JACK, AT fifteen, often cannot sleep. It might be a form of insomnia, but most likely not. He has good reason to stay awake. He lives in a slope-shouldered row house so close to the border of Maryland, it seems as if the District wants it exiled. At night, bedeviled by a fog of anxious stirrings, he lies in bed, staring at the traffic light at the junction of New Hampshire and Eastern Avenues. He lives, eats, and breathes by the rhythm of its changing from red to green. Outside his window, at the eastern border of the District, the city roars, barks, whines, squeals, growls like a pack of feral dogs, glassy-eyed with hunger. Inside the row house, the darkness is filled with dread. It seems to grip his head like a vise squeezed tighter and tighter until he gasps, shoots up in a fountain of bedclothes. This moment is crucial. If the light is green, everything will be okay. But if it's red… His heart pounds; the roaring in his ears dizzies him. Disaster.
When he could bear to look back on those nights, he understood that the color of the traffic light didn't matter. The reliance on the pattern set by unknown city workers is an illusion of control over the parts of his life he dreads. But like all children, he relies on illusion to keep his terrors in Pandora's box.
Between the hours of one and three in the morning, his ears are attuned to the heavy tread of his father's footsteps as he returns from work. This particular night is no different. It is June and stifling, not even the smallest squares of laundry stir on the line. A dog lies wheezing asthmatically in the ashy buttocks of the empty lot next to the auto chop shop. An old man wheezes, coughs so long and hard, Jack is afraid he'll hawk up a lung.
The sounds creep in, as if the apartment itself is protesting his father's weight. Every one of the tiny but separate noises that mark his father's slow progress through it sends a squirt of blood into Jack's temples, causing him to wince in pain.
Sometimes that was all that happened, the sounds would gradually ebb, Jack would lie back down, his heartbeat would return to normal, and eventually, he'd drift into a restless sleep. But at other times, the first bars of 'California Dreamin' ' by the Mamas and the Papas creep into his room, and his heart starts to pound and he has to force himself not to vomit all over the sheets.
The three slices of pepperoni pizza Jack had for dinner rise as if from a magician's wand.
Stomach acid burns his throat, and he thinks,
The melody takes on a life of its own. Like the notes of a snake charmer, it's filled with an ominous meaning at odds with its original sunny disposition. And like the cobra that hovers and strikes at will, digging its fangs deep into flesh, his father stalks him, the thick black belt he bought in a biker shop in Fort Washington, Maryland, held loosely in his left hand.
It was a time-honored ritual in the McClure household, this whipping. It would have been so much better if the cause had been alcohol because then it wouldn't have been Jack's fault. But it
And Jack's mother, what is her part in this ritual? She stays in her bedroom, behind a tightly closed door that leaks 'California Dreamin' ' every time her husband wraps the belt around the knuckles of his left fist. Jack, a living example of Skinnerian psychology, prepares himself for the pain when he hears the first bars of flower power sweetly, innocently sung.
Fists aren't what frighten Jack, though his father possesses the big, knuckly rocks of a bricklayer or an assassin. By adult standards, his father isn't particularly big, but with his dark eyes, sullen mouth, and broken nose, he seems like a colossus to Jack. Especially when he's swinging the belt. Following Neanderthal instincts, he turned the biker belt into an ugly, writhing thing. Its armor of metal studs, its crown a buckle big as two fists are not enough. He filed the corners to points one sunny Sunday when Jack was out playing softball.
'Tell me a story, read me a book,' his father says as he opens the door to his son's room. He looks around at the unholy mess of clothes, comics, magazines, records, bits of candy bars and chocolate. 'Books, books, where are the friggin' books?' He bends down, swipes up a comic. 'Batman,' he says with a sneer. 'How the fuck old are you?'
'Fifteen,' Jack answers automatically, though his mouth is dry.
'And all you can read is this junk?' He shoves the comic in his son's face. 'Okay then, brainiac, read to me.'
Jack's hands tremble so badly, the comic slips through his fingers.
'Open it, John.'
Dutifully, Jack flips the pages of the comic. He wants to read, he wants to show his father that he can, but his emotions are in turmoil. He's filled with fear and anxiety, which automatically extinguish what progress he's made in decoding English. He stares down at the comic panels. The speech balloons might as well be written in Mandarin. The letters float off like spiky sea creatures with a will of their own. He sees them, but he cannot make heads or tails of what they might be. It's garbage in, garbage out.
'God almighty, it's a fucking comic. A six-year-old could read it, but not you, huh?' His father rips the comic from him, flips it into a corner.
'Hey, watch it,' Jack says, leaping up.
His father sticks out his right hand, shoves him back onto the bed.
'That's issue number four.'
'How the hell would you know?' His father stomps over to the corner, rips up the comic. Batman and his bat-cape are parted.
His father carefully removes his prized gold-and-diamond cuff links from his shirt, knocks a pile of comics off Jack's dresser with a backhand swipe, lays them down on the open space. Then the beating starts. The belt uncoils from his father's fist like an oily viper. It whips up, then down, striping Jack's rib cage. And as the lashing commences in earnest, his father punctuates each singing strike with a litany of words.
'You don't talk right.'
He is breathing hard, his chest rising and falling rapidly. 'Where the fuck did you come from?'
His rage is immense, as large as the Lincoln Memorial, as large as the sky. He is a man who looks upon his son and is diminished. As if something in his seed is defective. He can't bear the thought. Having a son like Jack fills him with rage; the rage fuels his violence.
'Your mother must've fucked some sideshow freak-'
Jack's body absorbs the excruciating pain with its usual indifference. In fact, it grows hard and tough under the abuse. It's the words that penetrate to his inner gyroscope, fragile, delicately balanced in the best of times. The litany of hate knocks the pins out from under the gyroscope, the heavy machinery flattens Jack's tattered self- esteem, burying it in the muddy flats at the depths of his being. Belief is as ephemeral as a cloud, shape-shifted by invisible forces. How easily other people's beliefs masquerade as our own. The enemy outside invades, and we, young and impressionable, are vulnerable; the enemy is so insidious that we're changed without even being aware of it. Our cloud shape is altered as we are propelled onward through life.
AFTERWARDS, JACK lies on the blood-smeared sheets. His room is invaded by the howls at the edge of the city. The traffic light at the intersection of Eastern and New Hampshire blinks from red to green and back again. Once again, it has predicted his fate. But now the light is ignored. Jack's mind is busy continuing the punishment his father has meted out. He straddles a widening fault line. This fault line is his; he has manufactured it out of his dim brain, he has spun it from all the things he can't do, all the things he tried to do and failed. His father is right. His fault, his fault line, growing bigger and wider every day.
INSTEAD OF lying in a pool of sweat, waiting for the constellation of dreaded sounds, Jack takes to wandering the flyblown streets. Night shreds like smoke, manhandled by streetlights, neon signs blinking and
