Mark pondered this. He also pondered, come winter, the snowballs that hit him in the back of the head. There were other kids who would intentionally attract his eye, then make exaggerated expressions of imbecility and moan, “Fag!” The injured hatred they managed to pack into that one syllable was hair-raising. It was lucky that Mark was big for his age. They didn’t ever try to really beat him up. No doubt they could have—Mark hadn’t the tiniest conception how to fight—but they didn’t know that, and just as episodes of My Three Sons had it, bullies seemed, beneath all the bravado, to be cowards. Mark was grateful. But he never stopped feeling a plunge into sick dread at the sound, behind him, of that furious, indignant “Fag!”
What was it? Maybe his glasses? Different lenses, but the same sturdy frames he’d picked when he was seven. It was possible they were out of style, but so what? He liked familiar things. His trumpet case? The thick wedge of books under his arm? The bookstrap holding them together?
Everyone had had bookstraps when Mark was eight. Maybe they were popular only among eight-year-olds. Mark neither knew nor cared. They worked. Mark liked how strong the rubber was. He liked drawing patterns with his Bic pen on the strap when it was stretched and watching how the shapes contracted and solidified when he let the rubber relax. Hand-drawn serif fonts compressed themselves into convincing professional type. Stretched again, waiting on his desk in a boring class (math, puerile; history, pointless), the strap tempted him to poke holes in it, using the same pen, and he’d watch the pinholes deform into ellipses that lengthened day by day until finally, after he’d grouped several in a Pleiades-like cluster, the strap would break and he’d have to stop at Woolworth’s on his way home to buy another. In the aisle with the eight-year-olds.
• • •
Or maybe (thinking of keyboards and constellations) it was the coincidence itself that was magical. If it were actually magic—some wizard’s intentional scheme—it wouldn’t be magical, but kind of dumb. How cheaply symbolic to decide that middle C should be Hercules, and make it so. But how wonderful that it was random.
• • •
In the summer of 1972, when he was almost thirteen, Mark had strange dreams. Some of them involved human bodies that fell apart or changed into bloody pot roast on the kitchen table. Sometimes there were terrible bodily smells. One night a grown woman in sheer black leggings climbed on his shoulders and pressed her undulating crotch against his face and he had his first “nocturnal emission,” as they called it in Health class.
One night he dreamed that Susan was helping him set up his electric train. He was arranging the buildings, and he turned to say something to her just as she was aligning two pieces of track, holding one in each fist, and as he looked on helplessly she shoved them together and her eyes flew open and her face lit up red as a buzzing filled the room and she was electrocuted. He woke to the buzz of his alarm clock, his heart thudding.
He frequently had a dream that was much different, that filled him with peaceful euphoria. It varied in detail, but always began with him walking along an unfamiliar path through a darkened landscape. It might be in the woods, or it was twilight—“penumbral,” a word he’d recently learned. Coming to the bottom of a hill, he looked up and saw, at the crown, his own house. The path wound up to the front door. The house was always exactly like his real house, except that, as he came closer, he saw that it hadn’t been lived in for many years. The front door was ajar. He went in, and all the rooms were the same, all the furniture was the same, but there were cobwebs and dust and small items scattered on the floor, as though wind had blown them there, or some animal had come in at night. Mark was never surprised that the house was empty. He had already known somehow, in the dream, that his family had gone away, or were all dead. That part didn’t matter. It had happened in the normal course of things and Mark didn’t mourn; instead he felt an overpowering love for the house that had stood empty all these years, waiting for someone to come and take care of the things inside. Now Mark was here, and all his family’s things were here: letters, bills, toys, games, his dad’s LP collection, his mother’s mysteries, his sister’s secrets. Mark now had all the time in the world to go through it, bit by bit, drawer by drawer, lavishing his attention on every detail, with no one to interrupt him. And although the specifics of the dream varied, the words that occurred to him as he stood in one of the silent rooms contemplating the soul-satisfying job before him, those words were always the same: It’s all over now.
• • •
That summer his mother tried a music camp. “Maybe the kids won’t be so mean,” she said. It was on the shore of a lake in Maine. On the first day, as Mark and his parents parked on the grounds and walked toward registration, boys were running around boisterously, catcalls were flying. Mark cringed, waiting for the first ball accidentally thrown straight at his head. But in the registration office he met short, round Rudy, a fellow camper, who said, “Everyone has to take a swim test; you want to take it with me?” A pulse of relief and gratitude shot through Mark that was so strong, Rudy would become his best friend for the remainder of his adolescence, even though Rudy lived in the Bronx and Mark lived in a Boston suburb.
It turned out that Mark’s mother, at last, was right. There were a few rough kids but hardly any mean ones,
