Because You'll Never Meet Me (3 page)

“Nuclear explosion.” I stood up and stretched.

“
Implosion
. You stayed in one piece. But something was collapsing and burning under your skin, in your skull. You know how it feels better than I do.”

I shrugged. I've had enough seizures that I can't imagine the shock of the first one.

“You were so small,” she said, picking up her needle again. “No wonder it killed you.”

Anytime I was conscious, I was seizing. They were all worried about my brain cells because seizures burn them up pretty rapidly. I was sedated and stuck in an incubator while Mom was on bed rest.

Last spring I asked Auburn-Stache for his side of the story. We were on the back porch early one warm evening, and he was taking my blood pressure by the pinkish light of sunset over the tree line.

“Tell me about when I was a baby, Auburn-Stache.”

“What? Yet again?”

“Yeppers.”

“Sometimes, Ollie, you sound unnervingly like a five-year-old.”

“You mean right now, or when I stamp my feet and demand ice cream?”

He smirked and adjusted his glasses. The armband tightened on my upper arm. “Ice cream is serious business, kiddo. It renders us all five, as you well know.”

“Once more with feeling, Auburn-Stache.”

“Tch.”
He raised a mocking eyebrow. The armband released. “You were weeks early, or I'd have been there. Already you couldn't stay put!”

Auburn-Stache had been friends with my dad ever since they both worked together (at the mysterious laboratory no one likes to talk about?), and Mom called him the moment she went into labor. She probably screamed at him, like anyone being split in two would. He was working as an on-call physician a few counties away. He jokes that he got out of work and on the road so fast that he left his previous patient on the table with two limbs too few. Very funny, Auburn-Stache.

“I couldn't stop thinking about the penlight. It left the faintest trail of hives on your skin! ‘Aha!'” He re-created his moment of epiphany, standing up from the lawn chair with his finger in the air. “Photosensitive epilepsy!”

“Sit down, you kook.”

He knew that flashing lights sometimes cause seizures. Many people's auras are triggered by cycles or patterns of lights or images. Auburn-Stache bugged the hell out of the old doctor until he agreed to put me in a dark room. But I was still in an incubator,
so I still got sick. I got so sick that I flatlined. Auburn-Stache resuscitated me.

“But I never got around to actually placing the defibrillator paddles on your chest and back! The moment I held them near your diaphragm, the shock of their proximity alone somehow restarted your heart”—he clapped his hands—“and set you to seizing again.”

“Man, sounds like it was a party!”

“It would have been rather exciting for me, had you not been in pain.” His face went unusually still. “You should not think I'm so terrible as that, Ollie.”

I couldn't think of what to say. The fireflies were beginning to hover around above the grass when he said, “But you aren't entirely wrong. There are all kinds of adventures in the world. In that moment when you woke back up, the paddle was repelled from you. It was as if you had an electric charge of your own.”

He had me released into his care, and then he bundled me up in rubber hospital gear and wheeled Mom and me out to his Impala while the hospital staff looked on without much hope, all teary eyed. (Artistic license, okay?)

I bet that car could have killed me all over again. Even the tiny lights that come on when the door opens could have done me in! Even the FM radio. Even automatic window switches!

I don't know what he and Mom talked about while he drove out of town. Maybe they talked about my dad. Once we were past the last gas station, on the brink of the forests where tourists liked to go camping, he pulled me out of the car and laid me in the ferns.

But I still trembled, so he tore off his jacket and his phone and left them behind. He carried me deep into the woods, Mom following behind him. He asked her to wait in the car, but that just
wouldn't be like her. I bet she looked comical, stumbling over branches in a hospital gown.

At some point under the trees somewhere, the seizing stopped. I opened my eyes.

Mom told me later that Auburn-Stache laughed then—with joy, or relief, or the sort of mad glee that doctors and scientists get swept up in when they solve a puzzle. But Mom didn't laugh.

“I knew then that there were things you would always be powerless to change about your life.” She spoke softly. “And that I couldn't protect you from all of them.”

Bleak, Mom. Bleak.

You can await Part Two with bated breath! I can leave out some of the finer details of my toddling years, like every time Mom burped me or the time I decided to pee on our blue Persian cat, Dorian Gray. I can be mysterious, too, all right.

As much as I like mystery stories, it's hard to solve them when you're stranded in northern Michigan. The only Watson candidate I have is a cat who still resents me. I've read a lot of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie and a ton of Case Closed, but I'm no detective. I don't have a pipe, for one thing. I think that's required.

Here are the clues you've given me, Moritz Farber:

1. You have a pacemaker. Oh, and the name of your lower-left heart chamber is actually your left ventricle, or your
ventriculus cordis sinister
. You may win at languages, but
you
didn't spend four months handcrafting a life-size model skeleton complete with clay organs, Styrofoam lungs, and hand-spun alveoli!

2. You can't read by yourself. Your father had to read my letter
to you. But this paper was typed on a computer in, yes,
real good
English. So although electricity is no problem for you, there is something wrong with your eyes. But in that case, clue #3 seems strange….

3. What the heck do you mean, you've “seen EVERYTHING”? Why was that part of your letter typed in capital letters? To me, capitalizing things doesn't come across as italicizing. It looked like you were SHOUTING AT ME! ANGRILY!

4. People have said cruel things to you in the past. This one is speculation. I mean, you hate your peers. But not just because they're idiots, because I think idiots are probably nice people sometimes. If it's about abusing language, I don't have to go to school to know that words can really suck, even when they aren't insults. I'll do my best, Moritz Farber, not to slash at you with them. OR WRITE AT YOU IN AGGRESSIVE CAPITAL LETTERS.

5. You typed your letter, so I know you have a computer. Don't even get me started on what a bottomless sense of emptiness I get when I hear about the Internet, a weird electric Neverland where everyone giggles at cats and updates myyouface pages or something. I mean, when I read manuals for old Internet browsers, it feels like I'm reading a really bland cyberpunk novel, and half the time I end up falling asleep and waking up with newsprint on my face.

Part of me wants to ask you all about it, but what would be the point? I try to be optimistic! It doesn't do me much good to hear about things I can never have.

But anyhow. I want to tell you about the first time I saw a computer, because it was also the first time I ever saw Liz.

It was at Junkyard Joe's, many years ago. Joe's trailer is the only place within a few miles of ours. The cars in his yard are the only safe ones I've ever seen—dead, scattered across the lawn like rusting bones in some mechanical elephant graveyard. I used to sneak away to crawl between them.

The little girl on Joe's porch didn't see me crouching behind an old pickup truck, spying on her. It was Liz, but I didn't know that yet. She was sitting at the lopsided picnic table and biting her lip, poking away at what would now seem like a massive brick of a thing, oblivious to the strips of verdant energy that gathered around her fingertips whenever she pressed the keys. The white light of the screen was reflected in her eyes. It made me think she was staring at the moon.

Did the screen reflect her like she reflected it?

I knew that if I got closer to her, my stomach would knot. Veins in my temples would bulge. I would convulse and fall and hit my head on the wooden steps.

But maybe seeing whatever she saw on that screen would have been worth a seizure.

Thanks for writing me back. The boredom's already shallower! I even got my lazy butt out of bed and went downstairs for a couple of hours to dig out the English-German dictionary, so Mom'll be singing your praises soon. You know, when she gets out of bed herself.

I'll leave the rest to you, Moritz. (Can I call you Mo?) And I've written way too much again, so I guess I'll save the questions about laboratories for later, but I hope you can start to trust me. I don't know why you think I would ever want to say anything cruel to you.

I mean, I've already given you lots to make fun of me for. If I'm ever an asshole to you, I hereby give you the right to call me a “catpisser”!

Don't tell me this isn't a
little
fun.

~ Ollie

You are a difficult tic to ignore, Oliver. I cannot despise you. Yet.

I am no Oscar Wilde and no Mo. I
am
an expert in oral storytelling. I have listened to hundreds of books. Dozens of authors and readers. Yet I have rarely heard a voice quite like yours.

My father has a strong Schwäbisch accent. He is not the best reader. His voice is like gravel. When he speaks, I must lean in close to find what he means within what he says. Before he knew me, I doubt he spoke to anyone. Now he tries to be heard. For my sake. During his reading yesterday evening, I heard you. On the fifth-floor apartment balcony overlooking the cars driving across Kreiszig's noisome
Freibrücke
, I discovered something about you. Something you are unaware of:

Even if you are powerless, your words are not.

You are a natural storyteller, Oliver. That may be
why
I
do not trust you—your sincerity is implausible. You and I are very different. Yet you made me understand something of what it means to be you. Most people aren't capable of making me feel anything. Let alone sympathy.

Most people would have been angry after my last letter. I was condescending. I mocked you outright. But you respond by telling me exactly who you are. You offer me new insults to use against you? It seems cruel to withhold my story when you are incapable of doing so. It is as if I am avoiding a puppy for fear of it drooling on me.

And your detective skills are not entirely wretched. You are right about my eyes.

I doubt I can be as endearing about it as you are. But let me tell you who I am.

I am Moritz Farber. I was born listening.

I was born without eyes. Do not ask if I am blind. I have never been blind. But I was born with no eyeballs in my sockets. While I doubt I wailed as loudly as you did, others have since screamed bloody murder at the sight of me.

Oliver, you should be grateful you were raised in a cabin and not a laboratory. I spent my earliest years in a testing facility. I do not intend to talk about it. Needle me as much as you like. I have felt worse. I have felt actual needles.

Yet I have also thought this: at least scientists could bear the sight of me.

You have never seen an eyeless boy. Perhaps not even in all those comics and books that occupy your time. Imagine you are looking at your dear Liz. Imagine that above her
button nose and her sunshine smile there are no eyes reflecting a computer screen. Imagine that there is nothingness there—just skin. No expression whatsoever. Imagine this. Can you say you love her still?

I have no eyes, no eyelids. No eyebrows. I grow my dark hair long in the front so that my fringe hides the worst of it.

But there is nothingness on my face. Who would not scream?

I do not say “
tch!
” like you and your mother do. That would be irritating.

Sometimes I click my tongue against the roof of my mouth when I wish to see anything with greater clarity: If I am curious about the pores in someone's nose. The dust in the cobblestones outside. Anything minuscule requires this extra effort on my part. A focused click and, yes. I can see EVERYTHING.

Such clicks are usually unnecessary. My surroundings create enough sound waves to see by. This is the only advantage of living around other people. Kreiszig is a city of bustle. Of bodies and movement and clatter. No one can see what I see in the morning fruit and bread markets, where people haggle and stack and chop and banter. The noisier an area is, the clearer it is to me.

During school I can see well enough to avoid those who might be looking for me. See hiding places that others miss. Empty closets and classrooms. I can duck beneath tables when familiar footsteps trudge closer, scraping against the floor. At least my nothingness gives me warning.