Now Is Not the Time to Panic(18)

And then, the rhythm of this summer giving me just enough time to wash my face and brush my teeth, Zeke was at my door, already sweating from the bike ride over. He had this jittery, nervous look about him, and he kind of pushed his way into the house.

“Your neighbor was really staring at me,” he said. “He’s kind of spooky. I think, maybe, he knows what we’re doing. He had on, like, weird pajamas.”

I walked out onto the porch and looked over at Mr. Avery, who waved. I waved back.

“It’s not pajamas,” I said, like that was the most important part of what Zeke had just told me, like it mattered at all. But it did to me. “It’s a haori.”

“What?” Zeke asked.

“It’s like a kimono, but not so fancy. It’s a kind of jacket, I think. He explained it to me once.”

“Who is he?”

“Mr. Avery,” I said. “He’s from Los Angeles, but now he lives with his sister. He’s neat. He used to be an artist. But he’s pretty sick. That’s why he wears the haori, because he says he’s cold all the time.”

“He was an artist?”

“Yeah, kind of. He tried to explain it to me once. It was, like, a performance. Performance art.”

“I know about performance art . . . I think,” Zeke replied.

“Well, that’s what he did. In Los Angeles. And Japan, I think. That’s where he got the haori. He’s pretty proud of it.”

“I think he knows what we’re doing. He really stared at me.”

“He’s probably wondering what you’re doing here, because I never have people come over. He’s just bored. He’s in the house all the time, except for these little walks that he takes around the block. He has cancer, I think. He’s got other things to worry about than what we’re doing.”

I guess I should say that this was all before you could just google anyone and anything and actually get results. I had barely even used the internet at this point. And it wasn’t like Randolph Avery was someone that you’d just know about if you were a teenager in Coalfield in the nineties. It wasn’t until later that I realized who he was, how famous he had been. He was a hugely influential artist in the early eighties; he had pieces at MoMA, at LACMA. For the two years since he’d moved in with his sister, who was the postmaster in Coalfield, he was just Mr. Avery, this weird, sweet man who sometimes would talk to me with this faraway look on his face, like he had no idea how he’d ended up in this place.

“What did you do last night?” I asked Zeke.

“I mostly just drew in my notebook. There’s not much else to do at my grandmother’s house. She doesn’t have cable or even a VCR. She just wants to play Uno all the time, so I do that for as long as I can stand it. The whole time, my mom is just playing her violin, which makes everything feel kind of creepy.”

“She plays the violin? Like, in the same room as you?”

“Yeah, in the living room. She’s just constantly playing, like me and my grandmother hired her to perform for us. And when she finishes a song, it’s like, what do I do? Clap? Tell her that it’s good? It doesn’t matter anyway, because she just starts a new song. And then when she gets tired, she goes onto the front porch to smoke cigarettes, which she never did before.”

“Yikes,” I said. I thought about my mom, after my dad left us. For months, she had this stunned expression, like every five seconds she realized, once again, that this was all real, that she wasn’t dreaming. And then one night at the dinner table I noticed that her shoulders weren’t up around her ears, that her body was relaxed. Maybe she had met Hobart. Maybe she had realized that after all this time with my dad, it wasn’t so bad to be without him. Whatever it was, she got loose. It made me happy. I wondered how long it would take for Zeke’s mom. I wondered if it would ever happen.

“And then I go into my room and draw,” Zeke continued. “I was working on this design. I was kind of thinking that maybe we should make another poster.”

“Another one?” I said, stiffening.

“Yeah, like keep it going but also change things up a little. Like, can you think of something else you want to say on the poster?”

“No,” I replied, feeling a little sad. “I already said it.”

“I thought I could draw, like, a big wolf standing on a pile of bones. I sketched it out. Here, let me show you.”

He got out his notebook and it was exactly like he explained, a big wolf on a pile of bones, but it didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel the same.

“I just . . . I don’t want to do another one,” I finally said, after he pointed to the wolf, like I hadn’t seen it, like I didn’t realize that the figure on top of the bones was a big fucking wolf.

“You don’t ever want to make anything else?” he said, and I could feel him slipping away from me a little, and I needed to pull him back.

“I want to make stuff forever, for as long as I live. But I want our poster to be the only one we make. It’s special. It’s the first one we made. It’s perfect, right? It’s perfect. It has our blood on it.”

“We could bleed on this,” he said, pointing to the wolf again.

“Do you know what I mean, Zeke?” I asked, and the whole world depended on what he said. I got one of the copies of our poster, and I held it out for him. “This is what the world gets. If we do more, lots of different designs, new words, we’ll lose it. It just goes away. It’s like . . . I don’t know . . . ordinary. Do you know what I mean?”