The Candy House(98)
He found himself staring up into a gray-white void. It disoriented him: Was he looking up or down? Only near his face did its contents reveal themselves in spiraling motes of cold that pricked his eyeballs and twanged in his throat when he inhaled. There was something familiar about all of it. He’d done this before: lain on his back in a snowstorm, gazing into a depthless, empty sky. But when? It must be déjà vu. And then, with a rush of comprehension, Gregory recognized his father’s Anti-Vision: that bleak blank vista that had harried and tormented him, driven him in disguise to this same neighborhood twenty-five years ago. The Anti-Vision had never been an absence—the opposite! It was a density of whirling particles. His father just hadn’t gotten close enough.
Gregory gazed, transfixed, as snow swarmed down upon him like space junk; like disarranged flocks of birds; like the universe emptying itself. He knew what the vision meant: human lives past and present, around him, inside him. He opened his mouth and eyes and arms and drew them into himself, feeling a surge of discovery—of rapture—that seemed to lift him out of the snow. He wanted to laugh or shout. Finish your book! Here was his father’s parting gift: a galaxy of human lives hurtling toward his curiosity. From a distance they faded into uniformity, but they were moving, each propelled by a singular force that was inexhaustible. The collective. He was feeling the collective without any machinery at all. And its stories, infinite and particular, would be his to tell.
Middle Son (Area of Detail)
There’s no mystery about this creature: a human boy. Eleven years old, a little shrunken-looking in his beige uniform, nothing to hook your gaze if he isn’t your brother or son, but all eyes on him now because he’s the one at bat, bases loaded, his parents and two brothers in the stands, his mother wringing a lump of yarn because it’s agony watching him hit (or try to hit, he never hits), her emotions cliché to anyone who’s read a book or seen a movie about children playing sports and how their mothers feel, and yet—how is this possible?—fiercely specific: a wish to pluck him from that spot and spirit him away to a place where she can protect him; a craving to hold him like she did when he was newly born and smelled like milk (his first smile, a tiny sputter of lightning across his face, a thing she often recalls); a hope that he won’t be dwarfed forever by his older brother, who moves through the world as if it were a receiving line; a plea to someone, something, that her boy’s uniqueness, so manifest to her lovestruck eyes, be revealed to all: a singularity that, were there justice in the world, would rearrange the present scene and cause a beam of light to fall directly onto his head.
But no beam—no sun, even. A cloudy dusk in late spring in an Upstate New York suburb interlocked with many others, around a city like many other cities. At night, from the window of a plane, their lights look like seams of gold ore in black rock. And among the tens of thousands of suburbs surrounding some three thousand American cities, there might be, from April onward, seven or eight hundred boys standing at home plate at any particular time, each emulating the batting stance of whatever hero’s poster hangs above his bed, and a throng of parents, some ringing cowbells, some getting nasty—stories of bad parental behavior are part of a picture that turns generic the instant you cease to have a stake in it, as in: The boy at bat is your boy.
His name is Ames Hollander. Middle son, squashed between godliness above and eccentricity below. People forget his name. They forget he exists—that he can see and hear and remember like they can. His mother frets, knitting the brown V-neck sweater he’ll reject in winter when she presents it to him (No one wears knitted sweaters, Mom!): How can the love and dread she feels for her middle son be converted into something tangible, something that can help him? One horror of motherhood lies in the moments when she can see both the exquisiteness of her child and his utter inconsequence to others. There are so many boys in the world. From a distance they look alike even to her, especially in uniform.
It’s 1991, and a lot of things that are about to happen haven’t happened yet. The screens that everyone will hold twenty years from now haven’t been invented, and their bulky, sluggish predecessors have yet to break the surface of ordinary life. No one in this crowd has ever seen a portable phone, which gives to this moment the quality of a pause. All these parents gathered in the fading light, and not a single face underlit by a bluish glow! They’re all here, in one place, their attention burning toward home plate, where Ames Hollander stands looking smaller than usual, compressed by the grim facts that have converged upon him: two outs, bases loaded, bottom of the ninth, the visiting team ahead by three. The game is surely lost, yet the possibility of victory still exists, should the batter—Ames, that is—manage to hit a home run. And although Ames is the last player on the home team likely to manage such a feat (he hasn’t hit once all season), every home team member and home team parent is seized by wild, irrational faith that he can. They wrote him off three games into the season, but now they scream his name and stamp their feet on the chilly metal bleachers in a communal howl of conviction.
Strike one. Didn’t swing. Possibly didn’t even see the ball.
Like every team, this home team has a story that would render comatose anyone without a stake, but for those who do, its minutiae are inexhaustible fodder for passionate, intricate discussions over beers (the dads, mostly) or telephones attached to walls, their coiled rubber cords knotting and tangling when extended to their full length so that moms can talk behind closed doors without their sons hearing. Over beers or twisted cords, these conversations have certain identical refrains: