On Fire (16 page)
I shake my head. I've been pierced enough.
T
HERE'S A BENCH OUT IN FRONT
of the cafeteria I sometimes sit on. Howard finds me there one day and tells me I have to move. ”This is why I still volunteer at the hospital,” he clucks, “even though I'm not a patient anymore.” He points above his head. “Look how cloudy it's getting. If the sky falls this is a dangerous place to be.”
I'm not in the mood to argue so I move farther back by the edge of an abandoned brick building. I stretch out on the dead grass and look up at the sky. Howard sits down beside me.
The clouds are all cumulus â the puffy kind little kids look at and see birds or small animals in. “I remember hearing a story about the sky falling,” I tell Howard. “Something lands on Chicken Little's head. I believe it's an acorn. Chicken Little thinks it's the sky and runs around telling everybody. Goosey Loosey. Turkey Lurkey. All the friends rhyme.”
“Howard loves that story,” he says. “But Chicken Little doesn't think the sky's falling. He knows it is. He and his friends go to tell the king.”
“Then the fox eats them all at the end.”
Howard snorts. “There is no fox in Howard's version. Chicken Little keeps warning people about the sky. The end.”
“You're serious?”
I squint at Howard. I must do it sceptically because he says, “I suppose you've heard of tornadoes?”
“I have.”
“Well . . . ” He smiles and I hear cotton candy winding around a paper stick. “Since I've been working here, a tornado has never touched down.”
He stops talking and looks over his shoulder. “Do you know those folks over there?” He points at a couple of people by the cafeteria.
“Sorry,” I say. “I can't see that far.”
“Try,” he says.
“You try. Put Vaseline on your eyeballs first.”
“I'll look for you, then,” Howard says.
“There's a girl. She has short, dark hair and a round face. I've seen her here before. She kind of shines.” He holds up his hand and waves.
“There are two men with her, both wearing black baseball caps. One's taller. The other man's hurt somehow, but . . . I'd say getting better and . . . ” He waves again. “You told me you didn't have any family.”
“I said I don't know of any. Please quit waving,” I tell him. “They're probably do-gooders who want to save our souls.”
Howard goes toward the people he's been staring at like he hasn't heard me. “Come on, Dan,” he says. “I think they're here to see you.”
Eventually I get up and follow him.
“Are you Dan?” the taller man asks. He steps around Howard. I squint at him. “Dan Iverly?” he asks again.
“He is.” Howard pokes me in the ribs.
“Oh,” I say. “Yes. I guess I am.”
“You guess?”
“No,” Howard says. “He knows he is.”
“Then I guess that makes me your uncle Frank.” The tall man holds out his hand. My own are shaking so much I've put them in my pockets to hold them down. I take the right one out now. It's moving like a tiny room fan. He clamps on to it and for a moment solves the problem.
I think he asks me a question then. What system am I from? Do I say, “The Milky Way?” Or do I just keep that in my head?
“This is Marsh,” Frank says, meaning the other man standing in his shadow. “I understand he took care of you while you were in Blackstone Village, living in my office.” He lists all the jobs he holds there, then adds, “But I'm down in Kingman now helping out with emergency relief.”
A couple of times while he's talking I feel like I'm floating above everyone else. I want to comment on that. I want to tell them I have an elevator for a soul.
“Going up!” I want to sing out. But I keep my teeth together.
The man he's introduced steps into the sunlight. I don't remember him either but I haul my hand out of my pocket again. “Hello,” I say.
Does he shout, “Run for cover?”
No, I think he says something about recovering. That I am.
There's an awkward pause after that. Then Frank turns, looks behind him and leads someone forward. “And this,” he says, “is Matti.”
I can't place the person who steps toward me, but she hums with energy. It's robin's egg blue. “Here,” she says. She reaches something out to me. It's a ring on a silver chain. When she puts it in the palm of my hand it feels like water.
We all go to the cafeteria to drink cokes and eat big pieces of white cake that taste like air. I continue to squint. “I'm sorry,” I say. “I can't see very well. The medication I'm on blurs my vision.”
“We thought maybe you needed specs,” Frank says. He and Marsh laugh high up in their chests.
“I'm sorry,” I say again.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” Frank tells me. “Not that I know of anyway.”
I put both hands around my glass of coke, leave it on the table and bend over so I can drink with a straw. I'm afraid if I pick the glass up, I'll break it.
We're quiet after that. I probably have things in my head I want to say, but when everyone gets ready to leave, I can't recall any of them.
Matti turns and looks at me.
“Thank you for the ring,” I tell her. “Did you buy it for me?”
“No,” she says. “It's yours. But you can't keep the chain. That still belongs to me.”
W
HEN
H
OWARD'S NOT AROUND
I
SOMETIMES
sit out in front of the hospital administration building and listen to the cars that pull up there. You never have to second-guess the condition they're in. They're always pretty honest about it. Trucks are the same. And buses.
A bus pulls up while I'm there. Proud diesel engine idling like dark chocolate. People get off the bus and walk toward me. One of them stops and hands me a small, plastic bag.
“Here,” she says. It's Matti. I recognize her by the way she hums.
I open the bag and right away I know what's in it â
know
in this case means
remember.
My nose remembers. My mouth remembers. My stomach.
Million Dollar Fudge.
“Eat it if you want,” Matti says. She sits down on the other end of the bench. Her hum moves into a higher gear.
I take a bite of fudge â just one bite, and there's a reconnection somewhere in my brain.
“You can talk with your mouth full,” she says. “I don't care.”
I would talk with a mouthful. It's clear Matti expects me to. But there's so much going on inside my head. Rockets launching. Comets snapping their tails as they whiz by. A new galaxy opening up. And then there's the luscious, velvet sounding taste of what I've just put in my mouth.
“Slow down,” I caution myself. “Breathe.” But I can't stop myself. I eat another piece.
“It didn't seem like you remembered me when I was here before,” Matti says. “Marsh, either. He took care of you, too.”
“I remember some things,” I say around the planetarium-show in my mouth. “I usually can't tell if they actually happened.”
“We put too much pressure on you the other day. I should just have come alone.”
Matti talks about someone named Bee. A friend. Do I remember her? I shake my head, although the name might be familiar. She carries on with a string of questions like that while her voice gets farther and farther away. Or I do.
I'm on some kind of chocolate nirvana high. Smoke comes and goes. Fire. Demons. Water. Names. Ravens fly into my life and fly away again. They talk. They don't talk. Lights and ghosts fade.
Am I remembering? I don't know if that's what I'm doing. But if someone put a microphone in my face right then and asked me to comment on the experience, I'd says Matti's fudge should be served to patients in mental hospitals all across the country. It has done more to clear the smoke from my brain than all the green and yellow and alphabetical pills I've taken since I got here.
I'm not a doctor of course. And I'll continue to take their advice. But I will give this testimonial: by the time Matti leaves, the vision in my left eye is almost back to normal.
H
OWARD HAS A THEORY ABOUT MEMORY
. If something happens to you, that's traumatic, he says â something so big it hits you in the head and knocks you unconscious â your brain sticks it somewhere dark and puts a stone on top of it.
But this thing your brain is hiding from you will keep trying to come out, he says, so you end up using more and more of your energy to hold the stone in place. You do that because if the stone rolls away, all that painful stuff it was sitting on will come bursting out. And that can be almost as bad as whatever happened to you in the first place.
I don't know where Howard learned this. He may have made it up. It isn't what happens to me. There's no explosion when my memory starts to come back. No sudden blast of lightning.
It's more like what happens when you dig a hole in the sand at the seashore. It's completely empty when you're finished, but if you check back in a few minutes, water is already seeping back in.
I can't say for sure it was Matti's fudge that got me started, but hour by hour, drop by drop, my sorry life started to come back to me.
I'd be walking outside. I'd look down at my feet and I'd see the shoes I used to wear. They had pointed toes and the sides came up and buckled around my ankles.
“Queer boots,” my father used to call them.
Or I'd be lying in bed in my room at the hospital and suddenly I'd be in the room I had in his house. I won't use the word
home.
It was never like that.
I'd remember how I kept all my books hidden under the bed because when he was sober my father thought reading anything but the Bible lead to a relationship with the devil. He put anything he found in the fire.
Then when he was drunk, he was the fire.
He never laid a hand on me, but he let me know that nothing I did would ever be good enough. Over and over I heard that I was evil. Perverse. A blot on the family name.
I have the same dream several nights in a row. I want it to be a dream. I'm high up on an outcropping of rock. I take out my wallet and begin to pull things out of it. My school card. My library card. My driver's license.
I can read my name clearly on each one of them. It's not Dan Iverly.
One at a time, I send these cards spinning away from me and down into the gorge below. “I don't have a name any more!” I scream. “Now I'm nobody.”
After a while the dream is also with me during the day.
And then it's not a dream at all. It's my life.
I want to talk to Howard, but he's suddenly not around. I try to talk to my nurse instead. I even call him by his name.
“Morris,” I say, “I have a problem. Can we sit down and talk?”
Morris is pushing his pill cart around. In the past there have been thefts so he won't move two inches away from it. “Only one?” he says. “You're a lucky guy.”
“I don't feel lucky,” I tell him.
“You are.” Morris reaches into his pocket. “I've got a day pass here for you. Take the bus into town. You can even have an over-night on the weekend.”
“I don't have anywhere to go.”
“Try the library,” he says. “Have a coffee. Things are turning out well for you, so enjoy yourself.”
When Howard saunters up to me later that day he already knows about the pass. “Perfect timing,” he says. “We'll go to the King's Roost in Kingman tomorrow. They have a happy hour special there. Hot wings for twenty-five cents each. You'll love it.”
“There's something I need to talk to you about,” I say.
“Tomorrow,” Howard says. “Happy hour's a perfect time to talk.”
W
E PICK A BOOTH IN THE
corner of the King's Roost where it's quiet and we can talk. The waitress comes over chewing gum and smiling at the same time. “Boys,” she says. “I'm Crystal.” She pops her gum. If she's a day older than Howard, I'll be surprised. “What can I getcha?”
Howard takes three dollars out of his pocket and plunks them on the table. “Let's have a dozen hot wings,” he says.
Crystal stops chewing her gum. “A pitcher to go with that?”
“Two diet cokes,” Howard says. “No ice.” When she goes back to the kitchen he tells me proudly. “I come here a lot. I'm probably one of their best customers.”
We don't have to wait long before the wings arrive. I eat two and Howard vacuums up the rest. Crystal comes back when there's nothing on the table except empty glasses and a pile of bones.
“Anything else?” she says. She's irritated about something. When she pops her gum it sounds like she's shooting B. B.'s.
Howard puts down three more dollars. “The same again, please,” he says. “And can you make them hotter? Like, you do call them
hot wings
.”
“The manager wants me to remind you that it's happy hour,”
Crystal says. He'd like you to have a beer each, at least.”
“That's very nice of him,” Howard says. “Tell him thank you, but we're both on medication. We can't drink. And we're happy already.”
From the way she yanks her long hair back off her face, it's easy to tell Crystal isn't happy. Not even close.
We wait quite a while for the next order of wings and cokes. Long enough that I imagine they've had to scour the neighbourhood for more chickens. It gives me a chance to talk to Howard. “What I wanted to tell you,” I say, “is that Matti's not my real cousin.”
“You could have fooled me,” Howard says.