A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip (11 page)

Kevin heads for his regular seat beneath the wall of comic strips, a paling rainbow of
Marvin
s and
Momma
s and
Hi and Lois
es, their corners creased over rectangles of Scotch tape.

Miss Vincent gives him a probing look and asks, “Kevin, is everything all right?”

The sound of his name. That’s all it takes. From someone who doesn’t mean it as an insult.

“Oh dear,” Miss Vincent says, and “Take your time,” and “Would you like me to close the door? Here, let me close the door.”

Haltingly, because it is not a story, he tells her what has
happened. The rain taps like grains of rice against the glass. A laugh filters through the wall. When he has finished, Miss Vincent gets up and walks to her desk, tugs out a handful of Kleenex, and hands them to him in a lily. In elementary school, on the first day of class, everyone was required to contribute a box of Kleenex to the supply cabinet. They never lasted until Christmas.

“How long has all of this been going on?” Miss Vincent asks.

“Two weeks. More like three.”

And that’s when the intercom goes off, and the building fills with noise, and her tenth-graders begin to arrive. She escorts Kevin to the landing at the top of the back staircase. “I need you to wait here a few minutes. Can you do that? I’m going to page Mr. McCallum. He’ll want to talk to you.”

“But I’ve got math.”

“Don’t worry about math. I’ll write you a pass.”

“But—”

The fire door sighs closed on its metal cylinder. He sinks down the wall to the floor. There is no silence like a school’s after the halls have drained and the bell has rung and the doors have clapped shut like a string of firecrackers. Kevin rubs his eyes. For a moment, his body seems to swim with light. He hears Miss Vincent call his name from the corridor, but he is sitting directly beneath the grated window, and she can’t see him. “Kevin?” she repeats, and a wild guilt goes sprawling through him. He wishes that he understood where it came from. Often he has a dream—he could be inside it now—that he is carrying something fragile, something precious, and he has dropped it. Sometimes he relives the accident a hundred
times before he wakes up. He can never prevent it. That’s how he feels listening to Miss Vincent say, “I don’t know what to tell you. He was right here. I don’t know where he went”—as if something irreplaceable has bobbled from his fingers. It is falling, it is broken, and maybe it will always be broken. A week might pass, a year, and who can say?

There is no silence like a school’s after the halls have drained and the bell has rung and the doors have clapped shut like a string of firecrackers. Kevin rubs his eyes. For a moment, his body seems to swim with light. By the time his vision has cleared, a man is standing over him on the landing, a skinny guy with the look of a guidance counselor on his day off, untucked but still buttoned up. The man holds himself with the same slight hunch Kevin wears when he wants to remain invisible—except stiffer, old-mannier. Here, Kevin thinks, is someone who has been trying to go unnoticed for so long that the posture has become irremovable. He is welded into it.

Breathlessly, like a runner finishing a race, he says Kevin’s name, giving a sympathetic dip of his chin. “Hello again. You’re supposed to follow me.”

Without thinking, Kevin gets up and accompanies him downstairs. They both skip the last step with an instinctive little elastic stride, as if they’re avoiding a puddle.

If you had asked him, Kevin would have said he was sure the stairwell door opened at the back corner of the lunchroom, but the wall must have spun ten feet to the left, because they end up in the kitchen instead, behind the Formica counter where the science club and the spirit squad conduct their pizza sales. The man leads him through a darkened side room,
then past the vending machines and microwaves to the table where Asa Stephens and Danny Morgan usually sit.

He makes a jellyfish gesture with his fingers:
Have a seat
.

Kevin takes the bench across from him. He has never seen the lunchroom so deserted. He can hear the Coke machines humming like spaceships.

“So,” the man says—a finished statement. “It’s been pretty awful, hasn’t it?”

“Thad and Kenneth and everything. Yeah. Am I supposed to go over it all again with you?”

“You can if you want.”

“Well, I just finished telling Miss Vincent, and she said—” On the table Kevin notices a pattern of sunlight guttering through leaves. He turns to face the row of windows. “Hey, it stopped raining.”

“For now it has, absolutely.”

“Weird. Where’s Mr. McCallum, anyway? Shouldn’t he be here for this? Miss Vincent said she was going to call the principal.”

“Mr. McCallum is waiting upstairs for you. I promise he’ll stay there as long as it takes.”

Kevin scrutinizes the man: his lean neck, his dark beard, the pigment spots on his forehead. His mannerisms are oddly familiar, like those of some halfway relative in the background of a hundred family photos, all mild words and big stage gestures. He has one prominent canine tooth. His eyeglasses are shaped like elongated stop signs. And the way his hair thins to silk on top and flares back in a great puff at the sides reminds Kevin of—oh—what was his name?—that small skullish guy who commanded the Death Star. “You’re not a guidance counselor, are you,” Kevin says.

“A guidance counselor, that’s good!” The man has a generous laugh, much bigger than it appears he would. Each
ha
is like a perfect circle, soaring out of him one after the other, a tunnel of glowing blue rings. “A guidance counselor! No, think of me as a sort of chaperone. A courier.”

“So you don’t want to talk about Thad and Kenneth?”

“Well, again, we can if you’d like, but no. Truth is, I know the Thad and Kenneth story already. By heart. What I want is to offer you a way out.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Here, look. This is—will turn out to have been—the worst few weeks of—well, your childhood, at least. Your school years. That I can promise you, Kevin. Right now you think the harm is irreparable, and you know what? You’re right. It is irreparable. It is. You’ve changed. From now on, for good or ill, however fractionally, you’re going to be a different person.”

The transparent hairs on Kevin’s arms prickle.

“I know, I know, you don’t want to be a different person. Believe me, I understand. And that’s why I’m here. Life is difficult and confusing, but—and here’s the thing—it comes with an escape switch. Everyone gets their chance to press it if they want. This is yours.”

He situates his glasses on his forehead. Some people’s eyes seem to soften without their glasses. His, though, sharpen to a knife-edge. “Do you understand what I mean?”

“Not the remotest clue.”

“No? Look around.”

Kevin can’t stop sniffling. He wipes his nose with one of the Kleenex Miss Vincent gave him. When he was a kid, in first and second grade, he would cry so furiously sometimes
that his jaw ached and sweat pasted his hair to his scalp, yet ten minutes later he would feel fine, magnificent, as fresh as grass. But now that kind of crying leaves him utterly exhausted. For the rest of the day his eyes will have an ugly red-rimmed look, with colorless flats of tightened skin underneath. Between classes he will hog the water fountain, drinking until his stomach strains at his jeans, but his throat will keep itching anyway. He won’t begin to feel better until he gets home and turns on the TV.

“The lunchroom,” he says to the man. “Big whoop.”

“Look closer.”

At first there is just a vague weaving of colors that keeps flickering behind itself, returning and disappearing, but then some warp seems to move through the room, and it all settles into place. Everywhere Kevin turns, pairs of figures are joined in what must be conversation. Some of them look like people, a few like animals, a few more like animals if animals were people: two gangling birds with long snaky necks, two mice sitting back on their haunches, two coppery-red toad-things, rows of polished feelers along their backs that look like paper clips bent partway open. Many of the shapes are hardly like bodies at all, but gadgets, magic tricks, science experiments. Kevin isn’t quite sure how he recognizes them as living creatures at all, only that he does.

Two spikes of beating light.

Two plumes of yellow-brown smoke that slip through some pinprick in the air.

Two curved sheets of paper marked with letters he can’t read.

A pattern of frost slicing its way through a similar but sparser pattern.

Some strange roughening in space next to a slightly more porous roughening.

Two plantlike sprays of greenery twitching with raindrops from an approaching storm.

Two mirrors reflecting everything except each other.

Why, Kevin wonders, didn’t he notice any of them earlier?

“Who are all these people?” he asks.

“They’re like you. Alive. This is their chance to say no.”

“But where did they come from?”

“Everywhere.”

“But I mean what are they doing
here
?”

“Here at CAC? That’s just a convenience, an illusion. Right now they’re probably wondering what you’re doing under the ocean or in the forest or between the solar rifts. Anyway, none of that matters. What matters is how you answer the question.”

Kevin cocks his head to one side.
The question?

“The question is, Would you like to press the escape switch?”

A hissing gradually takes the shape of the room, squaring out against the walls and the ceiling. It sounds as if a blank tape is playing directly into his ears. Usually Kevin feels smarter than this.

“I don’t understand.”

The man pivots his head until a vertebra in his neck pops. “Mmm. What I’m saying is that you’re alive, but you don’t have to be. You don’t have
to have been
, ever. It’s up to you. That’s part of the bargain. This is your chance—your one chance—to make up your mind.”

Two old women hobble through a door Kevin can’t locate once it closes. The man points to the bench where they were
sitting and says, “See, that was her chance, just now,” then to a pair of threads winding around an invisible spool. “And this is his.”

Something inside Kevin lands suddenly. He takes a sharp breath and tells the man he understands, but not out loud. What should he do? The man repositions his glasses. “I know nearly as much about you as you do, but I’m here only to ask the question. You’ll have to answer it yourself.”

“But we just met.”

“Meaning how can I possibly know anything about you? Let’s try this.” He bows his head, and his scalp gleams through his hair. “Flash paper. Ice Pirates. Fool’s gold. Magnets. World War Three. Orange peel. Incorrigible. ‘It’s casual.’ ” None of it would make sense to anyone but Kevin. “And do you remember that E.T. thing you used to do, the way you’d extend your neck and flex it until the joints cracked? And then one day you heard Stacey Leavitt say, ‘He’s doing it again,’ and realized it was weird. Oh, and what about the dream you always have that you’re at the flea market, and you’re sorting through a box of comics, and you find those two issues of
Captain Carrot
you’re missing. Or the time your dad called out of the blue, and you guessed it was him before you picked up the phone, and you answered with, ‘Hi, Dad,’ as if you were psychic. Remember? You were living at Sturbridge. Mom had just made dinner: spaghetti. And how about that bare patch in the yard at Clapboard Hill that looked like a giant’s footprint? And that pencil collection you had in the second grade? And here’s one: how about that same year, when Miss Jordan wouldn’t lend you the bathroom pass and you decided you’d teach her a lesson by wetting your pants—”

“Okay. Stop.”

“—and you sat on your math workbook—”

“Stop. I get it.”

“—to soak up the puddle.”

“Enough.”

With his palms, the man surrenders. “And it’s Grand Moff Tarkin. From
Star Wars
.”

On the table alongside theirs Kevin sees two small girls with strands of glass melting from their fingernails. One table over are two amoebas of red oil paint, and by the wall are a heap of zigzags in several shades of gray, and near the break room are two men wearing suits of yellow tennis ball fuzz—or no, wait, that’s their skin—and “What’s going to happen when Miss Vincent comes downstairs looking for me?” Kevin asks. “Or when someone cuts through the lunchroom on their way to the office? Won’t they freak?”

“No one’s going to interrupt us.”

“But what if they do?”

“They won’t. But tell you what, why don’t you go upstairs and check on them? You remember the door we came in by? Use that same one.”

Kevin takes the stairs two at a time. The fire door at the top opens with a big
cha-kunk
of its push bar, and in seconds he is on the other side and gunning out into the hallway. He nearly runs into Miss Vincent and Mr. McCallum, who go as still as cats. They were on their way to find him, just as he knew they would be, their faces locked in expressions of worry and anger. He is about to apologize for leaving without permission when he notices how Mr. McCallum’s legs are bent, how Miss Vincent’s skirt is hanging at three different angles, none of
them down, and realizes that they aren’t moving. At all. They look like statues clothed in skin and hair and fabric and color and softness and light.