Because You'll Never Meet Me (5 page)

As far as echolocation goes, when I was nine or so I went through a pretty sizable dolphin obsession. We have a small fishpond a few acres away from our cabin that I've hiked to before. But there are, surprisingly, no dolphins in it. (Why couldn't I be a hermit at a beach house? I'll never see the ocean….)

Here's what I've learned about echolocation: dolphins can click at frequencies so high that most people can't hear them. Most humans can hear sounds as low as 20 hertz, which doesn't sound like anything but feels a bit like being underwater with pressure on your ears, and as high as 20,000 hertz, which is probably like ALL CAPS, if ALL CAPS were a seriously pissed-off teakettle. But there have been a few documented cases where scuba divers swimming with dolphins could feel vibrations in the water. And here's the weird part:

Some people felt some emotion in the vibrations. They could sense if the dolphins were happy, or sad, or scared that a boat was gonna come and make tuna of them. These dolphins were sending their feelings into the world. What if I could see sound waves instead of electricity? What color would dolphin feelings be?

(Liz said this was the “girliest” question I've ever asked. I know that cowboys are manly, but why? And somehow dolphin noises are … girly? Who writes these rules?)

Anyhow, maybe the reason people avoid you is because the emotions your brain sends out when you click are kind of … negative emotions? Clicking is a nervous habit. And you do it more when you're worried about this kid who follows you home. Is he what folks call a “bully”? Is there a German word for that? I checked the German dictionary, and it said
Tyrann
, which sounds like
tyrannosaurus
. But he sounds less like an awesome tyrannosaurus and more like a loser. Maybe you're clicking unhappiness at people, and they're sending it right back in echoes.

I hope this doesn't sound dumb. What I'm getting at is some people can be really terrible. But you have to work harder not to let it faze you, because if you let them make you feel that way, you're just adding to the mess of unhappiness in the air.

I don't understand why you're so self-conscious. You seem pretty cool to me, even if you are kind of stuffy. I'm wondering what could have happened to make you despise Moritz Farber. Moritz Farber is not even a little boring.

Like I said, you've got all the makings of a comic book superhero! If people give you shit for being pretty cool, stand up and peel your goggles off and scare them away. Laugh maniacally and send happy dolphin-waves—

Actually, I mean it. I think you
should
try pulling the goggles off sometime. Have you ever done that? If you're so ugly (shut up and hit yourself over the head with the rolled-up pages again), you can send them running for the hills! Maybe then you won't have to whimper anymore. Lenz won't stop if you don't stop him.

What are you so afraid of? I can't even ride a bike down my driveway, but you can do anything. Anything you want, wherever you want!

In fact, your Magic Brain Vision (henceforth called MBV) makes my allergies look pathetic on all fronts. So I'll try to get to the good parts of my story. I'll try to hurry and get to Liz, to stop you from “talking smack,” as kids say.

I'm going to rush my earliest years. I want to get to when I was old enough to read, old enough to wonder why the heck I couldn't handle batteries, old enough to stop peeing on household pets. Since you trust my storytelling so much (which is one of the coolest compliments—stories are everything to me), I think I'll tell you three stories from when I was a little kid. Three memories of three accidents that really stick out in my mind. Three's okay, but I kind of wish it were five. Because you know who really
was
a good storyteller? Shakespeare. He wrote plays in five acts.

Focus, Ollie.

The Linear Autobiography of
Oliver Paulot, the Powerless Boy
PART TWO: EARLY DAYS, IN THREE ACCIDENTS

1. The Fire

Mom used the money from my father's life insurance to buy our cabin in the woods. The cabin is shaped like a triangle; apparently
it's part of some sort of ancient worldwide tradition to let your rooftop trail all the way down to the grass. The almighty A-frame! There's moss and ivy creeping up the roof from the ground, and sometimes it gets mildewy in the peak of the house, where my bedroom makes up the top floor, and it starts to smell a little like pond scum and cedar. Downstairs, there's Mom's bedroom, the kitchen, the living room, and the bathroom, all paneled in dark wood that Mom calls “too seventies to abide.” Maybe that's why she hangs tapestries and quilts and paintings on every surface. There's a porch in the back, and one in the front with an awning that doesn't really offer enough shade in the summertime.

The cabin is on the outskirts of Rochdale, Michigan, hours away from where Auburn-Stache lives. My whole life long, he's come to check up on me at least twice a month. He's a kook, but I suppose I love him or something.

Anyhow, one of my weirdest memories begins with one of those checkups.

I've never seen Dr. Auburn-Stache drive. He's too careful about my allergies. So he parks the brown smudge of his latest Impala at the end of the two-mile-long driveway. (That's some nonsense number of kilometers. I'm just saying that our driveway is more like a long, thin dirt road.) Then he buzzes and flits to the house with a suitcase in hand. He doesn't wear a lab coat, which is kind of disappointing. He wears paisley dress shirts and corduroy pants. For a long time I thought this was how men dressed, but Mom smirks and says Auburn-Stache is “quirky.”

Usually I get a standard physical check from him, but he has to be creative about some things. For years I've had this sort of awkward, deflated Mohawk haircut. Not by choice. By the hand of Auburn-Stache! Whenever he gives me a physical, he has to look
into my ears and nose and mouth without a penlight. (You remember how penlights and I don't get along.)

So he has this wacky old apparatus that's like a small adjustable gas lantern with a pane of magnifying glass in front of it, and a funnel attached to that. He holds that against the side of my head whenever he wants to check my ears for infections. (It's his makeshift otoscope.) He says having hair on the sides of my head is a fire hazard, but I think he just likes to make me look like a rooster.

He used to sit me on his knee out on the front porch, where the light is better. One time when I was pretty little, Dr. Auburn-Stache pressed his otoscope against the side of my head and I didn't feel like sitting still anymore. So I wriggled away and somehow knocked the otoscope onto the wooden porch, and the lantern shattered. There was a sudden burst of heat as the doormat went up in flames, and then the nearest potted plant, and then the wreath on the open door, and then the carpet in the breezeway. I remember feeling like the fire had a mind of its own, sort of like electricity—like it was out to get me.

Good thing Dr. Auburn-Stache is always so twitchy, because he bundled me up and flitted and buzzed away from the porch. He deposited me on a stump pretty far away from the cabin and told me to “Stay!” like I was the drooling puppy you compared me to.

I think he was going back to rescue Mom, who'd been inside making tea. She needed no rescuing. She strode right out through the fiery doorway and onto the porch with Dorian Gray pinched under her arm, both of them looking more annoyed than anything else. He was clawing her up pretty good. Out on the lawn, she thrust the cat into Auburn-Stache's arms before sprinting to the garage to call the fire department.

I sat there on the stump, just blinking, watching the flames lick the brick chimney. The roof was catching fire by the time we heard the sirens. I wish I could describe what it looked like. The fire engine, I mean. I thought Mom's car was gritty, but that was before that diesel engine. I could feel the humming electricity even in the soles of my feet, even when it wasn't within sight. I could feel that thing coming like an electric stampede of red weight and light at my temples, and that must have shown on my face because Auburn-Stache lifted me up into his arms and jogged me away from it as it pulled up. Dorian Gray was meowing like nobody's business, and Auburn-Stache's chest rose and fell like running was the last thing Englishmen in paisley were used to.

There was Mom, staring at our house going up in flames, watching smoke and ash pour from the haven she'd set up for herself and her kid, and she still looked at least halfway exasperated about it all. And I only had eyes for the flashing lights and bleeding black smog that smothered the fire truck. It's what I imagine an old locomotive might look like, if that locomotive came roaring out of hell. Like some massive battering ram, all black and red smoke and bursts of white light that churned and spat into oblivion before my watering eyes. Grond! Grond! (Read Tolkien!)

I remember seeing some other amazing things. I saw policemen with walkie-talkies that left trails of saffron dust in the air whenever they buzzed with noise. I remember the blue light atop cars piercing through the clouds around the fire truck, but they didn't look only blue to me. They were spinning fronds of multicolor, fanning streaks of chartreuse and aquamarine that stabbed through puffs of burgundy and umber.

I should have looked away. My skull hummed against my brain. My nose was running, my eyes poured, and it had less to do with
the fire than it did with the electrical auras buzzing in the air, making me itch from head to toe like I had some sort of volcanic sun rash.

But I saw so many colors that night, so many that maybe even you should be a little jealous.

Mom wouldn't let anyone near me. She couldn't be sure they weren't stashing phones or Tasers in their utility belts. Auburn-Stache chuckled when he saw I'd singed the side of my pants, but his eyes were shining. When Mom stomped back over to us, I rounded my shoulders in preparation for an almighty reaming.

Mom flew right past me and had Auburn-Stache by the shoulders, shaking him.

“What did you do? Another
harmless
digital watch?”

“Of course not!” he protested. “It was an accident! Electromagnetism wouldn't simply light a fire!”

“Don't say ‘of course not,' as if you've never pushed him before. Oliver is not one of your experiments!”

“You don't need to tell me that.” The fire in his eyes was only halfway due to the reflection of the flames behind us.

“He isn't
your
son.”

I was gaping at the pair of them because this was a bigger spectacle than the fire, even. Mom and Auburn-Stache
never
fought. They sipped beers on the porch some evenings, got teary eyed and red faced when they thought I wasn't peeking down with binoculars.

Now Mom was looking at Auburn-Stache like he'd been beating me.

“Meredith,” he said slowly, eyes reflecting the firelight, “I would never harm him. You have to know that.”

Mom let out a laugh like a bark. “I think I can cut Ollie's hair from now on.”

“Please.”
The blood left his cheeks, Moritz.

I rushed forward and grabbed her elbow. “Mom! He didn't do anything!”

She slumped. “Not this time, he didn't.”

Mom, covered in black ash, let go of Dr. Auburn-Stache, wrapped her arms around me, and squeezed too tightly.

I could see Dr. Auburn-Stache over her shoulder, white against the red-black.

We stayed in a tent for a month, which the police thought was weird. But camping out and cooking hot dogs was an adventure while we waited for the cabin to be repaired. When we finally moved back in, Mom set our suitcases down in the untouched living room and sighed.

“
Tch
. Even hellfire couldn't kill the seventies?”

I threw myself across the orange tartan couch, burying myself in cushions. “Nope!”

Mom sat down beside me. “Ollie. Look at me.”

She was so quiet that I did.

“You're too young to remember the digital watch. But if Greg—Dr. Auburn-Stache—
ever
tries to show you something electric, you have to tell me right away.”

“But … he's my doctor.”

“I'm your mother.”

I think I was just relieved to hear he'd keep visiting. That I'd get to see color in his face again.

We've got a living room
covered
in bookshelves, Moritz, and one shelf is entirely stacks of encyclopedias. A couple years after
Auburn-Stache and Mom argued, I read the word
electromagnetism
.

Basically, electromagnetism is as strong a force in the world as gravity. I mean, if you can count on anything, you can count on things falling when you drop them and the air being full of electricity. Subatomically, electric particles are attracting and repelling each other
all the dang time
.

But if I'm allergic to electricity, how come static doesn't kill me? I've had a few shocks in my socks on the wooden kitchen floor, and those didn't give me seizures. And I know about anatomy. There's electricity in
our
brains, Moritz. Walt Whitman doesn't need to sing any body electric. We're all a little electric already, with or without pacemakers.

So how come I'm not permanently dead yet?

This is my working theory: my epilepsy isn't due to allergies. It goes beyond that.

I don't
get along
with electricity. I repel it and it repels me. Nobody's just
born
that different. It defies science and logic, Moritz.

It's just easier to say I'm sick. Easier for Mom to coop me up like an invalid.

So you
have
to tell me about the laboratory, Moritz. Even if it bores you. I'm not needling you now. I'm
asking
you. If you were created in a lab, was I created there, too? I mean, how else are you and I connected?

What else can explain the mess I'm in? If I'm an experiment like you, I need to explain that to Liz. I need her to know that there were bigger issues than me being a walking disaster to excuse—well, not excuse—but to
explain
that I couldn't help what happened when we went camping. I couldn't help her and I couldn't—