The Elephant Boy {fourteen}

A/N: I have the end planned out now, so its only a matter of time and development. The italisized portions are no longer from Charlie's POV, but from the POV of Peter Hall, a counselor in a correctional facility who you'll learn more about in chapter fifteen. Enjoy.

They guided him up the walkway with handcuffs wrapped around his wrists and his head covered in a pillowcase. To me, he looked like one of those poor Americans caught by Al-Queda terrorists and placed in front of a video camera with a gun to his head for all the world to see. He was thin and meager and he walked with heavy, homeless feet, wobbling a little. Feet that belong to old men and death march Jews.

His hands were soft and white, like lucky rabbit's feet.

Couldn't they see he was dying of the cold?

Couldn't they hear his frozen pea teeth rattling around inside his jaw?

And there was nothing they could do about it. Nothing at all. I saw immediately that his shivering and chattering was more then skin deep. I could tell that he was freezing, freezing on the inside. The reason he moved so slow was because the blood pumping through his veins was turning to Castor Oil poured out onto a spoon. His heart was packed in snow, preserved like severed fingers on ice in a plastic baggy. Because the minute the police touched his arm, someone with wire clippers clipped all his arteries clean in half.

He was winding down.

He was loosing speed.

Slower, slower they headed towards the door of our facility. Part of me was desperately looking forward to working with a subject like this one. A seventeen year old survivor of the Chicago Bombing! Killed another kid his age and can't really think straight anymore because something snapped a long time ago in his head, snapped because he wears a hood over his face, which have been all blurred up and censored like fleshy private parts on television.

The other part of me wanted to go home and lie down and sleep for a long time. I was getting awfully, awfully tired of all these broken kids. I was getting tired of them getting the muddy footprints of their misery all over my white carpet. I was tired of never being able to fix them up. I was tired of having my hands greasy at night with the oil.

They all leaked oil.

I saw him glance up at my window right before they stepped into the building and for a second I thought I saw his eyes, which magnified everything he had ever done before me, like those coin operated binoculars on observation decks magnifying the Golden Gate bridge or the Statue of Liberty. I could see that this kid wasn't a criminal. He was too shattered to be a murderer or an inmate. I saw his skeleton for a moment through those binocular eyes and all of his bones were brittle and crunched up. He was just a mouthful of broken teeth.

Somehow, I had the impression that he wasn't all that disfigured underneath that pillowcase.

Not any more disfigured than the rest of us.

-February 11th-

My lawyer is a tired, little man with a face that crumpled like a tin foil hat and fingers that are always making cat's cradles out of the air; twitching and weaving and playing. His eyes are watery. They are moist and bulging things that soak up the world, sop it up until he blinks, blinks, blinks to get all that soot from under his eyelids.

He sits there as the prosecution slips Liesel questions on the witness stand and breathes impatiently. Breath that sounds like shovel-fulls of dirt clumping onto the lid of a coffin. Breath that fills that amplifies the clock on the wall and withers every second, drooping the eyes of everyone in the courtroom. He sweats shifts back and forth in his seat, rustling like a grass skirt.

I bow my head.

The jury members are imagining what I look like without my hood.

I can tell.

Tell.

(I need to tell a secret: Amir is whispering into my ear. His words are gentle and feathery, the way the fingers of lovers in bed drift across each others' cheeks and I can feel his pulse in my hands again: thump, thump, thump. His voice is indistinct. It is so quiet that I can barely make out the words. But they're loud enough. I can hear him saying:

“I'm not gonna hurt you.”)

There is blood on my hands still, cherry snow cone stains.

I've tried bleach, but that doesn't work. It's painted that way permanently.

At the witness stand, Liesel's words sew me up.

***

Inside the cop car, I find that my voice is gone. It slipped out, like children tying their bedsheets together and scaling down the walls of their house to the ground below; pajamaed and dew-footed. All that's left is my laughing and crying, and even those are wearing away. The words I want to speak, the story I need to explain has deserted me. And no matter how hard I struggle for the words, their syllables and shape remain just out of reach, just so that my fingers can brush up against them.

(personally, I think Amir stole them while I had my fingers around his neck)

It's as if my voice has been locked up like a post office box filled with envelopes that can never be opened and replied to. It's as if my mouth has been zipped up like the back of mommy's evening dress that she can't reach. The lawyers ask me questions, the police ask me questions. All these knocks on my door! All these taps on my window!

But I can't answer.

The power of speech is gone.

A cash register forced open with a crowbar and scooped clean by dirty hands.

I need to go around town with a stack of 'Missing' posters (advertising, of course, a reward for finding my voice) and staple them to every telephone pole and hand them to every pedestrian. It's becoming quite a nuisance, not being able to release all these built up words. They're fogging up my brain like smoke from a disappearing act. Like a sauna.

(and I'm sweating)

His face...

As soon as I can speak again I'll tell everyone that his face was as white as a milk mustache.

When I entered his room, I knew exactly what to expect. A kid with his mind all unraveled and broken, who refuses to talk, whose eyes are milky and dull. A kid who had held another person's life in his hands and let it dissolve away like alka-seltzer in a cup of water. Someone whose every breath is stolen. Robbed right out of the mouth of the person lying six feet in the ground, decomposing with the imprints of his fingers still bruised on his neck.

I knew him.

I knew a hundred people like him.

So there was no surprise when I opened the door and found him at the window as still and as withered as a burlap sack-faced scarecrow. I walked over to his desk and sat at his chair and watched his back for a moment, waiting just like I always do. The really broken ones, the ones with moving parts missing and wires snipped can stand there for hours watching the trees.

If they're like that, then they've sunk pretty low.

But they're not all gone yet.

They're just dormant.

Just hibernating.

Waiting for the frost to thaw and for spring to push its zombie fingers through the dirt of its grave.

After a half hour I say, “You know, the longer something stays still, the less likely it is that it'll ever move again. You'll rust like that, tin man. Come on. Sit over here and we'll talk for a bit.”

I can feel him kicking a little inside, just like when you put your hand on the stomach of a pregnant lady and feel the feet of her kid knocking through her skin. He studies the origami of my words for a second; folded up cootie catchers and decides that his cocoon is too tough to break through, that the spider has weaved him up to tight.

He became even limper.

I stood up and walked towards him.

“It's been a long time, hasn't it? It's been a long time since you've talked to someone. Really talked. Maybe you're afraid if you tried again that the words won't come out right. Is that it? Listen, talking is just like riding a bicycle, kid. Your words won't incriminate you. They won't hurt you.”

For some reason, I got the impression that he wanted to talk. That he had a thousand ideas that he needed to get out of his lungs, release them like homing pigeons with fluttering wings into the air. But something was stopping him. Something bigger than him, something that wasn't conscious.

But I've seen a lot of kids like him.

I've seen them all.

I got up right behind him until I could whisper in his ear and said, “You've killed him. We know that. You know that. We know about Heather and about Amir and we have video tapes showing you stalking him at his apartments. You had an obsession. And you think that now, now that you can see yourself in the light, that it turns out you're not really human. That hood has become your face. Those scars have mixed around with your genes. You're thinking, 'Nobody has been through this. Nobody has struggled like this. Nobody has beat another kid up with a candlestick until his skull is all smashed up'.”

He stiffened up like a kid taking a whipping from a nun with a meter stick and his face turned pasty white. I was starting to find out that his body language could wire messages to me as loud as an air horn. That he wasn't dead on the outside yet, either. That whether he had a voice or not anymore, he desperately needed to be with a human being again, instead of with his thoughts. He needed to touch someone. To hold someone. To feel a heartbeat under his fingers again, like neighbors thumping broom handles against the ceiling because that God-awful bass is breaking all our china and it's four in the morning and we're gonna call the police if you don't turn it off ! Heartbeats like that. Heartbeats that rumbled the earth.

I continued, “But, really, you're not all that different. I'm not saying what you did was the best decision, but you were trapped, weren't you? There was no other place to go. What it all boils down to is that you're human. And the fact of the matter is that humans kill and humans hurt and humans feel the craziest things and...”

He was starting to cry a little so I stopped and touched his shoulder.

“Hey. Hey, tin man. You're gonna rust yourself all over again like that.”

His eyes were hot and red and irritated; little Bunsen burners. He steadied himself against the wall and his hands started looking for a place to roost, looking for a place to settle. Pockets, head, chest, wall, face, like kite tails.

I caught his hands, turned him, and put my forehead against his so I trembled along with him and we stayed that way for a while, connected and thrumming along the same radio wave and I could almost hear the words that had been trapped inside his throat slipping out into the air; silent. Slipping out through the back door, quiet so that they don't wake anyone up.