The fifth week, she taught him how to sleep. She whispered to him in the dark. He let her onto the stage, but not too close: “Milo, there’s a bowl at the bottom of your belly, a big bowl-can you feel it?”
“Uh huh.”
“Well; every time you take a breath, like, the bowl kind of fills up with air. Doesn’t that feel good?”
“I guess.”
“And every time you breathe out, it kind of steams off, like soup steaming into cold air, see? You don’t have to do a thing, little man. Just feel that bowl fill up, and then feel the steam float off it. Watch how it goes out your mouth and nose, and then feel the air coming in there again. Over and over. Because it feels good, that’s all. If you start thinking about something, just go back to the bowl again. Nobody’s keeping track. You don’t have to get pastone. Just one…one…one-see? That’s thereal way to count.
All those other numbers are a lot of crap. Then, if it’s night, you fall asleep, and if it’s day, you keep awake. Get it?”
“I’ll try it, Sylvie, but I’m scared.”
“Tell me about it, sky-jumper boy. Scared!”
“How old are you?” he asked, staring at her with sudden intensity.
“A million.”
“Come on, Sylvie!”
“Seventeen,” she said.
“I’m fifteen. We’re practically the same.”
“Dream on, little man.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No.”
“Did you ever…?”
“Yes.” Suddenly she took his hand. “Not yet, Milo. It’s too soon. But I feel it too. I think it might happen. Don’t push, okay?”
“Okay.”
She cocked her head at him and bit her lip in a way that melted whatever of Milo remained solid before Sylvie. “What do you see when you look at me, Milo?”
“A girl-what do you mean?”
“When you see the moon and stars, maybe it’ll be time then…”
“Sylvie, I want to tell you something about myself.”
She looked away. “I gotta go somewhere. Tell me when I get back…Do you have any money? I’m a little short.”
At the beach that day, lying in the sun on a hulk of driftwood, sand dusting his face, fine sea air puffing his shirt and filling his lungs like a sail, Milo breathed. Water welled, sucked, and whispered around him.
Waves lapped. The bowl filled and emptied. Thoughts came and went. Inside him, a knot loosened.
Dede was saying, “Milo, how can you be so small?”She wasbig. She was the Jolly Green Giant. She was King Kong, Mount Everest, the Moon. He felt that he was looking at her the wrong way through a microscope. She flipped him, and he came up heads. She laughed. “I mean, where’s the rest of you, Milo? Don’t worry, I won’t spend you. I wonder what Galileo would say about this. He’s the one who figured out how there are as many square numbers as there are numbers, baby. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,…or 1, 4, 9, 16, 25…for each of each there’s one of the other-savvy?-even though the one bunch looks bigger, even though the one bunch isa part of the other. Is that how it is for you, Milo?” She tickled him on the eagle’s breast. “Lots or little, somehow you’re still my little Milo. Don’t youlose something when you turn to a quarter? Don’t youget something when you turn to a blimp? Howdo you do those change- ums?”
The bowl filled, the bowl emptied. The sea. The wind. A knot inside him came undone. “I’m ashape-shifter! ”
The sky darkened. The lake began to glow so intensely blue-green, seething in its basin, that it seemed more emotion than liquid. Strati knit the sky shut. Thunder. Milo climbed down from the log, brushed the sand off and started running. He was supposed to meet Sylvie in front of the bathhouse for a show in the old carousel enclosure.
“When the great world horse pisses, it rains,” Dede had told him once. “Everything is transformations-it says so here in the Upanishads. Wanna hear more?”
“No.” It had frightened him.
Now, just as in Dede’s Upanishads, the rain broke like piss from a tight bladder. It sprayed down. The world horse whinnied. Its eyes flashed. The sand was speckled then splotched then rutted, and Milo was spattered with wet sand, splashing, pool to pool, toward the bathhouse. Then the hail began to fall. His scalp tickled. His hair sparkled with hail. When he brushed the tiny hail stones out, his haircrunched.
It only lasted a few moments, and the drumming of rain and hail subsided. He could hear the waves again, breathing back and forth far behind him, and the flag by the bathhouse flapping like a faltering conversation.
Sylvie was pacing back and forth between two pillars at the top of the bathhouse steps, just under the eaves of the roof, protected from the downpour. The broad stone steps were littered with tiny hailstones that crackled under Milo’s feet.
“Sylvie!” he shouted. “I’ve got to tell you something. You’ve got to listen.”
“Look, I’m in a hurry, Milo. There’s a guy waiting on me inside there, and then we still have that show to do.”
“But Sylvie…”
A tall wiry man in a Hawaiian shirt strolled out of the men’s door across the landing from Sylvie and Milo. He was balding but meticulously groomed and greased, with sideburns down to his long, heavy jaw. His fingers were covered with rings. “Hey, what’s the holdupnow? My client is getting impatient.”
Sylvie turned toward him. “One minute. Just wait inside. I never let you down yet, did I?”
“Okiedokie.” He ducked back in.
“Listen, Milo.” Sylvie was slightly trembling. So was Milo, but Sylvie wasn’t wet. “I’m going to leave in a second, but I need you to stay here. You gotta go in where Lenny is and give him something for me-a box with some stuff inside. Watch him, Milo. Watch that he’s careful with the thing I leave him, okay?”
“Sure, Sylvie…”
“Listen. The guy he’s with will do some stuff-it won’t take long-and then Lenny’ll give you some money. And he’ll give you the box back. Make sure you get that box back and everything in it.Mint.
Understand?” She handed him something. She had to push it into his hand, because at first he didn’t see it, he had been focusing so intently on Sylvie’s eyes. It was an ice pick.
He didn’t know what to make of it at first. “Sylvie?”
“You won’t have to use it, don’t worry. It’s just in case. You might have toshow it to him-that’s the worst it could get. Then he would give you everything and run. Lenny’s not brave like you, jumper boy.
Believe me, I know Lenny.”
Milo put the ice pick under his shirt, inside his belt.
“Let Lenny leave. Just stay there by the showers. Make sure he’s gone. Make sure nobody’s around. If anybody’s around, wait till they’re gone. Put the box down on a bench. Come out to the door, and wait.
I’ll meet you there in less than a minute, guaranteed.” She took a deep breath and huffed it out.
“Okay,” she said, strictly business now, all the tension turned to purpose. “Turn around, Milo. I gotta do something you can’t see. Then I’ll split, and I’ll leave the package there for you to take in to Lenny. Just turn around, count to twenty, then do what I told you. Get it?”
“Yes, Sylvie.”
“You’re soaking wet, you jerk.” She smiled and tousled his hair. “Don’t you know to come in out of the rain?” Then she pushed his shoulder to make him turn.
“One, two…” rain dripping from the eaves. His teeth chattered a little. At twenty, he turned around and Sylvie was gone. There was a hat box on the landing, bound with a red ribbon. Milo picked it up and carried it across the landing and in through the men’s door, hugging it closely to his chest with both arms.
The ice pick pricked his thigh a little when he stepped, but it didn’t hurt much.
He didn’t see anyone at first. He was standing in a large, echoey dome with arched passages leading off every
