Mad Boys (2 page)

I moved on, out of the cemetery onto a street, hot on my bare feet. Two-story, wood-frame houses crowded together. Lawns. Gardens brimming with vegetables. Hedges. Sandboxes. Shade trees. The weather kindly. Must be late summer.

I heard the echo of a scared holler. Somebody had seen me, a kid probably.

A minivan approached, slowed; woman inside gave me a funny look; in response I gave her a funny look, or so I think she thought. In fact, I was trying to catch my reflection in her window to see what I looked like, but I missed it because she sped off.

Someone had been washing a car in a yard. Garden hose draped over a tree branch where it threw down a fine spray. Nobody in sight. The car wet under the sun and shiny as a gun barrel. I thought I might look at myself in its glass. Rainbows made by the hose spray against the sun. I forgot about me. Walk into the rainbows. Smell the rainbows. Touch the colors. I stepped into the spray, and the rainbow disappeared but the colors fawned over me.

After the water had washed the muck from my skin, I stepped out of the spray and looked at myself in the side mirror of the car. I saw a boy twelve or thirteen, dark skin, eyes of green and gold, stiff, shaggy hair the color of hardtop, body immature. Naked as the day he was born.

Then something really strange happened. I saw another boy in the mirror. He wore a silvery space suit. Although he had the features and build of a boy, he seemed very old and wise. He wore a tight-fitting cap, so I couldn’t see the color of his hair, but his skin was pale, as if it had never seen the sun. Eyes like black dimes looked at me with pity and spite, and I was afraid. As the light stroked his suit, colors flashed and disappeared. It was like looking at the belly of a trout. It was like looking at the back of a mallard duck. It was like looking into the mind of God. I turned around to where he should have been. Gone. I looked again at the mirror. Nobody there, not even me.

Next thing I knew I was in a speeding ambulance, while a brawny-armed woman attendant checked me over. Another attendant, a man, drove the vehicle. The siren wailed, and we tore through the streets. I was in a small city in a broad river valley surrounded by wooded hills. Main Street was wide and dead-ended into a town square with a white church at its head. I wondered if this town was home.

“Where am I?” I asked the attendant.

“He’s perking up,” the attendant said to the driver, who relayed the information to the hospital on a microphone he held in his hand.

“This is Keene, New Hampshire,” the attendant said to me.

“Keen?” I said.

“Yah, Keene.”

“Have I been here before?”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said, then barked at the driver. “Pulse fast and uneven, can’t give you a number; blood pressure one-fifteen over sixty.” She turned back to me. “What do
you
think? Have you been here before?”

I was suddenly suspicious because of the way she asked me that question. “I’m the thousand-year-old boy, and I’ve spent these last 999 years and 364 days and 23 hours on a spaceship.” I didn’t know why I said that; the words just spilled out.

“Is that so? A flying saucer?”

“We call it the mother ship.”

“We?”

“Yah, we.”

“Who are the others?”

“Boys. They study boys from Earth on the mother ship.” I was amazed, wondering as I spoke these words where they came from and whether they were true. They certainly felt true, but they did not seem to be my words, and I could tell that the attendant didn’t believe them.

“That’s real interesting, who is they?” the ambulance attendant asked.

“I can’t say. I promised. You’ll have to torture me to get me to talk.”

“I see. What did you say your name was?”

I tried to create a name by voicing it, but the sound came out horrible and twisted, “Xiphi.” I thought I would cry, but I held back.

“What’s that? I didn’t get it. Now tell me your name.”

She was trying to get information out of me, and I knew I had to deliberately throw her off the track. “We didn’t have names on the mother ship,” I said. “They gave us numbers. Mine was 29868836462323.”

“You have a nickname?”

“We didn’t have nicknames. They called us by our number.”

The attendant said to the driver, “Possible concussion. Possibly hallucinating.”

I closed my eyes and tried to think of my name. Or maybe my number, which I had already forgotten. I concentrated so hard I blacked out.

When I came to I was in the hospital. A nurse who looked like a female Santa Claus gave me a little smile and then stuck a needle in my arm. I wanted to pull away, but I could barely manage a mumble of protest. Didn’t realize how weak I was. Arms limp. Legs limp. Maybe I didn’t have any bones. Maybe I was a snake disguised as a boy. I could see the snake in my mind now, a slithery body with the face of a man. The image disappeared when the nurse spoke.

“Going to pump some sugar and spice into your veins to rehydrate you.” The nurse stroked my forehead. I liked the gentle touch of her hand, and I shut my eyes to feel it better.

An hour later I was awake and alert but still weak. My nurse introduced herself as Nurse Wilder. In her white uniform, white cap that swept down over her ears, and white cape, she looked like a tank in a wedding gown. She held my hand in her own big, dry hands, and she whispered, “As long as you’re my patient, I’m going to take good care of you. You can cooperate by not giving me any guano.” She screwed her face up into a fake glower. I knew I was going to like her.

My room was on the third floor. It had a television set equipped with cable, a bed, a dresser, a bathroom, a window with a view of the tops of pine trees partially blocking distant hills. There was also another bed (unoccupied) and a funny-shaped bowl on the floor.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A bedpan. For people who can’t get out of bed to go to the bathroom. Now you rest up until Doctor Hitchcock comes.” Nurse Wilder tucked me in and left the room.

As soon as the door shut, I jumped out of bed, grabbed the bedpan, and put it on my head. It was a little shaky, but if you added foam for a lining it would make a good helmet. I went into the bathroom to admire myself in the mirror. I looked like a soldier in an army of maniacs. I pranced around holding it squared away on my head. When I was bored with this act, I removed the “helmet” from my head and dropped it on the floor. I lifted my johnny gown and used the bedpan for the reason it was designed. It sounded a little bit like a ringing door bell. Then my aim went bad and I dribbled on my foot. I put the bedpan in the bathtub and went back to bed.

I clicked on the TV with the remote. Reception was great. For a while I didn’t watch anything in particular, just flipped through the channels until I stopped at a reel of the Earth from outer space. It was blue with wisps of clouds. Seen from the darkness, above and far away and maybe in a spaceship, the earth looked like an inviting place.

A minute later Doctor Hitchcock walked in. He was a big man with reddish-brown hair. I could tell it was dyed by the flecky gray beard stubble on his face. I was scared of him, because he reminded me a little of the Director in my imagination.

“How are we this afternoon?” he said. “What are we watching on television?”

“Program about the sky,” I said.

The doctor gave the TV a puckered look for a few seconds. “Oh, the depletion of our ozone layer,” he said.

“In the mother ship, they called it the Old Zone,” I said.

“Tell me about this Old Zone,” Doctor Hitchcock said. He started to poke and prod me, and I could see he didn’t really want to hear about the Old Zone or anything else I had to say. His friendly talk was just politeness. And he was in a rush. I wanted to apologize for putting him behind in his work. But the way he went about his business, as if I wasn’t really there, made me bashful, so I shut up.

After he left, Nurse Wilder brought me a plate of food. I asked her about my loss of memory. She said that in cases like mine the patients either got their memories back a little bit at a time over the course of a few weeks, or they didn’t get them back for months or even years. Sometimes never.

“How did I lose it?” I asked.

“A shock to your system.” She wouldn’t look at me; she stared out the window to the hill behind the pines.

“Oh,” I nodded and nodded again, as anybody does when they don’t want to let on that they don’t know what’s being said.

She turned and looked at me. “For a while, maybe, you were the devil’s child.”

“The devil.” A shiver of pleasure and terror shot through me. I asked Nurse Wilder to tell me about the devil.

“He changes to any shape he wants. Your fears. Your desires. Your dreams. Your guesses. But his touch is always the same. Like slimy fire.” She rolled her eyes and breathed like a hurrying hound. “Do you know Jesus?”

“I know the name. Religion. God, right?”

“Right. Jesus is the son of God. Jesus is God. And the Holy Ghost. The same. Three persons in one God.”

A picture appeared in my mind of a cranky, three-headed man with his three toothbrushes, three combs, and three toupees. I must have flinched, because Nurse Wilder brushed her hand against my forehead. “Are you all right? Did I scare you?”

“No,” I answered, “I was just thinking: There’s a God, and he comes in a three?”

“Yes. Have you been baptized?”

“I don’t know.”

“To be on the safe side, you should be baptized,” she said. “I will go to my priest. I will confess to him my sins. He will give me absolution, and I will be a child of God. Then I will return and baptize you, and you will be a child of God.”

“Baptize me? Will that get my memory back?”

“Not likely.”

“What good is it then?”

“Baptism qualifies you for heaven. Without it you either burn in the everlasting fires of hell or go to limbo.”

“Limbo?”

“A state of being where nothing happens.”

An image appeared in my mind: a sign off a multi-lane highway. “Like the weather forecast for San Diego, California.” The words just came out of me, as if spoken by someone else.

“See, you knew that. You know a lot of things. You just can’t remember why you know them.” She took my hands into her own. “Another benefit of baptism is heaven assigns you your own guardian angel. He’s always there, looking over you. Now pray with me.”

I liked that idea of a guardian angel. Nurse Wilder raised her eyes to heaven, and she prayed, “Man makes bad seem good, good seem bad.” Then she stopped and said, “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Repeat the words.”

So, I repeated the words—“Man makes bad seem good, good seem bad.” And she went on and I went on, line by line.

“We trust not good in man. So in God we trust.”

“I think I’ve heard that one before,” I whispered.

“Don’t think; thinking doesn’t go well with prayer.”

“In God we trust,” I prayed, then spoke, “Maybe you could clue me in a little, I’m not quite following what this prayer is all about.”

“Suppose I have a date,” she said.

“Aren’t you too old for that?”

“When you’re too old for that, you’re too old.” She squeezed my hands so hard they hurt. “Fact is I don’t have a date. My husband is in this very building at this very moment eaten up with cancer. But suppose I do have a date. His name is Mister Good. There he is. Job with benefits. Good intentions. Etcetera. Mister Good looks at me and tells me with his eyes what he sees. Older woman. Lines in her face. Fat in her cheeks—both upper and lower. Too much craftiness in her eyes. You think that’s going to make me happy?”

I shook my head no.

“Suppose Mister Bad shows up.” Nurse Wilder let go of my hands. “His eyes and his lips feed me apple-pie lies to make me swoon and forget my troubles. You see what I’m saying?”

As softly and as kindly as I could, I said, “No.”

“You must only trust in God, because in man, good makes bad and bad makes good.”

I still didn’t get it, but I wanted to move on to something else, so I said, “Now I understand.”

“That’s because God’s grace is already spreading through you. Have a good meal. Get a good night’s rest. Keep God’s gentle flame burning.” Nurse Wilder yawned. She was tired; a few seconds later she was gone.

I dug into the tray of food, some kind of meat in gravy, mashed potatoes, salad, carrots, slices of nice soft white bread with pads of margarine. I ate everything. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was.

After the meal, Doctor Hitchcock came to my room with four men and two women in white uniforms and badges on their lapels. Later Nurse Wilder told me they were beginner doctors. I was poked, pinched, prodded, squeezed, and punctured by needles. Quite an experience. Lights shined in my eyes, mouth, and even my. . . you know. Blood taken from my arm. Pee in a special plastic container, please. Move the elbow joint, please. Stand on tiptoes, please. I grew sick of pleases. As the examination progressed, I began to feel creepy and a little scared. A camera flash went off in my mind. In the afterimage of that light, it was as if I wasn’t there. As if I was drawing away from my body. “Hold still,” said Doctor Hitchcock, “we’re doing this for your own good.” I could see then, as Nurse Wilder had taught, that good makes bad.

Finally, they left. It was dark outside. I went to sleep with a single idea in mind: escape.

It was noon the next day before I woke up. Nurse Wilder brought me lunch—tuna salad, potato chips, extra pickles (because she liked me), and two glasses of milk. With each bite I could feel my strength returning.

Late in the morning a reporter and photographer from the
Keene Sentinel
newspaper arrived with Doctor Hitchcock. The doctor said that once my picture was in the paper, my parents would discover where I was and come and fetch me and take me home. I tried to picture these parents and this home in my mind, but drew a blank. It occurred to me that I had never had parents or a home; I was created out of nothing, for mysterious purposes, by Nurse Wilder’s three-headed God. He/She/It/Them thought things over and said to themselves, let’s make a boy. Let’s not worry about giving him parents and a childhood. Let’s just get him going and see what he does. They were up there in heaven, watching, and it was my job to put on a good show.