antidote. We don’t have time to test it. You’ll just have to take the risk.” He patted the dull black barrel of his rifle. “I’ve already loaded this baby with antidote darts.”
From the distant front porch of our house I could hear our front door squeal on its hinges, and then the separate voices of my parents, saying hello. I tried to make sense of their murmurings, but we were too far away. After a while there was another long squeal of hinges, and the door slammed shut, and then our house creaked and resounded with the passage of feet along its hallway.
“Oh, my God,” I said. “I think she let him go inside.”
“Come on,” said Timothy. “Drink this.”
“I’m not drinking that stuff,” I said.
“All right, then,” he said. “I’ll drink it.” He threw back his head and took a long swallow. Then he handed the canteen to me, and I drank down the rest of the antidote. It was sweet and sharp tasting, and bitter through and through. I felt pretty sure that it was just Coca-Cola mixed with good old sodium chloride, but then, after I got it down, I realized there must have been something else mixed into it—something that burned.
“Take this,” he said, handing me the plastic commando knife. He said that it was in case something went wrong; the rifle was only for delivering the antidote. He said, “Stay down.”
He led me out of the trees, across our moonlit backyard, and up the short, grassy slope that rose to the back of our house—a silvery gray shape loping along in a sort of crouched-over commando half-trot. The sleeves of my parka whispered against my sides as I ran. I belched up a fiery blast of his formula, and then laughed a tipsy little laugh. Timothy stepped up onto our patio and unslung the rifle from his shoulder. A radiant cloud of light from our living room came pouring out through the sliding-glass door, illuminating the trees and the lawn chairs and the grill, and the crown of Timothy’s close-cropped head as he knelt down, raised the rifle, and waited for me to catch up to him. When I got there he was peering in, his face looking blank and amazed behind the luminous disks of his spectacles, his breath coming regular and heavy.
“Can you feel it?” I said, kneeling beside him. “Is it working?”
He didn’t say anything. I looked. My father and my mother were sitting on the sofa. He was holding her in his arms. Her face was red and streaked with tears, and her mouth was fastened against his. Her sweatshirt was hiked up around her throat, and one of her breasts hung loose and shaking and astonishingly white. The other breast my father held, roughly, in his hairy hand, as if he were trying to crush it.
“What are they doing?” Timothy whispered. He set the rifle down on the patio. “Are those your parents?”
I tried to think of something to say. I was dizzy with surprise, and the formula we had swallowed was making me feel like I was going to be sick. I sat there for a minute or so beside Timothy, watching the struggle of those two people, who had been transformed forever by a real and powerful curse, the very least of whose magical effects was me. I felt as though I had been spying on them for my entire life, to no profit at all. After a moment I had to look away. Timothy’s gun was lying on the ground beside me. I reached for it, and held it in my grip, and found that it weighed far more than I had expected. Its breechblock was steely and cool.
“Timothy, is this real?” I said, but I knew he would never be able to answer me.
I stood up, my head spinning, and stumbled off the patio, onto the frost-bright grass. Timothy lingered for a moment longer, then came hurtling away from the window, passing me on our way into the woods. Under the maple trees we threw up whatever it was that he had given us to drink. He seemed to lose some of his enthusiasm for our game after that, and when I told him to go home and leave me alone he did.
Later on that night, my father and I fetched his notebook from the pile of dead leaves in the woods where Timothy had dropped it, and went over together to the Stokeses’ house to retrieve all the pieces of his shattered laboratory. My father’s arm lay heavy around my neck. I told Althea Stokes about the rifle, and Timothy was forced to produce it and surrender it to her. It had been, she said, his father’s. I helped my father carry the cartons out to his car, and then in silence we and my mother removed all of his other belongings, one by one, from her hatchback, and loaded them into the trunk of our big old Chevrolet Impala. Then my father drove away.
The next morning at eight, a little yellow bus full of unknown boys pulled up in front of the Stokeses’ house, and sounded its angry horn, and Timothy went out to meet it.
House Hunting
THE HOUSE WAS ALL wrong for them. An ivy-covered Norman country manor with an eccentric roofline, a fat, pointed tower, and latticed mullions in the downstairs windows, it sat perched on the northwest shoulder of Lake Washington, a few blocks to the east of the house in which Christy had grown up. The neighborhood was subject to regular invasion by armies of gardeners, landscape contractors, and installers of genuine Umbrian granite paving stone, but nevertheless it was obvious the house had been got up to be sold. The blue paint on the shutters looked slick and wet, fresh black mulch churned around the pansies by the driveway, and the immense front lawn had been polished to a hard shine. The listing agent’s sign was a discreet red-and-white escutcheon, on a black iron stake, that read simply, “Herman Silk,” with a telephone number, in an elegant sans serif type.
“This?” Daniel Diamond said, his heart sinking in a kind of giddy fizz within him. Although they had all the windows open, Mr. Hogue’s car was choked with the smell of his cologne, a harsh extract of wintergreen and brine which the realtor had been emitting more fiercely, like flop sweat, the nearer they got to the house. It was aggravating Daniel’s allergies, and he wished he’d thought to pop a Claritin before leaving the apartment that morning. “This is the one?”
“That’s the one,” Hogue said, sounding weary, as though he had spent the entire day dragging them around town in his ancient Mercedes sedan, showing them one perfectly good house after another, each of which they had rejected with the most arbitrary and picayune of rationales. In fact, it was only ten o’clock in the morning, and this was the very first place he’d brought them to see. Bob Hogue was a leathery man of indefinite middle age, wearing a green polo shirt, tan chinos, and a madras blazer in the palette favored by manufacturers of the cellophane grass that goes into Easter baskets. His rectilinear wrinkles, his crew cut, his chin like a couple of knuckles, his nose lettered with minute red script, gave him the look of a jet pilot gone to seed. “What’s the matter with it? Not good enough for you?”
Daniel and his wife, Christy Kite, looked at each other across the back of Christy’s seat—Christy could never ride in the rear of any vehicle without experiencing acute motion sickness.
“Well, it’s awfully big, Mr. Hogue,” she said, tentatively, leaning to look past the realtor at the house. Christy had gone to college in Palo Alto, where she studied French and led cheers for a football team that lost all the big games. She had the Stanford graduate’s aggressive nice manners, and the eyes of a cheerleader atop a struggling pyramid of girls. She had been the Apple Queen of Roosevelt High. From her mother, she
had learned to try very hard to arrange everything in life with the flawlessness of a photograph in a house-and-garden magazine, and then to take it just as hard when the black plums went uneaten in the red McCoy bowl and filled the kitchen with a stink of garbage, or when the dazzling white masses of Shasta daisies in the backyard were eaten by aphids.
“Yeah, I don’t know, Mr. Hogue,” Daniel said. “I think—”
“Oh, but it is beautiful,” Christy said. She furrowed her brow and narrowed her eyes. She poked her tongue gamely from a corner of her mouth. She was trying her hardest, Daniel could see, to imagine living in that house with him. House hunting, like all their efforts to improve things between them—the counseling, the long walks, the watching of a movie called Spanking Brittany Blue—had been her idea. But after a moment her face went slack, and her eyes sought Daniel’s, and in them he saw, for the first time since their wedding the summer before last, the luster of real despair, as if she feared they would find no home for their marriage, not in Seattle or anywhere in the world. Then she shrugged and reached up to retie her scarf, a sheer white piece of Italian silk patterned with lemons and limes. She opened her door, and started to get out of the car.
“Just a minute, you,” Hogue said, taking her arm. She fell back into the car at once, and favored Hogue with her calmest and most obliging Apple Queen smile, but Daniel could see her nostrils flaring like a rabbit’s. “Don’t be in such a rush,” Hogue went on irritably. “You’re always running off half-cocked.” He leaned over to open the glove compartment and rummaged around inside it until he found a package of Pall Malls. He pushed in the cigarette lighter and tapped one end of a wrinkled cigarette against the dashboard. “You can’t rush into a thing like this. It could turn out to be a terrible mistake.”