When We Were Animals(72)

Boys, too. A menagerie of different species, and yet you could love them all. There were the kind boys, like Peter Meechum, who did not peek at you while you dressed, who were pretty and noble, who made love to abstract futures. You could follow them and build skyscrapers on horizons of goodness and truth. And there were awful boys, like Blackhat Roy, who did not fear filth, even the filth you sometimes thought you were, who seemed to see darker truths and did not shrink from them. You could follow them and be on the thrilling, shivery edge of wrong until you died.

Truly was I inexplicable. I wanted others to tell me who I was so I could write it down and know myself true and inscribed. But words were not their medium, so I tried to read their appraisal of me in the bruises on my neck and wrists. My scars would be the palimpsest of my life.

When the moon was out, you could be aware of all the pieces of night—you could see all the things you didn’t see during the day, all the subtle little fragments that the world uses to join its wholes. The ladybugs hidden behind the bark of trees, the breath of the daffodils over the dew of a cut lawn, the hum of a power box on a traffic-light post, the gritty taste of rust from old patio furniture, a fawn standing still on a deserted highway. You could see it all—the patterns the lake made and the lightning in the clouds, the patient settlements of dust and the groaning fissures of the earth, the slumber of a whole town and its heartful waiting for dawn. You could fall in love with it all—and you could want, finally and truly, to set a match to it.

I ran to the mine, to the tunnels that twisted this way and that, and I felt my way through them, liking the cool unknown of the inky dark. Maybe I would get lost—I grew out of breath thinking that I could lose myself in those caverns and stay there forever. I could starve to death, pressed tight between worlds, living out my days in darkness, with nothing, with no one.

I could burn the whole world down, because there was some honor in destruction, which was why the Vikings immolated their noble dead.

Then I doubled back to my cistern and uttered no words of prayer or remorse or wishfulness as I watched the sky grow pink with morning through the opening at the top of the cave.

It was not a night for the decencies of language.

*



That was when everything came apart.

First, it was during the Cordial Moon that Hondy Pilt stopped breaching. So many fallen. So many rescued. He would become, in time, the same person he had been before the breaching. He would fade back into obscurity—no longer a noble leader of wildings under the moonlight, just a lonely explorer in the vast, unpopulated cell of his own mind. And so are we all, I suppose.

I had always wanted more from him. We all did. Maybe we mistook his deep, abiding interest in the universe for an interest in us.

There are times in your life when you project yourself against the sky—you see yourself everywhere, even in the configurations of stars, and you think, “How could anyone fail to notice me there, all my desires and haunted dreams in the nightly patterns of God, who loves me and knows me to be special?”

Me, too. I was guilty of such things.

I was a runner of caverns. I skittered and leaped my way through abandoned mine shafts. I knew where the floor opened up onto bottomless depths. I knew where to duck under the collapsed ceilings. I saw nothing. I moved by feel.

The other thing that happened was that Blackhat Roy followed me into the tunnels. Nobody else would dare. Even in their most primitive states, they feared the dark, the dangers they could not see. Breachers were made for moonlight—they relied on sight, to look and be looked at. Me, I disappeared into the darkness, and they snarled after me. When I emerged again, they crouched and gazed at me through the sides of their eyes. They did not trust me. They did not like outliers. But they did not attack. They knew me to be creatured to some darkness different from their own. I was littler than all of them, but they were afraid.

And Roy followed me all the same. He followed me just to the place where it was lightless and the air was musty with age. I could hear him, breathing hard in the dark, groaning after me, stumbling around. He was an echo in my caverns, an echo in my brain. So I stopped and turned and waited for him. When he caught up, his fingertips reached out tentatively and touched me. I let them rest there on my skin for a few moments, and we held our breath. Then I withdrew, and he was lost again. My bones ached.

He followed me, but it didn’t feel like hate. It felt like desperation. It felt like I was large in his mind. That I could ruin him. Ruin myself.

Poor boy! He was tortured by the abstract. Love and peace and relief came from places as far away as Tibet. Maybe he would see them one day, if he became a traveler. How did others locate such things so easily? How did Peter Meechum produce love the same way a magician would draw out an endless handkerchief?

Roy said, in the dark, “I don’t know where I am.”

So I took him by the hand and led him back outside, where the moon caught him up in its spectral light.

They were out there, the others. They paced back and forth, and their eyes glowed.

*



Peter Meechum was waiting in my front yard when I came home from school the next day.

“I saw you,” he said. He looked angry. He had been pacing back and forth before my gate when I rode up on my bike.

When I did not respond, he came and stood close to me—so close I had to crane my neck to look up at him. His eyes were raw, and his breath was hot. I felt sorry for him—all that fury and nowhere to put it. I thought it must be difficult for him, for boys. They get temperamental when they can’t shape the world into what they want it to be. It’s easier for girls. Girls are raised knowing that the world is unshapable. So they know better than to fuss.