It is dusk.
The streetlight across the street blinks and flickers like the eyes of people undergoing REM sleep and makes weird, twisted shadows out of the people passing under it. Cigarette smoke comes out of my nostrils and bleeds through the cotton pillowcase and my thoughts try to make prison breaks out of my mouth, but I won't let them.
I need all of them in one place.
Because if they leave, I'll be left alone with the one thought that I'm trying to avoid most.
It is so cold out. The air makes my teeth jiggle like men with Taser needles stuck in their chests and I shrink deep inside my coat and up against the wall to preserve as much heat as possible. It's no use, though. No matter how hard I try to stay warm, all my heat is drifting out from my chest, like clothes straight out of a laundromat dryer or bodies with fresh bullets inside of them.
At night, I have to sleep with three heating pads wrapped around my chest turned on high, and I watch my ceiling as it is slowly clouded up with my breathing and listen to tiny icicles forming in my blood veins. I've read somewhere that if you fall asleep while suffering from hypothermia it's very possible you won't wake up again, so I've turned into a voluntary insomniac. All night long I try to stay awake and keep my thoughts from wandering off.
Sometimes, it's impossible.
Either sleep congeals over my eyelids, sealing them shut like lickable envelopes or my thoughts escape and I'm left with the one I fear most.
Amir.
Sitting with my back scrunched up against the wall I shake my head and take a long drag on my cigarette. The thought of Amir is a dangerous one, not because he's so hard to keep out of my mind, but that he's so easy to entertain once he has my full attention.
As soon as all my other thoughts are gone, I start building.
Constructing Amir's death piece by piece, bone by bone, like a paleontologist putting together the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus for display in a museum.
I imagine:
Pushing him off of a tower.
Stabbing him in the back.
Shooting him in the head.
Slitting his throat at night while he's in bed so that his neck becomes a broken fire hydrant.
This violence horrifies me. But it is irresistible at the same time. It rips all my free agency out of my chest and takes over my head and turns me into something I hate.
The only way to keep it out is to cloud my head with Mother's voice, like steam clouding up the windows of a car with teenagers with their bodies all tangled up together. I have to shut everything down and fall asleep regardless of whether or not I wake up tomorrow morning. Because dying of all this cold is better than dying in an electric chair, right?
Right?
I'm so afraid.
My thoughts are getting scarce.
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A leak from the rain gutter outside Charlie's bedroom window trickled to the ground and made the same sound as homeless men urinating in doorways. The rain pattered strangely on the roof and kept Charlie awake as he stared up at the ceiling and tried not to think about his stomach and the fact that he had wet the bed. Now his sheets clung to him like wet parachute, wrapping turbans around his waist and legs, and everything smelled musty. Everything smelled like the hospital and the middle-aged woman with a leak in her throat.
Charlie still hadn't taken his hood off.
He wondered if the rain would clear all of the ash out of the sky the next day.
He wondered if Liesel or Joseph were going to give him dinner.
He wondered what Mother was doing.
If Charlie listened close enough to the rain, he could barely hear the hospital sounds underneath it, and that gave him some comfort. He was so tired, but he itched all over and his legs stuck together like postage stamps and he couldn't get to sleep.
What was worse, shadows were smeared all over the opposite wall and they were glancing at him hungrily. They were watching him and running Negro fingers all up and down his bed. As so as he fell asleep, he was sure, the shadows would swallow him up and all that would be left of him the next morning was a shriveled up little corpse.
Charlie shivered.
Someone knocked on the door and Liesel stepped in with her eyes glittering like manhunt flashlights bobbing in the forest and with her mouth tightly sewn. He stared at her. She flicked the light switch and checked her watch.
She said, “Tomorrow I'll be taking you to school, so get some sleep and – ”
She stopped.
Her nose wrinkled up.
“What did you do?”
Charlie shrunk into the bed frame.
“You wet the bed? You're eight years old and you wet the bed? You little bastard! Get up. Get up! And bring those sheets with you. God in heaven, they didn't tell me you pissed in your sleep. Do you have any idea how disgusting that is? Any idea at all? Didn't I tell you the bathroom was just down the hall? Don't you listen? Don't you speak? Answer me, kid!”
“Sorry,” he whispered, dragging the sheets off of the mattress and onto the ground. They were limp and heavy, like bodies carried out of burning buildings in the arms of firemen.
“Sure as hell better be. Lord have mercy!”
Charlie just wanted to sleep.
***
The hallway walls played ping pong with their footsteps and had windows that the light broke its neck on, like little birds running into sliding glass doors. Charlie was dressed in clothing several sizes to big for him so that he had to roll his sleeves and pant legs up and the lunch money in his pockets for later sang commercial jingles for everyone. Liesel was walking beside him and checking her watch and pinching her mouth.
Charlie's pants went:
Swish, swish,
like janitorial push-brooms.
Liesel walked quickly and held his hand as if it was the handle of a briefcase, handcuffed to her wrist, so tightly that Charlie could almost feel his finger bones grinding together. Charlie was nervous. He was nervous about his face. He was nervous that everyone would hate him because of his eyes and his mouth, which were exposed by holes in the pillowcase. He was worried that the children might talk to him, look at him, point at him. Invisibility was so hard to maintain.
His heart tap-danced.
Liesel was saying, “Just control yourself, OK? Just don't make a scene or talk too loud or draw attention to yourself. Good children are like dolls. Their voice boxes are plastic. Alright? And remember. Toilet. Bathroom. Not pants. Alright?”
“Alright.”
“Okay. Here we go.”
Liesel stopped them in front of a door, opened it, and stepped in, her hand crushing up Charlie's metacarpals like drug addicts crushing up cocaine. The classroom had ten or twelve students in desks and a teacher who all turned their heads at the same time in Charlie's direction.
His skin was burning up.
He lowered his head.
“Here's Charlie Provost,” Liesel said to the teacher. “He's in your class, I believe.”
The teacher, a thin woman with eyes as flat as junkyard automobiles in car compacters and arms that dangled at her sides like rusty tire swings, nodded and coughed a little. She gestured to a seat in the front row.
“Yes, thank you. It's nice to have you, Charlie.”
The eyes of the other children frisked Charlie up and down with groping, intrusive hands.
Liesel nudged him.
“I'll see you tonight, then.”
Charlie's stomach intestines twisted and he slowly made his way over to his seat, watching the ground. Some invisible man he had turned out to be.
Whispers now.
Liesel turned and walked back down the hallway and the ping pong ball footsteps faded away.
Charlie took his seat.
The teacher coughed again and Charlie imagined dust drifting out of her mouth like fine plaster leaking from the ceiling of an apartment right beneath train tracks. Charlie imagined spiderwebs collecting between her fingers and moths resting in her hair.
He noticed someone had carved something on the surface of his desk:
Help.
Charlie traced the letters with his finger.
“My name is Mrs. Gelsinger, Charlie,” the teacher said. “Like I said, it's nice to have you here. Do you want to come up and tell us a little bit about yourself? Maybe a little bit about your new home?”
Charlie stared at his desk and tried to stay as still as possible. Maybe if he didn't answer, didn't move, didn't breathe she would forget he was sitting there in front of her and ignore him. The whispering was getting louder. It was crescendoing like the hum of B-52s impregnated with atomic bombs flying over a Japanese sky; propellers whisking. They were sharp and harsh sounds. They ate at Charlie's clothes and hissed God's breath onto his skin.
“Charlie?”
Help.
“You don't want to tell us anything?”
Someone snickered.
Charlie closed his eyes and tried to scrub out the room with shoe polish darkness. He tried to block out all of the sound, he tried to turn the room into a silent moving picture, but the gag in his mouth just amplified everything a million times. Mrs. Gelsinger stood up in front of everyone looking nervous and uncertain and kept repeating Charlie's name until she finally left him alone and told the class to be quiet. The sound stopped, but the staring continued.
The students kept glancing at him, like boys with binoculars watching women undress in front of their bedroom windows.
Fidgeting, Mrs. Gelsinger said, “Okay. Uh, take out your silent reading books, kids, and I want you to find an example of a simile, alright? Yes, a simile is when you compare to things using the words 'like' or 'as'– ”
She whined mosquito conversations in Charlie's ear.
For the rest of the day all that could think about without burning up inside was:
Help.
Help.
Help.
