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Authors: Gary Braver

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BOOK: GRAY MATTER
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E
very Thursday night, Cindy Porter would stop at Morton’s Deli for some pastrami, sauerkraut, potato salad, kosher pickles, fresh sub rolls, and a copy of the
Cape Ann Weekly Gazette
. Then she’d head home and, weather permitting, she’d settle into the backyard hot tub with her boyfriend, Vinnie, and read the paper and pig out.
As a nurse, she knew better, given how the cholesterol, fat, and salt in one of her Mortons could probably send a hippopotamus into cardiac arrest. But the rest of the week, she did her tofu-wheat-germ-and-broccoli virtues. Besides, she had read about a study by some Harvard nutritionist who concluded that a steady diet of low fat and cholesterol statistically added at best two months to one’s life. Her weekly Mortons were worth a measly eight weeks, especially since her parents were in their seventies and still going strong.
It was a pleasant evening, and, as usual, she changed into her bathing suit. Vinnie was visiting his mother in Connecticut and wouldn’t be back until late. So she made herself a sandwich and settled into the tub with a cold Sam Adams and the
Gazette
. As the warm water gushed around her, she felt her muscles loosen in place. She took a bite of sandwich and washed it down with some beer.
The headlines were about the ongoing battle to build low-income housing. She was against it, only because she knew that only ten percent of the actual complex would be for poor families, the rest for expensive country condo living that would amount to a bonanza for developers. And that meant
more coastal acreage would be jammed with construction, and more traffic clogging town roads. She made note of the town hearing next week.
She turned the paper over. Catching her eye at the bottom of the page was the headline: “Human Remains off Gloucester Identified.”
According to the story, a skull and a leg bone that had been pulled up by professional scallopers two months ago had been positively identified. She vaguely recalled reading about the discovery. Apparently the remains had been DNA-matched to a six-year-old boy from Tennessee.
Maybe he had been up this way on a summer vacation or a visit with relatives. The poor kid. There were boating accidents and disappearances every year, usually because people don’t check the weather reports and then get caught in storms.
The story went on to say how forensics experts from the medical examiner’s office in Boston originally were baffled by the mysterious holes in the boy’s skull.
On an inside page, where the story continued, was a schematic drawing of the skull showing the odd cluster of holes—two sets on the left side of the forehead just behind the hairline, and above the ear.
Experts still aren’t certain if the holes were made by marine organisms or had occurred before death.
The cause of death has not yet been determined. However, forensic scientists estimate that the remains could have been in the water for over a year, leading some to conclude that the child had drowned.
But according to Gloucester police who worked in conjunction with Tennessee authorities, the child’s disappearance was being treated as a kidnapping and homicide.
The story went on to say that the remains had been returned to the parents for burial.
Cindy stared at the diagram.
That strange boy who came into the ER the other night had scars on his head just like these. The poetry kid. The savant.
Brendan something or other.
“Yes, they’re drill marks,” Joe Steiner insisted. “And you don’t need to get a second opinion. While you were gone, I had Boston look at them. We got both stereoscopic and an electron microscopic analysis. No marine organism in the books made those holes. They also ruled out lasers, knives, ice picks, and every known kind of muzzle projectile—bullet, pellet, BB, buckshot, dart—you name it. They were drilled, Greg, and you can take that to the bank.”
Greg was on the phone the morning after he had returned from Chattanooga. He would have called from the road yesterday, but Joe was out of the office yesterday, car-shopping with his daughter.
“How come the parents weren’t notified about the holes?”
“Because somebody messed up, maybe at the Gloucester end, maybe Tennessee,” Joe said. “It’s possible it was simply overlooked, or somebody didn’t think it was significant. Whatever, the Boston ME made it clear those perforations were the results of a neurological procedure. And that got into the report because I saw it.”
“They didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.”
“If the kid had had an operation, the parents would have remembered. Nobody saw it as a cause of death. These things happen.”
“Joe, you weren’t down there,” Greg said. “You didn’t see the expression on their faces when I told them that their kid’s head had been drilled.”
“I understand. That must have been a bitch. But when you calm down, you might want to give this woman a call.”
“What woman?”
“Write this down: Cynthia Porter, R.N., at the Essex Medical Center.”
“What’s she got?”
“A kid with cluster-scars on his head identical to those of the Sagamore Boy and the Dixon kid,” Joe said.
“What?”
“And he’s alive.”
N
icole was naked but for a tutu and doing peek-a-boo pirouettes while her boyfriend, the older guy from the diner, lay naked and panting on her bed in a state of red alert, his wanger armed and poised like a surface-to-air missile—when suddenly she glided to the window and dropped the blinds, cutting off Brendan’s view.
Brendan lowered the binoculars. Whatever they were doing in there, only the fish in her aquarium could appreciate.
It was a little after midnight that same evening. For nearly half an hour he had watched her through her bathroom window just thirty feet from his perch, taking in every moment of her precoital ritual. She had stripped down to that pink-cream flesh then, with her back to him, she brushed her golden mane, after which, turning slightly toward him, she shaved herself at the sink, her arms raised like swan necks toward the ceiling so he got a full double-barrel shot of those pink-capped breasts, then raising her legs as if practicing a ballet move, running the razor in long strokes, turning this way and that, all the while oblivious to the raised blinds and Brendan in the tree right outside her window.
Even so close, he could not see his mark because she never faced him straight-on long enough—just a quick flash of the dark target area, then she slipped into the shower, which was one of those fancy all-glass-and-chrome enclosures that instantly misted up, rendering her a moving impressionism in pink. And when she was finished, he lost her to a towel.
Brendan slipped the field glasses into its case and slumped against the
tree trunk. This was the third time he had staked her out. And another bust.
Next time.
He didn’t care about the boyfriend, who had climbed up the drainpipe onto the porch roof and into her bedroom. Brendan was only interested in Nicole.
Nicole DaFoe.
He liked to stretch the syllables like sugar nougat.
Ni-cole Da-Foe
DaFee DaFi DaFoe DaFum
I smell the blood of a Yummy Yum Yum
Nicole DaFoe.
Everybody knew her name because it was in the newspapers all the time about how she made the honor roll at Bloomfield—a precious little prep school for rich geeks—how she got this award and that, how she was at the top of her class two years in a row and won first place in the New England science fair, how she was nominated for a Mensa scholarship for her senior year and was going to some fancy genius camp this summer to study biology and astrophysics. But not how she danced naked for her boyfriends. And not what they all said:
Nicole DaFoe: the Ice Queen who fucked.
Next time, he told himself. And up close and personal.
At this hour most of Hawthorne was asleep. Brendan had slipped out in his grandfather’s truck and driven the fifteen miles to Nicole’s house. From his perch high in an old European beech elm, he watched a blue-white crystalline moon rise above the line of trees and the fancy homes that made up her street. It blazed so brightly that the trees made shadow claws across the lawns.
But Brendan did not notice. He was now lost in the moon face—so much so that his body had gone rigid with concentration and his mind sat at the edge of a hypnotic trance. So lost that neither the electric chittering of insects nor the pass of an occasional car registered. So lost that the ancient shadows on the white surface appeared to move.
He had nearly cleared his mind of the assaulting clutter—of verbal and visual noise that gushed out of his memory in phantasmagoric spurts—crazy flash images of meaningless things that would at times rise up in his mind like fuzzy stills, as if he were watching a slide show through gauze—other times they’d come in snippets of animated scenes, like a film of incoherent memory snatches spliced together by some lunatic editor—images of people’s
eyes, their faces blurred out—just eyes—and lights and shiny metal, television commercials, green beeping oscilloscope patterns.
And that Möbius strip of poetry.
He liked poetry, which stuck to his mind like frost—especially love poetry, not because he loved but because he couldn’t. It was like some alien language he tried to decipher, his own Linear B.
Maybe it was because he had banged his head earlier that day, but his mind was particularly active—and from someplace he kept seeing flashes of a big smiling Happy Face cartoon.
It made no sense.
Nixon.
He almost had caught it earlier.
Nixon.
Big blue oval face and a sharp almond odor he could not identify—an odor that was distinct and profoundly embedded in his memory.
Memory.
That was the problem: He had Kodachrome memory, ASA ten million, and one that didn’t fade. Ever. He had been cursed with a mind that would not let him forget things. Although the Dellsies thought it cool having a waiter with total recall who could tell you the nutritional value of everything in the kitchen and remember what you ordered three weeks ago for lunch, his head was a junk-heap torture chamber. While other people’s recollection was triggered by a song or a familiar face, Brendan’s mind was an instant cascade of words and images, triggered by the slightest stimulus—like the first neutron in a chain reaction in a nuclear explosion. It was horrible, and it led him to avoid movies, music, and television. To keep himself from total dysfunction or madness or suicide—and there were many days he contemplated braiding a noose—he had worked out elaborate strategies. Sometimes he would project the images onto an imaginary book page then turn the page to a blank sheet. Or he would write down words or phrases that just wouldn’t go away—sometimes pages worth, including diagrams and stick drawings of people and things—then burn them. When that didn’t work, he would torch whole books.
Medication also helped. But when he turned sixteen, he had to quit school because he could not take the reading, not because he couldn’t understand the material—
au contraire,
the subjects were stupefyingly easy. It was that he couldn’t clear his mind of what he read, and just to release the pressure, he would gush lines of memorized text—like verbal orgasms. Teachers
complained. Classmates called him “freak.” They called him “Johnny Mnemonic.” They wanted him to do mind tricks like Dustin Hoffman in
Rain Man
—look at a shuffled pack of cards, then turn them over and recite the order, or spout off the telephone numbers of all the kids in class, or the amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Stupid razzle-dazzle memory stuff. It was easy, but no fun being a one-man carnie sideshow. So he stopped reading and quit school.
The other day he happened to walk by DellKids, and because the door was ajar he overheard that little Whitman boy, Dylan, complain that he didn’t remember something that he was supposed to. Brendan envied him that. He would kill to turn off his brain.
But some things remained buried, like his parents. They had died when he was eight, yet he could only recall them in their last years—and nothing from his early childhood—as if there were a blockage. Also, there were things he wished he could selectively summon to the light—like that big smiling Happy Face that sat deep in his memory bank like the proverbial princess’s pea sending little ripples of discomfort up the layers …
blue
.
Big blue cartoon head and big bright round eyes and a big floppy nose. Bigger than life.
Brendan slapped himself in the face.
Don’t be afraid …
Dance
…
Mister
…
Almost. Big eyes. Funny nose. He felt it move closer.
He slapped himself again.
Mr. {SOMETHING} makes you happy.
And again.
He almost had it. Almost.
His face stung, but he slapped himself once more … and like some night predator, it nosed its way up out of a dense wormhole toward the light … inching upward ever so cautiously, so close … so close he could almost grasp it … Then suddenly without mercy it pulled back down into the gloom and was gone.
Brendan let out the breath that had bulbed in his chest and felt his body collapse on itself. He rested his head against the trunk and closed his eyes, feeling spent and chilled from perspiration.
So close, he could almost see it take form out of the gloom … and hear
vague wordless voices … and almost make out a room and faces … hands and lights.
He banged the back of his head against the tree.
A bloody membrane away.
Brendan lit a cigarette and let his mind wander. He thought about how the tars in the smoke were filling the micropores of his lungs with dark goo that might someday spawn cells of carcinoma and how he didn’t really give a damn. How nothing in his life mattered, including his life. How different he was from others. A freak who could recite the most exquisite love poetry ever written, yet who passed through life like a thing made of wood.
It was crazy, which was how he felt most of the time. Crazy.
Just before he climbed down, he let his eyes wander across the stars, connecting the dots until he had traced most of the constellations he knew, then reconnected the stars until they formed constellations of his own. The arrow of Sagittarius he stretched into a billion-mile hypodermic needle.
And Taurus he rounded out into a smiling blue face.
“
Mista Nisha won’t hurt you”
.
The words rose up in his head with such clarity Brendan gasped. Instantly he clamped down on them before they shot away.
He had them. HE HAD THEM.
“Mr. Nisha wants to be happy …”
“ … Don’t be afraid …”
“Dance with Mr. Nisha,” he said aloud. And he groaned with delight.
Thirty feet away, Michael Kaminsky also groaned with delight as he shed himself deep inside Nicole.
She felt the warm ooze fill the condom and kissed him. “Was that good?” she whispered.
“Ohhhhh, yeah.”
“Would you give it an A?”
“A-plus,” he panted. “Did you … you know, enjoy it, too?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Why? Well, because I’m never sure with you. You don’t react much.”
She didn’t answer, but tapped him on the shoulder to get up. The clock said 12:43. “You’ve got to go, and I’ve got to get up in four hours.”
“But it’s Saturday.”
“I know, but my mean old history teacher wants my term paper by noon Monday.”
“What a prick.”
She slid her hand down his body and touched him. “I’ll say.” Then she got up and slipped on her nightgown.
Michael peeled himself off her bed and began to get dressed. “If they ever found out, I’d be hanged at dawn.” He pulled up his shorts then sat at her desk and put on his socks.
“Well, that won’t happen if you’re real nice,” she said, and put her arms around him. “Michael … ?” she said, glaring up into his eyes in her best pleading look.
His body slumped. “Come on, Nik, I can’t do that.”
“You have to, Michael. Just two-hundredths of a point.”
He sighed. “You’ve got your A, but I can’t do that to Amy, or any other student. I can’t give her a grade lower than she deserves.”
She squeezed his arms. “I want you to do this for me. Please.” She kept her voice low so her parents wouldn’t hear them.
“You know these Vietnamese kids. She killed herself on her paper. I’d have to make up stuff to justify a B. It was excellent. So was yours—”
“Then you’re going to have to make up stuff, because this American kid won’t settle for second place.”
Michael got up and pulled on his pants. In the scant light from the fish tank, Michael looked around her room. Covering the walls were photos of Nicole as well as her various awards, plaques, citations, blue ribbons. Hanging over a chair was her Mensa T-shirt.
“It means that much to you.”
“Yes.”
She watched Michael move closer to inspect the photographs. There were a dozen of them. One caught his eye: the group shot of the Bloomfield Biology Club on a field trip to Genzyme Corporation. Seven kids were posing in a lab with company biologists in white smocks. At one end was Nicole; at the other end was Amy Tran.
“Aren’t you taking this a little hard? I mean, you’ve got a wall of awards. You’ll probably get early admission to Harvard and be in med school in four years. What else do you want?”
Nobody remembers seconds.
Nicole moved up to him. “Maybe I am,” she whispered. “But you have to do this for me. It means everything.” She pressed herself against his groin.
“I don’t think Mr. Laurent had this in mind,” he said.
“Fuck Mr. Laurent.” Her voice was void of inflection.
The Andrew Dale Laurent Fellowship was a prize that went to a member of the incoming senior class whose sheer determination and effort had “most demonstrated the greatest desire to succeed,” as the write-up said. It was the most prestigious award at Bloomfield Prep, not because of the thousand-dollar prize, but because the benefactors stipulated that it went to the student with the mathematically highest grade-point average going into the senior year. It was the only award based purely on grades. And although the school did not publish class rank, everybody knew that the recipient was the eleventh-grade valedictorian. Number one.
BOOK: GRAY MATTER
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