No One Belongs Here More Than You (9 page)

I should have left the second I saw he didn’t have Alzheimer’s. But I had a tingling in my arms. I was an angel looking down into the world, into one car on the world, into two members of mankind, into their souls, and into the place behind their souls: the void. She looked up, our eyes clicked, she remembered me from Early Chinese Philosophical Texts. Madeleine L’Engle’s husband opened his mouth. I could tell he was about to use one of the five question words: who, what, why, where, or when.

What?

That woman.

What woman?

She’s gone now.

Did she see us?

Yeah. She was in Early Chinese Philosophical Texts.

What?

We were in a class together.

Are you fucking with me? You knew her?

I should probably go.

Fuck! This is fucked! Did she see me?

No. I’m going now.

Is she still out there?

No, she’s gone.

How does anyone ever let go of anything? My book was a long glove clasping the dark shape I had loved. Inside the glove was one very pale young hand that had never learned to grip skin. It was so raw it looked wet. I fell into the eyes of every person I passed on the street. Food seemed impossibly strange. Children thought I was a child and tried to play with me, but I could neither play nor work, I could only wonder why. Why do people live at all. I read every single ad in the classifieds section each week. Real Estate, Employment, Counseling, Home Services, Getaways, Musicians Market, Dating, Women and Men Seeking Each Other and Themselves, Chance Meetings, and Automotive. I had narrowed it down to either
Power trio seeks excellent
2nd guitar for heavy rock or Angela Mitchell LCSW, therapy supporting
the integration of body, mind, spirit, and world
. I settled on Angela Mitchell because the power trio wanted an experienced gigger, and I wasn’t sure what that was. But as I rose in the elevator toward Angela’s office, I whispered the words “experienced gigger” to myself, and they calmed me. I hoped Angela Mitchell meant her ad literally. I imagined a couples counseling/séance for me and the dark shape.

But when I was sitting in her big soft chair, staring at an abstract print of orange circles inside of oranger circles, I found that I was mute. When she finally asked why I had come, I said I had broken up with my boyfriend over a year ago and still regretted it. She bludgeoned me with a look of such limitless compassion that I immediately began to cry. I wondered briefly if she might adopt me or hire me as her assistant or become my lesbian lover. I blew my nose, and she asked if I had ever seen the musical
South Pacific
.

I think I saw it on TV once.

Do you remember the scene where the women are washing their hair?

No.

They sang a little song, do you remember what it was?

No.

“I’m Going to Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair.”

Oh.

Do you understand what I am saying?

I think so.

Is there anything else you want to talk about?

Well, I’ve been thinking maybe I should get a job. Do you think I should?

Definitely.

The special-needs assistant helps the special-needs teacher who teaches the children with special needs. Buckman was in transition when they hired me. Originally, it had been a school for kids with all different disabilities, but now the kids with physical challenges, the kind you can see, were sent to Logan Education Center. Logan had amazing play structures for students in wheelchairs, and “soft rooms” where those same students were taken out of their wheelchairs and encouraged to do free body movement. They were reminded that movement is about more than just getting from A to B, it is nuance and emotion, and they were the inventors of New Gesture. Once a month they were visited by a group of researchers from Microsoft. The researchers would take off their shoes and lie on the floor and just let it all happen around them. Apparently, this is how the computer touch pad was invented. Every week we heard stories about Logan, and it made me and my students feel as though we were not on the cutting edge. We were slow readers, and speed-readers with no comprehension, we were too nervous to learn, too happy to learn, too angry to learn; learning seemed beside the point.

The older students were allowed to keep their orange bottles of Ritalin and Adderall in their desks, and legally, they could raise their hands and ask to be excused for almost anything. The side effects of Ritalin are headaches, anxiety, sleep disorder, irritability, depression, gastrointestinal upset, and the jitters. I was assigned to the ones who needed extra help with their reading skills. I knew where I was headed: to the bottom of each page and the top of the next. I felt like I could do this forever, because nothing mattered more than anything else. I was patience defined, patience misspelled, patience sounded out slowly, letter by letter, with the
t
pronounced “shh.”

In the spring a special-education school called Obley shut down because of asbestos, and Buckman had to absorb all the Obley students and teachers. We had extra room because of the students who had left for Logan, but it was still a nightmare. The kids adapted easily, but the teachers resented one another like in-laws. We were all sure our way was the right way, and there were endless petitions hanging on clipboards in the staff kitchen, mobilizations
against
lining up before the bell, or
for
cursive. I was for cursive. I wrote my name on the pro-cursive clipboard. I left the kitchen and walked back to my room. I tidied the teacher’s desk and wrote
PUEBLO
on the chalkboard. I held my breath as I drew the o. I drew it slowly, oh so slowly. There was a knock at the classroom door. The o was done. I put down my chalk and walked to the door. Oh, the pounding heart. Oh, the held breath. Oh, how did I know. I opened the door. He had sandy brown hair and was taller than me. His face was an animal face, a cat-giraffe face that said everything in the absence of language. His clothes were careless and perfect, just areas that loosely mapped his nakedness. He said he was sorry he was late, and I said, Well, you’re here now, and I hugged him and his darkness swelled around me for an instant and whispered, Hello, sweetness into my blood. He pulled away, the teenager pulled away, but his eyes held my eyes like hands. He gave me a note.

Dear Teacher
,

Please excuse Steven Krause for his absence. He
contracted bronchitis during his last week at Obley and was
not well enough to join Buckman with the other students in
April. He is well now and will make up any missed work
.

Thank you
,
Marilyn Krause

He was not swift of mind, why should he be. He was a blur. He was a teenager needing me, as I had been a teenager needing him. And so I helped him. I sat beside his desk, and together we pushed through paragraphs, painstakingly sounding out the words, knitting them into human sentences that said very little. Suddenly, it seemed that language was nothing at all. Saying,
You were my phantom lover
would clarify nothing. I had already tried this, of course, right away. I brought in my book, the one that did not lead to a career in writing, and I sat nervously at his side as he sounded out the entire prologue, all the disclaimers and claimers and dedications to him, my dark shape. My gorgeous, pubescent, and mildly autistic onetime lover, lover-to-be.

I’m going to ask you a few questions to test your comprehension, okay?

Okay.

Is the book a true story?

Yes. No, wait—no! No.

It is a true story.

Oh, that’s what I thought, but then I thought it might be a trick question.

No, these are all real questions.

Okay.

So when the author says, “When I was fifteen, a dark shape came into my room at night,” who is she talking about? Who is the dark shape?

Who?

Yeah. Is it her father? Is it you? Who is it?

Ummmmmumumum. I don’t think we know yet at this part of the book.

You’re right, we don’t.

That was kind of a trick question.

I’m sorry.

And so there was a kind of divide. I knew him, and somewhere deep inside, he knew me, too, and it was up to me, as the special-needs assistant, to remind him. I saw myself as a kind of Anne Sullivan figure. There would be a breakthrough moment, like when Anne pumped the water on Helen Keller’s face and Helen spelled the word “water” on Anne’s hand, first slowly and then faster and faster, laughing and crying. Anne Sullivan wrote of this moment:
Suddenly I
felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of
returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was
revealed to me
. Only it wasn’t the mystery of language we needed revealed, it was mystery itself, before language, still draped in the mists. I saw the darkness swirling inside him. I saw that his feet did not touch the ground when he played basketball at recess. In moments, he was flying. Not like a bird but subtly, like a person.

Of course, there was only so much I could do as the special-needs assistant. One thing I could do was pray. I prayed while I looked into his eyes, and my prayer was Hello, hello, hello. Sometimes I heard my shape reply, and I had to press my knuckles against my thighs to keep them near me and away from the boy. The boy, who himself was so compelling in the way boys can be. How he pushed his hair off his sweaty forehead, the mineral smell of him, his hand holding a pencil, holding a pencil, holding a pencil, his hand! Our old affair was so easy, it was the dream that lovers have of consuming each other entirely. Now there was this extra thing, the boy, and the feeling I had carving into my gut, the feeling of wanting to fuck him, as he had fucked me when I was fifteen—into other galaxies.

I began to think this was as close as I could get to him, the shape. So after a while, I did not try very hard to help him read. I decided that reading was the wrong direction for our relationship. Not everyone has to be literate, there are some great reasons for resisting language, and one of them is love. The boy’s disability was the shape’s way of saying, I love you, I am here, it is me. I tried to be satisfied with this, and in the meantime, the boy himself began to love me. This was terribly, horribly, wonderfully sweet. It was, I supposed, the thing I had missed out on in high school. He would look at me and look away and look back again and look away and break the tip of his pencil and say fuck and blush and look at my leg and then look at the floor. A long hard look at the linoleum floor, in which he no doubt saw other things, the tits and spread ass of his young teacher and what he would do to them. Have I ever adored anything as much as I adored the sight of him glancing down at his own boner to see if it was hidden by the desk. It was.

There is only one way this ever happens. The student is walking home from school, and the teacher drives by and asks if he wants a ride. The boy looks at his teacher. The sun is shining into his eyes and he squints, and there is a pause wherein the shining of the sun and the squinting of the boy are the only two movements on earth. Even the birds stop. The teacher is momentarily paralyzed by the squinting and shining, but it is not enough to save the boy. She leans across the car and unlocks the passenger door, and with this movement the boy’s youngness ends and he becomes old.

Should I take you home?

Whatever’s fine.

Do you have to be home at a certain time?

No.

Is there somewhere you’d like to go?

Well, we could park.

For the first six months I just walked around in a constant state of amazement. I looked at other couples and wondered how they could be so calm about it. They held hands as if they weren’t even holding hands. When Steve and I held hands, I had to keep looking down to marvel at it. There was my hand, the same hand I’ve always had—oh, but look! What is it holding? It’s holding Steve’s hand! Who is Steve? My three-dimensional boyfriend. Each day I wondered what would happen next. What happens when you stop wanting, when you are happy. I supposed I would go on being happy forever. I knew I would not mess things up by growing bored. I had done that once before.

There were a few complications. There was the fact that he didn’t know we had dated previously. As it turned out, this didn’t matter. Loving is all in the blood anyway. He called the feeling between us “weird,” and I had nothing to add. I kissed the backs of his legs and they sang. He reached around and pulled me down onto his back and I lay there, like on the warm sand of a beach. Just that. That is all there is. That is the whole point of everything.

There was also the issue of our age difference. When you are dating someone much younger, you start to notice other couples with the same issue. You meet people who are dating people fifteen or even twenty years older or younger. You get to talking.

I think it’s a turn-on.

Oh, me, too. I would never date a guy my age, they have to be at least ten years younger.

Steve is ten years younger than me. I think he likes it that I’m older.

Of course he does. All guys fantasize about older women. It’s a mom thing.

Yeah, but thank God I’m younger than his mom.

I’m not. Gabe’s mom is forty.

Oh. How old are you?

Forty-three. How old are you?

Twenty-four.

We learned to be discreet. It helped that nobody really cares about anyone but themselves anyway. They check to make sure you aren’t killing anyone, anyone they know, and then they go back to what they were saying about how they think they might be having a real breakthrough in their relationship with themselves. People are always breaking through, like in the Doors song “Break on Through (To the Other Side).” But I really had. I had broken through twice now, and my feeling about the universe was that it was porous and radical and you could turn it on, you could even fuck around with the universe. And this whole time I was still the special-needs assistant. I was helping kids right and left. I was tapping in to their essential energies and leading them, if not into literacy, at least toward eventual pleasure. I wanted all of them to know love one day. I wanted the girls to pull their shoulders back and walk fearlessly into darkness. I wanted the boys to settle down a little. There was a group of boys in the back who never paid attention. They passed notes that weren’t even folded into the smallest possible square. Notes floated across the back row like large white sailboats. It was completely infuriating and made me want to humiliate them until they would never dare pass such a big note again. Why else was folding invented? I lurched toward the back of the room and grabbed the first sail I saw. It wasn’t even folded in half once. It said:
Caitlin gives Steve K. head
.