Author: Bill Clegg
Category: Fiction
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I make it up to 14th Street, and as I turn back down toward the hotel, a guy my age in a jogging suit and a trucker hat says hello. He is scruffy and cute and fit and looks like just the right thing to lift the descending gloom. He asks if I’ve been partying and I say yes, and before you know it he’s back in my room, getting high. We take off our shirts and kiss awhile. He isn’t there very long when my phone rings. I step away from the bed and after wrestling with several rounds of Memory Filled, New Text Rejected, I listen to the message. It’s from Malcolm, whom I have completely forgotten about and now hear as I would a long-ago friend from summer camp. He sounds serious and his message begins Hey, Bill, I really need to tell you something…
I hang up the phone and never hear the rest of that message because it is at that instant that someone knocks on the door. It is loud and urgent, and when I go to the door and look through the peephole, it’s Noah.
Where
Grammar school: Nurse’s bathroom. Bathroom is at the end of a hall, away from the nurse’s desk, has a locked door. Downside: it’s the bathroom the principal uses. Upside: no one is ever in the nurse’s office. Not even the nurse.
High school: Nurse’s bathroom. Dodgy at lunch. Second choice: boys’ room next to French class, on the second floor, in the old building. Almost always empty except in the morning before homeroom.
Home: Best is bathroom next to Dad’s den at the end of the house, on the other side of the front living and dining rooms (only when Dad is away). In spring, summer, and fall, during good weather, and when Dad is home: the woods. In winter or bad weather when Dad is home: kids’ bathroom upstairs, but hurry.
FRIENDS’ HOUSES
Derek’s: Basement bathroom.
Jenny’s: Behind the horse barn or basement bathroom.
Michael’s: Upstairs bathroom between Michael’s and Lisa’s rooms, above garage. If parents are gone or out in the barns, their bathroom at the far end of the house. If house is full, behind barn.
Adam’s: His father’s church across the street, downstairs bathroom.
Patrick’s: Abandoned bathroom downstairs, in the part of the house that’s been under construction for years.
Kenny’s: THE TOUGHEST HOUSE. Only two bathrooms, both near where people always are. Choose one and pray it’s over quickly.
BEAR IN MIND
1. Try to use first-floor bathrooms (people below can hear you jumping).
2. Place rugs, bath mats, and towels in front of toilet to cushion footfalls.
3. If you have no choice but to use an upstairs bathroom: avoid bathrooms above rooms where people are, use extra towels, bath mats, and rugs.
4. Don’t overuse toilet paper when cleaning up. It clogs the toilet.
5. If there is a wall near the toilet, pee with your back to it.
Another Door
His family moves when he is seven. It is the summer between second and third grade and it is to a house at the end of a long driveway, near the end of a long road, and fifteen long minutes from a town in the hills of Connecticut that doesn’t have a stoplight. The house takes years to renovate, and his parents add bedrooms and porches and a living room and dining room with the most beautiful wood floors that never get used. Money runs out and the upstairs floors, where the bedrooms are, will never be carpeted or finished with proper flooring. They scatter carpet samples and throw rugs over the plywood to keep from getting splinters. From a low, rambling one-story farmhouse, it becomes a large gray Dutch Colonial, and sits at the top of a hill, one of Connecticut’s tallest, his father says, and there are forty acres of woods and field.
There is a new landscape of doors—another nurse’s bathroom at school, woods to disappear into, barns to go behind, different friends’ houses with various pitfalls and out-of-the-way places for jumping and panic and eventual relief.
His third-grade class is small. Twenty or so in the whole grade, ten or so in his class. He is there only a few months when a new kid shows up, a girl. She is small and blond and birdlike and instantly familiar—like a sister or a little mother. She has immediate authority over him, but it is gentle and hard to notice. He understands that she is finer and wiser but also that she is part of him. From the moment she joins his class, he defers to her, looks up to her, and even when he is ignoring her, he worries over her approval. Katherine.
She reads. She is always reading. She asks him what he thinks about the books they read for school. In fourth grade, a book about an immortal family and a girl who falls in love with one of its members after she stumbles upon him in the woods behind her house, drinking from a spring; in fifth grade, a big, sprawling allegorical series of books about a handful of English children who must battle the rise of evil in the world. Later, too soon, she leaves Brontë and Dickens in his cubbyhole. He devours them and worries about the words he doesn’t understand and loves them because she does and often sobs at their endings, because for a while he is away, out of time, somewhere he can’t remember himself, and it is a shock, always a sad shock, to come back. She talks about these books, and each time, with each book, she sees more and better and has words that dazzle him to transcribe what she sees. He will steal all those words and use them. To himself, in his reports for school, talking to adults, teachers. With each word he feels a click into a finer self, one more wrinkle smoothed. Her words have a kind of magic, like the garments that carry storybook characters out of their lives. A dress that changes a chimney-sweeping urchin into a princess, a shoe that returns her to the castle after it’s all been taken away. She uses the word desultory in the eighth grade, and to this very day he works it into conversation the way a swimming champion casually mentions his medals.
They find out their families moved to their small town from towns very close to each other. They find out that they were born in the same hospital, seven days apart. He was born first but he inhaled vomit into his lungs and remained in the nursery for a week longer, so they imagine there was some kind of connection forged in those early, fragile hours when parents didn’t exist, only nurses and other October souls screaming to life.
She agrees to kiss him in the eighth grade. It is the day before his thirteenth birthday, and a group, the same group as always—Kenny, Gwen, Adam, Michael, Jennifer—spend the day at the trampoline behind the health food store. Behind the trampoline are the woods, and a long, dark path where they go to make out. On that day she agrees to kiss him, to go down the path, into the woods. It has been discussed during the week and now it is that day, a Sunday, and they’re all there.
She stalls. Or hesitates. Or something. He can never remember. He is frustrated, and he and Kenny and a few others go over to the Nutmeg Pantry to buy candy and soda. She stays, and he’s worried that even when he gets back she’ll refuse to go down the path with him. The little gang leaves, they cross the shopping center parking lot and then Route 7. They buy whatever they buy and head back. He’s slow to keep up, worried that she’s changed her mind or chosen someone else. That he’ll be the only one who won’t go into the woods that day. Everyone crosses back across Route 7 and he trails behind. He makes it to the other side and then everything goes white.
Later, he remembers an ambulance and the voices of the town comforting him. The feeling of being nowhere—between land and sea, life and death, asleep and awake—everything fuzzy at the edges, and coursing through him a great sense of relief, a feeling of flight. Being pulled out, spirited away. He surfaces only briefly from this nowhere and is disappointed when he wakes the next day, fully conscious, in a hospital room, covered in casts.
People talk. They say he and Kenny were playing chicken with the cars. They pass it along as fact and it reaches his mother, who gets very upset. He doesn’t find out about the talk until later, but when he does, he silently agrees with the worst things said, even though he has been told they are not true. He never remembers what happened, but a man from the next town gets arrested for driving with heroin and alcohol in his system. He never finds out what happened
to this man.
Katherine comes to the hospital with the others and she brings him books. He reads them—all of them—but which ones, he won’t remember, except for the tale of children who pass through a wardrobe into a world of unimpeachable good and terrible evil, of ice queens and lions; he will remember that one always. Like in so many of the other books she gives him, there is a magic door to step through—a gurgling spring with water that enchants a family into immortality, a golden ring that turns an ordinary Hobbit boy into the hope for all good in his world, a wardrobe that allows children to escape an unhappy house—some ordinary everyday object that acts as a portal into a world humming with wonder.
Because he can’t move yet on crutches, a bed is set up in what his family calls the Backroom. It is a TV room at the end of a long open space that extends from the kitchen and the dining area. The room is two stories high and has a loft with books and games that one can access by a wooden ladder. The far wall of the Backroom has an enormous window that looks out onto an old maple tree that scrapes against the pane and the side of the house. Beyond that, a lawn. And beyond the lawn, the woods. The bedrooms of the house are up the stairs and away from him, and at night he is very much alone. The tree scratches the window, sounds crack from the woods, and a red light blinks on the smoke detector like some kind of evil bead. He will read more and more during this time. Retreat further into himself and feel, in the small bed at the bottom of the large windowed room, breakable.
Friends come and stay the night, teachers bring homework. His mother plays nurse and is attentive to his casts and the physical therapy he’s supposed to do every day. She brings him food and wipes his face, and during the day, when she is around, he feels safe. There is a part of him that wishes this time at home with her would last forever. A month or so later, he returns to school, on crutches, and while he’s relieved to be able to move again, he’s also a little resentful that his old life has resumed, that no one is fussing over and looking out for him.
But before he gets home, before he leaves the hospital, in fact on the first day he gets there, the nurse brings him a bedpan that he is meant to pee into. He is immobile, cannot get himself to the bathroom, and in a flash sees the broken bones as something good, something lucky. A way to somehow shatter the always pattern of fiddling and jumping and upset and relief. Newly thirteen, and there is a little crack in what has up until now been an immovable door. There is, miraculously, hope. He pees into the bedpan and it feels like he’s pissing a thousand shards of glass but his hands don’t fly to his penis. While he is in the hospital he is able to pee without touching himself, every time.
A year and a half later, chubby, hairless, too pretty, and often mistaken for a girl, he goes to Australia as an exchange student. Between that time and the time in the hospital, there are many moments of triumph when he stands before a urinal and pees without the old ritual. There are also many setbacks, times when he has to retreat into a stall and wrestle with himself for nearly an hour. It goes on like this until the spell that will forever remain a mystery to him begins to fade. It starts when he is still in Australia, when hair finally arrives under his arms and crotch, when muscles gently bloom under his baby fat and inches happen, height happens. These developments occur so quietly and incrementally that he doesn’t notice them until he comes home and is at once aware that the energy around him has changed, that people react to him differently. And as all these prayed-for things appear and happen, his old nemesis quietly slinks away. He returns after six months in Australia and never again, not even once, panics before a toilet.
It will all be forgotten: every locked door, every hour he fretted in bathrooms, every flight into the woods where no one could see. It is not until he is twenty-six years old that he remembers that he ever struggled. And then, when he finally does, he remembers it all.
There will never be any explanation for his childhood affliction. Nothing beyond theories, some commingling of psychology and pediatric diagnosis, but nothing concrete or definitive.
Katherine and he will date and kiss and go out and not go out and avoid each other and have dramatic reunions all through grammar school, high school, college, and after. She will go to Scotland to an illustrious university in an ancient town by the sea and read a trilogy by a great Scottish writer about a girl and her family—about everything—that she will quote from often. She will eventually drop out and drift to Montana. A few years later, he will go to a university in Scotland in an ancient city—this one in the hills and not nearly as illustrious—and read that same trilogy and never in his life stop quoting from it. Boyfriends and a husband of hers will refuse to let her see him. Girlfriends and boyfriends of his will eye her warily. As adults they keep their distance. They write many letters. He reads all the books she ever cared about. He carries her opinions and interpretations around as if they are his until at some point, sometime after Scotland, he begins to find books of his own and to shape, slowly, opinions of his own. He graduates from her and both know it, she long before him.
But before that happens, the summer before he goes away to a small college on the eastern shore of Maryland, they drink a bottle of very expensive wine from one of two cases his mother is holding for a dear friend in a bitter divorce. They eventually finish off both cases and find out years later that it was very expensive indeed. They drink that first exquisite bottle of wine, with a griffin on the label, as they sit on a mountain called Indian. She throws pebbles into his shorts until it is clear that she wants him to take them off. She takes hers off, too, and he does the thing he had not done before but she had. It feels like a miracle that it is happening at all, but that it is with her makes it feel blessed, meant to be, but also something like incest. For years he will think it happened in a field her father owned, one night on the way to a play. But it will be her memory, her story, they agree on.
Uptown
How can he be here? How? I look back through the peephole again and again, and each time I am hoping that the paranoid fantasy that Noah is at the other side of the door has vanished and there is no one in the hall. But each time I look, there he is. And not alone. A large man in a heavy tan coat is standing behind him. He is talking into a cell phone and I’m sure he’s a cop or a DEA agent.
It’s okay, just let us in, Noah calls out. Don’t get upset, we’re here to help.
Jesse, the guy on the bed, tenses up and asks what’s going on. I whisper for him to get dressed as quickly as possible, that it’s my boyfriend. He moves like lightning and is up, fully dressed and with his coat on in seconds. He heads for the door and I tell him to wait. Wide-eyed and jumpy, he spits, Only a second, I’m not sticking around. As quickly as I can, I grab the ashtray on the nightstand and dump the remaining drugs in a plastic bag and stick it, along with the remaining stem, inside my jacket pocket in the closet. I grab a cloth and sloppily wipe down the crumbs and residue on the nightstand and scan the room for other evidence of what’s been going on. Jesse moves toward the door as I grab my sweater and jeans from the floor.
Jesse opens the door, does not look back to say good-bye, and pushes past Noah and the man in the tan coat. I’m sitting on the bed as Noah steps into the room. Let’s go, he says, without even mentioning the guy who has just fled.
The man in the tan coat is named John, and he tells me he is a former DEA agent, that he’s pulled a string and called into the agency to find out that there is a file on me. Noah then tells me the police have shown up at One Fifth, asking to question me. That my name came up in a drug bust. Mark? I wonder. Stephen? My heart, which is already beating wildly, begins to pound hard with new dread. I’m getting arrested, I think as I eye John, who looks no different from the Penneys.
How did you find this guy? I ask Noah. I’m convinced he’s lied to Noah about who he is and that he does not mean well. Noah says a lawyer recommended him and I ask who. I don’t know the name, and the more I look at John, the more I think he’s snared Noah in a complicated sting to haul me off to
jail.
We have to go, John says. We have to get you out of here.
It takes over an hour for me to get ready and it still feels like we’re rushing. I ask for privacy and load and smoke two huge hits in the bathroom. I let the stem finally cool and put it in my jacket pocket and load the remaining drugs in the stem so I won’t have to pack it later should I be able to peel away and take a hit. The high pushes away some of the immediate dread, and I wash my face and hands and run my fingers through my hair. I put on my turtleneck sweater, realize the bathroom is filled with smoke, and switch on the fan. Noah knocks on the bathroom door and I tell him to hold on. The dread returns as the smoke rises up through the vent. I sit on the toilet and take a deep hit off the stem and pray for a heart attack.
We leave the hotel without checking out and jump into a cab on Gansevoort Street. John tells me I’m lucky I haven’t been arrested yet. I look up at the driver and the obscured photo on the panel behind him. Jesus, I think, of course. I explain to Noah that nearly every cab I’ve taken over the last weeks has had a strip of cardboard or paper over the driver’s ID photo. That I suspect the drivers are undercover cops or agents of some kind. I try to explain to him about the cabdrivers and the Penneys and that this John here is one of them and the driver, too, and he doesn’t know what he’s just done to me by putting me in their hands. You don’t know, I whisper desperately to him as he pats my hand.
I finger the stem in my pocket and know it’s good for at least a few more big hits. I also think it probably holds enough to get charged with Intent to Distribute and immediately start worrying about where I can stash it if it looks like they’re taking me to a police station. Then I remember the cabdriver is undercover, and as I watch the city streak by outside the window, I start to shake with panic.