“Ever?” Jarrod asks.
“We’ll see,” Da says casually, like running everyone else’s world is just second nature.
“He will need his life back at some point, Da,” I point out.
“We’ll see,” he repeats, and I accept, silently reassuring Jarrod with an old-style, single-finger shush gesture.
I secretly upped Da’s dose, and between one thing and another he is sleeping so soundly the snoring is volcanic music. Sitting at my chair, I stare out the open window, listening to him and the outside world clash. It doesn’t go long without a horn beeping here, even in the night. It is usually joined by a responding beep, then things go quiet for a while more again. I listen to people talking as they walk to and from the pub, the movies, the restaurant, the park. Twos and fours are it, and a chunk of me now is wishing to be among them. I am looking forward to going to school. Going to a whole different world, away from my town and my family… and this new craziness, which has been unusual and exciting but is fast approaching do-without-it time. I don’t have a great many friends back home, truth be told, so I don’t know how much I’ll be back once I make the leap. My folks sent me to a weird boarding school as a weekly boarder, the most unwieldy of all the configurations, I think. You don’t live there full-time, so just when things get social and fizzy, you are going home for the weekend or holidays. Then you get to what’s supposed to be home, and you are trying to hang with the folks who have been living the real part of life, five days out of the seven, without you. You are trying to hang.
Until you are not trying. Which was okay. I’m not complaining. Not a lot, anyway. At least I don’t think it’s a lot.
And the only one who ever came and visited me, was him.
I stand from the window and walk to his bedside. I stare down at the snoring stillness of him, and I shake my head.
The only one. This Chock Full o’Nuts I see before me.
Couldn’t even plan for it, either, because he would just appear. Take me to dinner usually, or just drive around. He taught me how to drive so early, I had to relearn when it was time to go for my license. Had to take a handful of professional lessons because of all the bad little habits I developed, you know, like casually experienced drivers do.
Despite his own hall-of-fame smoking credentials, the one time he caught me trying it-one of his surprise appearances at my dorm window, of course-he took me outside and gave me bubbling and searing cigarette burns in the center of each palm. Looked just like stigmata for two weeks. Kids called me Jesus Smoking Christ all that time.
I liked it. The attention. All of it.
And it was almost like I didn’t even have him, because pretty much nobody ever believed me that he had been there. The only one who at least sometimes believed was Lucy.
“I believe you. He’s psychotic,” she said when I showed off my stigmata.
I sit on the side of the bed now, the snoring very comforting to me. Certain things, I realize lately, calm and settle me. Snoring means sleeping, good. Electric cars are a problem for me because they are so silent. That could kill you, right? Because a car is supposed to make noise to warn you of its lethality. That kind of incongruence in the physical world has begun to put me right off. Silence is deadly. Sound is life.
“Stealth, is all,” Da says and I leap off the bed as if it were a catapult.
I stand with my back to the window, staring at him, staring, staring at him. But he has not changed. The slow up and down of his rib cage, the three coarse breaths, and then the chopping snore.
Did he even say it? Is he testing me further, playing with my mind? Can he hear inside my head, the old mystical-madness thing that attaches to altered minds?
I sort of wish I could have done my first year of philosophy before this small adventure. Next summer would have been a lot more convenient. Then maybe at least I’d have known a thing or two.
“Hey,” comes a hoarse whisper, wafting up to my window from the street.
I turn to find Jarrod down there, alone.
“Come on down,” he says.
“Get to bed,” I say.
“Why?” he says.
I go to give him an answer, realize I haven’t really got one, and head down into the night.
“I have an idea,” he says as we sit on the curb watching absolutely nothing go by.
“Don’t. Don’t do that, Jarrod. Don’t have an idea.”
“Hear it, hear it. The old man is dead to the world, right?”
“Hmm. Not quite yet but, anyway…”
“We make a rapid run. Back-”
“Stop it, will you? No.”
“Listen. We are back in an hour and a half, collect our stuff all up, nobody’s the wiser. Perfect plan. If you come with me, you don’t have to worry that I’ll screw everything up. We’ll have Matt bolt the door from the outside-he has to do that sometimes-so even if he wakes up, your Da is safe and sound.”
When he finally stops talking, I breathe in the refreshing silence.
Then, “Leave it, Jarrod. My stuff is gone. Your stuff is gone.”
“Why would they take my stuff? My stuff is still there. Probably yours, too. You can get the rest of Da’s things, the clothes. You can get the phone and everything. It’s perfect. It’s perfect.”
The desperation is as clear as the greasy sweat on Jarrod’s face.
“It’s all gone, Jarrod. All of it. Forget it. They took everything, for sure.”
“Not everything. I’m a good hider. A good hider.”
He is speaking both faster and slower than usual. The words themselves burst out quick, with wrong-long air spaces between them. It’s like a verbal version of the game we played as kids, 1-2-3-red-light.
“What is it, Jarrod?”
“What is what? I want to go home, remember? That’s it. I just told you.”
“What is it you have to go back for, that can’t wait?”
“My stuff. And it’s where I live now. And I got work in the morning. You know how you just don’t feel right when you’re not in your place?”
“I am getting to know that feeling pretty well, yeah.”
“Right. Then. Let’s go.”
He is actually leaning his upper body in the direction of his car.
“Will I guess what it is?”
He stops leaning and looks at the ground. “No, why don’t you not do that.”
“You already have a load of stuff from Matt, so I know it isn’t that. So it’s… other stuff?”
“Stop it, huh, Danny, please? Can’t you just leave me be? I feel worse enough already.”
“Ah cripes, Jarrod. You know, it’s these kinds of reasons why you are what is known as a ne’er-do-well.”
“Are you trying to insult me? With ne’er-do-well? Cousin, I’d ne’er do any-damn thing at all if I could get away with it.”
This is very much like punching water.
“So… dammit… just get something from Matt.”
“Not possible,” he says, putting two hands up in front of him, as if I was coming to kick his ass. Which I should do. “Not possible there, man, so let’s just forget I said anything. Okay. Just let that one go.”
“I think that’s a good idea. Because I can assure you, whatever you left behind is with somebody else now. And you don’t want to go inquiring about it.”
An old, old scratchy voice comes down at me from over my shoulder.
I look up and back, to my window.
“Jeez, Old Boy, who are you, Rasputin? What does it take to pin you down, even for one night?”
“Who is that?” He is pointing at Jarrod, and he isn’t pleased.
“Just sharing a smoke. I’ll be right up.”
“You’d better be. I don’t like the look of him.”
He pulls his head back inside.
“I don’t like the look of me, either,” Jarrod says, dejected.
