Room: A Novel

and I’ve got two Dylan the Diggers and a conscience and spongy shoes.” “Wow.”

“Oh and I’ve seen the sea, there’s no poo in it, you were tricking me.”

“You had so many questions,” says Ma. “And I didn’t have all the answers, so I had to make some up.” I hear her crying breath.

“Ma, can you come get me tonight?”

“Not quite yet.”

“Why not?”

“They’re still fiddling with my dosage, trying to figure out what I need.”

Me, she needs me. Can’t she figure that out?

• • •

I want to eat my pad thai with Meltedy Spoon but Grandma says it’s unhygienic.

Later I’m in the living room channel surfing, that means looking at all the planets as fast as a surfer, and I hear my name, not in real but in TV.

“. . need to listen to Jack.”

“We’re all Jack, in a sense,” says another man sitting at the big table.

“Obviously,” says another one.

Are they called Jack too, are they some of the million?

“The inner child, trapped in our personal Room one oh one,” says another of the men, nodding.

I don’t think I was ever in that room.

“But then perversely, on release, finding ourselves alone in a crowd. .”

“Reeling from the sensory overload of modernity,” says the first one.

“Post-modernity.”

There’s a woman too. “But surely, at a symbolic level, Jack’s the child sacrifice,” she says, “cemented into the foundations to placate the spirits.” Huh?

“I would have thought the more relevant archetype here is Perseus — born to a walled-up virgin, set adrift in a wooden box, the victim who returns as hero,” says one of the men.

“Of course Kaspar Hauser famously claimed he’d been happy in his dungeon, but perhaps he really meant that nineteenth-century German society was just a bigger dungeon.” “At least Jack had TV.”

Another man laughs. “Culture as a shadow on the wall of Plato’s cave.”

Grandma comes in and switches it right off, scowling.

“It was about me,” I tell her.

“Those guys spent too much time at college.”

“Ma says I have to go to college.”

Grandma’s eyes roll. “All in good time. Pj’s and teeth now.”

She reads me The Runaway Bunny but I’m not liking it tonight. I keep thinking what if it was the mother bunny that ran away and hid and the baby bunny couldn’t find her.

• • •

Grandma’s going to buy me a soccer ball, it’s very exciting. I go look at a plastic man with a black rubber suit and flippers, then I see a big stack of suitcases all colors like pink and green and blue, then an escalator. I just step on for a second but I can’t get back up, it zooms me down down down and it’s the coolest thing and scary as well, coolary, that’s a word sandwich, Ma would like it. At the end I have to jump off, I don’t know to get back up to Grandma again. I count my teeth five times, one time I get nineteen instead of twenty. There’s signs everywhere that all say the same thing, Just Three Weeks to Mother’s Day, Doesn’t She Deserve the Best? I look at plates and stoves and chairs, then I’m all floppy so I lie down on a bed.

A woman says I’m not allowed so I sit up. “Where’s your mom, little guy?”

“She’s in the Clinic because she tried to go to Heaven early.” The woman’s staring at me. “I’m a bonsai.” “You’re a what?”

“We were locked up, now we’re rap stars.”

“Oh my go — you’re that boy! The one — Lorana,” she shouts, “get over here. You’ll never believe it. It’s the boy, Jack, the one on TV from the shed.”

Another person comes over, shaking her head. “The shed one’s smaller with long hair tied back, and all kind of hunched.” “It’s him,” she says, “I swear it’s him.”

“No way,” says the other one.

“Jose,” I say.

She laughs and laughs. “This is unreal. Can I have an autograph?”

“Lorana, he won’t know how to sign his name.”

“Yes I will,” I say, “I can write anything there is.”

“You’re something else,” she tells me. “Isn’t he something else?” she says to the other one.

The only paper is old labels from the clothes, I’m writing JACK on lots for the women to give to their friends when Grandma runs up with a ball under her arm and I’ve never seen her so mad. She shouts at the women about lost child procedures, she tears my autographs into bits. She yanks me by the hand. When we’re rushing out of the store the gate goes aieeee aieee, Grandma drops the soccer ball on the carpet.

In the car she won’t look at me in the mirror. I ask, “Why you threw away my ball?”

“It was setting off the alarm,” says Grandma, “because I hadn’t paid.”

“Were you robbing?”

“No, Jack,” she shouts, “I was running around the building like a lunatic looking for you.” Then she says, more quietly, “Anything could have happened.” “Like an earthquake?”

Grandma stares at me in the little mirror. “A stranger might snatch you, Jack, that’s what I’m talking about.” A stranger’s a not-friend, but the women were my new friends. “Why?”

“Because they might want a little boy of their own, all right?”

It doesn’t sound all right.

“Or to hurt you, even.”

“You mean him?” Old Nick, but I can’t say it.

“No, he can’t get out of jail, but somebody like him,” says Grandma.

I didn’t know there was somebody like him in the world.

“Can you go back and get my ball now?” I ask.

She switches on the engine and drives out of the parking lot fast so the wheels screech.

In the car I get madder and madder.

When we get back to the house I put everything in my Dora bag, except my shoes don’t fit so I throw them in the trash and I roll Rug up and drag her down the stairs behind me.

Grandma comes into the hall. “Did you wash your hands?”

“I’m going back to the Clinic,” I shout at her, “and you can’t stop me because you’re a, you’re a stranger.” “Jack,” she says, “put that stinky rug back where it was.”

“You’re the stinky,” I roar.

She’s pressing on her chest. “Leo,” she says over her shoulder, “I swear, I’ve had just about as much—” Steppa comes up the stairs and picks me up.

I drop Rug. Steppa kicks my Dora bag out of the way. He’s carrying me, I’m screaming and hitting him because it’s allowed, it’s a special case, I can kill him even, I’m killing and killing him—

“Leo,” wails Grandma downstairs, “Leo—”

Fee fie foe fum, he’s going to rip me in pieces, he’s going to wrap me in Rug and bury me and the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out—Steppa drops me on the blow-up, but it doesn’t hurt.

He sits down on the end so it all goes up like a wave. I’m still crying and shaking and my snot’s getting on the sheet.

I stop crying. I feel under the blow-up for Tooth, I put him in my mouth and suck hard. He doesn’t taste like anything anymore.

Steppa’s hand is on the sheet just beside me, it’s got hairs on the fingers.

His eyes are waiting for my eyes. “All fair and square, water under the bridge?”