As Simple as Snow (8 page)

Before last period I stopped by Mr. Devon’s classroom to throw the thing in the trash.

“I like it,” he said. “It’s a statement.”

“Billy Godley’s got a better one,” I said.

“Well, how many pirates did you see today?”

“About twenty.”

“And what was their statement?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t even know what mine was.”

Mr. Devon motioned me to follow him into his office, where he pulled a book from one of his shelves. “Look at these,” he said. “Brillo pads and soup cans. Not so different from cheese boxes, are they? And these are in museums and books.”

“Maybe I should get that out of the trash, then,” I said.

Mr. Devon laughed. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

A book on his desk caught my attention.
Arshile Gorky.
It was the same one I’d seen at Anna’s. “Did Anna borrow that from you?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Anna. That’s your friend, right?”

“Yeah. She had the same book.”

“Oh, really? Maybe we should all get together and talk about art sometime.”

“She’d probably like that,” I said.

The book was a coincidence, I guess, and later Anna made it clear that she didn’t want to have any conversation with Mr. Devon, let alone one about art. At least that’s what she told me.

 

 

 

When the final bell rang and I went to my locker, I realized that I hadn’t worn a coat. It was because of that stupid costume I’d had on in the morning. You would think that someone would have reminded me, been looking out for me. Isn’t that what mothers are for? And of course she wasn’t picking me up after school. Which meant that I had to walk home with no coat, no hat, and no gloves. I started out of school and walked slowly past parents parked in their cars, waiting for their sons and daughters, in hopes that someone would see my plight and offer some help.

“Hey, cheese loaf,” I heard someone yell at me. I turned around. It was Anna. She was hurrying out the door. “Where’s your pretty yellow wrapper?”

“Billy Godley is wearing it.”

“Come on, you were a lot more believable as a box of cheese than he was.”

“I’m sure I was.”

“Where are you going now?”

“Home, I guess.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“I forgot it this morning.”

“Do you want to wear mine?” It was a man’s coat. An old black overcoat from the 1940s or 1950s. It probably would have fit me.

“That’s okay,” I said.

“You could wear my blazer,” she said.

“I wouldn’t want to misrepresent Satan’s School.”

“My mom’s supposed to pick me up. Do you want us to give you a ride home?”

“That would be great.”

“Who knows, maybe we can convince her to take you home after a while. Instead of right away, I mean.”

“That would be even better.”

Mrs. Cayne pulled into the circular drive in front of the school, and Anna went and spoke with her and then motioned me to the car. “Get in front,” Anna said, “so you can be closer to the heat.”

It was the first time that I had seen Anna’s mother up close in the daytime. She looked crazier than ever. Her hair was particularly wild that day, and seemed magnetically drawn to the roof of the car. There was a pencil sticking out of the back of her hair, as if someone had jabbed it into her skull.

“So where’s your costume?” Mrs. Cayne asked.

“I took it off late in the day,” I said.

“Anna said you went as a block of cheese.”

“Velveeta.” I didn’t want to correct her.

“That’s interesting. Seems like a good idea for a costume.”

“It seemed that way, but it wasn’t really.”

“Not very practical?”

“Exactly. Cheese doesn’t offer a lot of range of motion.”

Mrs. Cayne laughed. It has to be a good thing when you make your girlfriend’s mom laugh. Especially when she’s thinking that you’re an idiot for (1) going to school dressed as a box of cheese and (2) forgetting your coat right after a snowstorm.

 

 

 

When we got to the Caynes’, Mrs. Cayne offered me some candy. She had bowls of chocolates and M&M’s and nuts all over the place. “I can’t eat any of this stuff,” she said. She always said that. You might think that she had so many bowls of stuff around the house because it was Halloween, but they were there every time I was at their house. And I always saw her eating it. She would never take more than one piece of candy out of a bowl, but when you have twenty bowls of stuff lying around, that adds up. And Mrs. Cayne always said the same thing: “I can’t eat any of it. Help yourself.”

I left Mrs. Cayne and her candy and went with Anna to her room. She closed the door and cleared a space on the floor for us to sit, pushing books and discs and papers into a heap under her desk. She dug around in a pile of discs and pulled out one with a dark cover, and white lines forming jagged mountains on the black. It looked like a cross between an X ray and a topographic map. “This was my dad’s favorite band, when he was in college,” she said, and put the CD in the player. She turned on her computer and showed me some fan sites. “The lead singer killed himself two days before they were starting their U.S. tour.”

“It sounds like it,” I said.

She gave me a disapproving look and moved on, jumping from site to site, subject to subject. We moved from the band to the city of Manchester to a site about London. “Have you ever been?” she asked.

“No. I haven’t been anywhere.”

“There’s nothing wrong with here.”

“Are you serious?”

“Sure. This is fine by me. You might want to try and see the world someday, though.”

“And where have you been?”

“I’ve been lurking around in the dark,” she said, “waiting for you.”

She ejected the disc and fished around for another. The cover was a black-and-white photograph of an antenna and wires. “My dad just played this for me yesterday,” she said.

It wasn’t music. People were reciting numbers in foreign languages, over and over, often barely discernible behind the static. A horn or a buzzer went off every few seconds. There were four discs of the stuff, recordings of radio broadcasts.

“What is it?”

“Nobody knows,” she said. “It’s been going on a long time, for more than twenty years. Some people think that they’re coded messages, used by spies, the CIA, KGB, stuff like that.”

There was a knock on the door. I quickly got off the bed. It was her father.

“Please keep the door open,” he said. He looked at the stereo. “What do you think of this?”

“It’s weird,” I told him.

“Have you ever heard anything like it?”

“No.”

“Are you staying for dinner?”

I looked at Anna and she nodded at me to accept. I did. “I just need to call my mom,” I said.

“Well, after dinner, let’s go listen to some more of this,” he said. “But on the radio.”

 

 

 

Mrs. Cayne was dressed in a princess costume when we came to sit at the table. She had her hair pulled back so that she could fit her funnel-shaped hat on her head, and I noticed for the only time a resemblance between her and her daughter.

“What does your mother do for Halloween?” Mrs. Cayne asked me.

“She likes to bake.” This wasn’t entirely a lie. My mother bought the cookie dough that comes in a tube, and all you do is crack it open, separate the pieces, and put them on a cookie sheet and then into the oven. She would take the fresh-baked cookies and go sit in the dark. When I used to dress up and go trick-or-treating, my mother would have a spread of candy. Actually, it was a well-ordered regiment. She would arrange the candy in neat, precise rows, and then re-sort and rearrange the rows as she handed out the candy. It was maddening to watch this compulsion, which demonstrated an organization and ardor she failed to exhibit anywhere else. This woman who couldn’t file or answer a phone properly could arrange candy in rows on the hall table, alphabetically or by size or according to who knows what exact system, and then dispense the candy in a logic and method known only to her, but in an obviously even way, updating the rows so that they kept their structural integrity. How was that possible?

Once I had stopped dressing up in a costume and bringing home candy, my parents stopped handing it out. It must have had something to do with reciprocity. I could imagine my father running the numbers in his head, seeing the debits, the red numbers piling up with every knock. He always hated kids’ coming to the door anyway. “Are there any worse sounds than doorbells?” he grumbled. So now my parents retreated to their usual spots in the house—my father to his den of solitude, and my mother to eat cookies in the dark, so that no one would think they were home.

As we headed down to the Caynes’ basement after dinner, a group of trick-or-treaters came to the door. “Where’s the witch?” they kept saying.

“No witches,” Mrs. Cayne answered calmly. “Only princesses live in this house.”

I looked at Anna, but she didn’t even acknowledge that anyone had said anything.

the basement

A door off the kitchen led to the basement at the Caynes’. There wasn’t much down there, but it was away from the rest of the house, and you could hear anyone coming. No one could sneak up on you or surprise you.

The stairs led to a large room, maybe forty feet by forty feet, almost perfectly square, with a small utility room right by the stairs, that housed the furnace and hot-water heater and all that junk. Behind the stairs was an old bumper pool table, and a beat-up brown sofa against one wall. At the other end of the basement was another sofa, positioned near a wood-burning stove that heated the place. While most of the basement was underground, there was a door that led outside. You only had to walk up a few steps and you were underneath a wooden deck at the back of the house that overlooked the yard sloping toward the street.

Mr. Cayne led us past a stack of boxes left over from their move and past an ancient TV set. It was the only TV in the house. “Is that color?” I joked.

“It is color, isn’t it, Dad?” Anna said. Mr. Cayne laughed, but his soft-boiled features turned menacing, and I could almost see the man who was capable of crushing somebody’s wrist and pulling an arm out of its socket. Anna didn’t say another word until he left us alone.

“We have six TVs,” I said. “Two for each of us. I don’t think there’s ever a time when one isn’t on somewhere in the house.”

Mr. Cayne continued toward the end of the room, “This is my workbench.” He pointed to a countertop, maybe eight feet long, with four cabinet doors and a row of four drawers underneath. Another pair of doors were above the counter, and a series of cubbyholes in various sizes beside those. A large pegboard covered the wall to the right of the workbench, where his tools hung in haphazard fashion. The top of the bench was covered with more tools, fishing tackle, and empty shotgun shells, as well as old radios and radio parts. There was also a machine to make shotgun shells, and a shortwave radio, a gray box with a bunch of dials set up on a corner of the workbench. “I’m not allowed to have this upstairs,” he explained, then turned it on and patiently navigated the static until he found a broadcast.

“This is above the medium-wave band you’re familiar with,” he told me. “It’s a huge space, over twenty times larger than the medium-wave band. There’s everything here, news and music, amateur radio operators, Coast Guard ships, commercial airlines, military communications. You can listen to broadcasts from all over the world.”

He kept a notebook where he logged the frequency of the stations he liked and what time he listened to them. He consulted his log and tuned to a broadcast from Kuwait and then one from Algeria. I couldn’t understand any of it, but he was clearly enjoying it. He seemed like Anna then, his words spilling out and his enthusiasm infectious. He wasn’t trying to force it on me; he just thought I would like it as much as he did. I didn’t see the attraction at first, but then he tuned to some stations that sounded like the disc Anna had—maybe they were the same ones. It was like voices from outer space, trying to tell us something. Some were happy voices, some sounded like machines, and some appeared to be pleading for someone to understand them.

“There’s all this stuff floating around out there,” Mr. Cayne said, “and nobody knows what it means.”

“Do you ever send messages back?” I asked.

“It’s one-way only. I’ve got a buddy who can broadcast messages, though. I like to listen.”

“Can we listen to your friend’s broadcast?”

Mr. Cayne ignored me and went back to searching for stations. Anna had left us at some point in his demonstration and was sitting on the couch. After listening a few more minutes he turned to me. “You should think about getting one of these.”

“Maybe I will.” I don’t know if I really meant it when I said it. I was trying to be polite. He nodded and went to the stairs, leaving the door open when he reached the top. I joined Anna on the couch. “How much time does he spend down here?”

“Not as much as he’d like you to believe,” she said. “That’s what’s nice about it. It’s a good place to get away from him, actually.”

 

 

 

Anna and I spent a lot of time in the basement over the following months. She would turn off the lights and we would lie on the couch and listen to the world woozily making its way across the airwaves to us. It was almost pitch-black in the basement, with only the cool light from the dials of the shortwave and the red glow from the door of the stove. The radio messages would float, hypnotically, rhythmically, monotonously, into the room. I remember especially one broadcast: a woman’s voice slowly, calmly repeating,
“Seis, siete, tres, siete, cero . . .”

Anna moved toward me in the darkness. I could feel her trying to find me, but I didn’t want to help. I waited for her to find me on her own. She brushed her hand against my chest and then slowly pushed it up my neck and chin. She pressed herself against me and held my chin in her hand until her mouth found mine. The woman on the radio was still repeating,
“Seis, siete, tres, siete, cero,”
again and again.