Gray Matter

“Write this down: Cynthia Porter, R.N., at the Essex Medical Center.”

“What’s she got?”

“A kid with cluster-scars on his head identical to those of the Sagamore Boy and the Dixon kid,” Joe said.

“What?”

“And he’s alive.”

14

Nicole was naked but for a tutu and doing peek-a-boo pirouettes while her boyfriend, the older guy from the diner, lay naked and panting on her bed in a state of red alert, his wanger armed and poised like a surface-to-air missile—when suddenly she glided to the window and dropped the blinds, cutting off Brendan’s view.

Brendan lowered the binoculars. Whatever they were doing in there, only the fish in her aquarium could appreciate.

It was a little after midnight that same evening. For nearly half an hour he had watched her through her bathroom window just thirty feet from his perch, taking in every moment of her precoital ritual. She had stripped down to that pink-cream flesh then, with her back to him, she brushed her golden mane, after which, turning slightly toward him, she shaved herself at the sink, her arms raised like swan necks toward the ceiling so he got a full double-barrel shot of those pink-capped breasts, then raising her legs as if practicing a ballet move, running the razor in long strokes, turning this way and that, all the while oblivious to the raised blinds and Brendan in the tree right outside her window.

Even so close, he could not see his mark because she never faced him straight-on long enough—just a quick flash of the dark target area, then she slipped into the shower, which was one of those fancy all-glass-and-chrome enclosures that instantly misted up, rendering her a moving impressionism in pink. And when she was finished, he lost her to a towel.

Brendan slipped the field glasses into its case and slumped against the tree trunk. This was the third time he had staked her out. And another bust. Next time.

He didn’t care about the boyfriend, who had climbed up the drainpipe onto the porch roof and into her bedroom. Brendan was only interested in Nicole.

Nicole DaFoe.

He liked to stretch the syllables like sugar nougat.

Ni-cole Da-Foe

DaFee DaFi DaFoe DaFum

I smell the blood of a Yummy Yum Yum

Nicole DaFoe.

Everybody knew her name because it was in the newspapers all the time about how she made the honor roll at Bloomfield—a precious little prep school for rich geeks—how she got this award and that, how she was at the top of her class two years in a row and won first place in the New England science fair, how she was nominated for a Mensa scholarship for her senior year and was going to some fancy genius camp this summer to study biology and astrophysics. But not how she danced naked for her boyfriends. And not what they all said: Nicole DaFoe: the Ice Queen who fucked.

Next time, he told himself. And up close and personal.

At this hour most of Hawthorne was asleep. Brendan had slipped out in his grandfather’s truck and driven the fifteen miles to Nicole’s house. From his perch high in an old European beech elm, he watched a blue-white crystalline moon rise above the line of trees and the fancy homes that made up her street. It blazed so brightly that the trees made shadow claws across the lawns.

But Brendan did not notice. He was now lost in the moon face—so much so that his body had gone rigid with concentration and his mind sat at the edge of a hypnotic trance. So lost that neither the electric chittering of insects nor the pass of an occasional car registered. So lost that the ancient shadows on the white surface appeared to move.

He had nearly cleared his mind of the assaulting clutter—of verbal and visual noise that gushed out of his memory in phantasmagoric spurts—crazy flash images of meaningless things that would at times rise up in his mind like fuzzy stills, as if he were watching a slide show through gauze—other times they’d come in snippets of animated scenes, like a film of incoherent memory snatches spliced together by some lunatic editor—images of people’s eyes, their faces blurred out—just eyes—and lights and shiny metal, television commercials, green beeping oscilloscope patterns.

And that Mobius strip of poetry.

He liked poetry, which stuck to his mind like frost—especially love poetry, not because he loved but because he couldn’t. It was like some alien language he tried to decipher, his own Linear B.

Maybe it was because he had banged his head earlier that day, but his mind was particularly active—and from someplace he kept seeing flashes of a big smiling Happy Face cartoon.

It made no sense.

Nixon.

He almost had caught it earlier. Nixon.

Big blue oval face and a sharp almond odor he could not identify—an odor that was distinct and profoundly embedded in his memory.

Memory.

That was the problem: He had Kodachrome memory, ASA ten million, and one that didn’t fade. Ever. He had been cursed with a mind that would not let him forget things. Although the Dellsies thought it cool having a waiter with total recall who could tell you the nutritional value of everything in the kitchen and remember what you ordered three weeks ago for lunch, his head was a junk-heap torture chamber. While other people’s recollection was triggered by a song or a familiar face, Brendan’s mind was an instant cascade of words and images, triggered by the slightest stimulus—like the first neutron in a chain reaction in a nuclear explosion. It was horrible, and it led him to avoid movies, music, and television. To keep himself from total dysfunction or madness or suicide—and there were many days he contemplated braiding a noose—he had worked out elaborate strategies. Sometimes he would project the images onto an imaginary book page then turn the page to a blank sheet. Or he would write down words or phrases that just wouldn’t go away—sometimes pages worth, including diagrams and stick drawings of people and things—then burn them. When that didn’t work, he would torch whole books.

Medication also helped. But when he turned sixteen, he had to quit school because he could not take the reading, not because he couldn’t understand the material—au contraire, the subjects were stupefyingly easy. It was that he couldn’t clear his mind of what he read, and just to release the pressure, he would gush lines of memorized text—like verbal orgasms. Teachers complained. Classmates called him “freak.” They called him “Johnny Mnemonic.” They wanted him to do mind tricks like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man—look at a shuffled pack of cards, then turn them over and recite the order, or spout off the telephone numbers of all the kids in class, or the amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Stupid razzle-dazzle memory stuff. It was easy, but no fun being a one-man carnie sideshow. So he stopped reading and quit school.

The other day he happened to walk by DellKids, and because the door was ajar he overheard that little Whitman boy, Dylan, complain that he didn’t remember something that he was supposed to. Brendan envied him that. He would kill to turn off his brain.

But some things remained buried, like his parents. They had died when he was eight, yet he could only recall them in their last years—and nothing from his early childhood—as if there were a blockage. Also, there were things he wished he could selectively summon to the light—like that big smiling Happy Face that sat deep in his memory bank like the proverbial princess’s pea sending little ripples of discomfort up the layers … blue.

Big blue cartoon head and big bright round eyes and a big floppy nose. Bigger than life.