A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip (22 page)

He leaves down the empty back stairs. At the bottom he nudges the door open with his hip. The sound of conversation microphones open around him. Something must be wrong with the air-conditioning, because the lunchroom is freezing cold. Clusters of kids prop themselves against the tables and the vending machines, their bodies doing an aching little up-down motion. An older girl—Chuck’s sister—cups her palms to her mouth and breathes into them at 98.6 degrees. One of the football players, a stocky guy whose name Kevin doesn’t know, stands with his hands tucked into his sleeves like an Indian squaw. Along the side wall, leaning against the windows, are Thad and Kenneth, Craig Bell and Clint Fulkerson, Shane Wesson, Shane Roper, Joseph Rimmer, Levon Dollard, the whole bunch of them too absorbed in whatever joke they are telling to have noticed Kevin standing just a few feet away. In his Goon voice, with that strange kazoo-hum, Thad says, “Will you sign my queerbook?” and then in his
regular voice, “No! No! Rearbook! Will you sign my
rear
-book?” and it must be the ideal line, because everyone booms with laughter.

Thad is (1) slick, (2) happy, and (3) confident. He is (4) handsome, in an Adam’s-appley sort of way. And he is (5) mean, or at least (5) inaccessible, or how about (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) Kevin doesn’t know him at all anymore.

At the beginning of seventh grade, they were best friends, but the months kept changing, no one could stop them. Their friendship blew up and—
flash, whumpf
—filled the atmosphere. The dust of it has been chasing him ever since.

He was hoping he could avoid seeing Thad and Kenneth and the others before the final bell rang. He considers backing out and returning upstairs, following the convolutions of the building to the foyer. It is amazing how long a second can last. But the sun is laying a stripe of yellow light across the room, one that climbs the benches and scales the tables, then plunges to the floor like the skyline of a city. He walks right through it, and no one seems to notice.

Half an hour later he and Ethan are home on Northwick Court, drinking Capri Suns from the refrigerator as they recline on the back porch. The end of school must have worked its spell, because everything feels different. Quieter.
More yielding. Some switch has flipped inside the day: a few hours ago it was warm and shining like spring, and now it is warm and shining like summer. They listen to the fan whir inside the air conditioner, then spin to a stop as the thermostat clicks off. They watch Percy track a pair of dragonflies across the lawn, leaping at them with his paws outstretched. Thousands of glowing white specks dance over the grass, and tangles of honeysuckle rustle against the fence, and the shadows of the clouds are like the shadows water makes as it ripples over gravel.

As soon as they finish their drinks, Kevin coaxes Ethan into playing a kick-game in the carport. Ricochet, he calls it, and all it takes is a soccer ball and a good hard wall. The ball rebounds off the bricks with a weirdly tinny smack, the sound of an echo with nowhere to go. It launches itself at their legs, careering into the door and the mailbox, the pillar and the bushes. Every few kicks it clips past them and sails out of bounds down the driveway.

After they become tired of chasing it, they decide to hike to Osco and spend their money, following a shortcut Kevin knows through the woods. He has been walking to the same drugstore since he was in kindergarten—no matter which house or apartment he has lived in, and no matter with which of his parents—buying comic books and stickers, Choose Your Own Adventure novels, cinnamon oil for toothpicks. A bag boy is collecting shopping carts from the metal corrals and wheeling them across the parking lot, a long square millipede of a creature that keeps hitching and shuddering over the asphalt. Kevin and Ethan are busy kicking rocks, and even though they veer back and forth to chase after the
strays, wincing at the ones that ping against the undersides of cars, it doesn’t matter—they still beat the bag boy to the sidewalk by a mile. The candy aisle is midway through the store: rack after rack of chocolate bars and chewing gum. Ethan chooses a box of Nerds, Kevin one of Everlasting Gobstoppers—fifty-nine cents plus tax, and that’s it for his allowance—and then they riffle through the books and the magazines.
Mad
and
Cracked. Hit Parader
and
Song Hits
. Stephen R. Donaldson. Stephen King.
Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions
.

The two of them have already set out for home when Ethan says, “You do know you have a zit on your face.”

“No, there isn’t. Where?” Kevin finds it near the tip of his nose: a hard round pill of skin. “Jesus! It’s like a candy button.”

Ethan tries to tie off his smile. “I think it adds character.”

“Shut up. Go to hell.”

Kevin doesn’t need his fingers to feel the tightness of the thing, the weight, but he can’t quite catch sight of it. Attempting to do so only makes him aware of the way his nose hovers between his eyes, bulging there like an orange wedge. How does anyone ever manage to see anything else?

“At least your yearbook picture came out all right,” Ethan says. “Look at what they did to me.”

It’s true: a printing flaw on the page has marked Ethan’s cheek with a horrible black ink flag.

“I think it adds character,” Kevin says.

“Shut up.”

Soon it is dinnertime, and then snack time and TV time, and then Kevin’s brother has gone to bed, and then his mom,
and he and Ethan use the rails of the wooden fence to climb onto the roof of the house. Once, not so long ago, there were no buildings at this end of town, no houses, only acres of empty fields and a loose net of oak trees, and every time Kevin hoists himself onto the shingles, his mind offers up the same idea: how if he had been here back then—
right
here, exactly where he is now—he would have been pacing through a canopy of branches, arranging his body in midair. Maybe that’s where ghost stories come from, he thinks. Maybe ghosts are just people walking around in the past. People at the wrong time.

He and Ethan lie back on the slanting tiles and stretch out over the kitchen. Beneath them must be the cabinet where his mom keeps the oils and the spices, and beneath that the counter with the tall wooden stools, and beneath that the tortoise-green arabesque of the linoleum. They prop their heads on their arms, switching every so often from the right to the left, using their shirts to brush the roof-grit off their skin. A car guns its engine on Reservoir, and a stereo plays across the street at the Stegalls’, but otherwise the night has a beautiful grassy stillness to it. All they can hear is the chiming of the insects, a sound so full and layered it’s easy to imagine it cascading down from outer space. The moon is hole-punching the sky, the stars salting it in little collections of four and five. Even the very closest ones, Kevin has read, are light-years upon light-years away. How many of them have shed their surfaces already, he wonders, and how many have collapsed? How many stars must go out before a constellation dies?

“What’s the best nightmare you’ve ever had?” he asks Ethan.

“The best?”

“The worst.”

“Hmm. I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

Kevin tells him about the Chernobyl dream—the fallout and the blaze of light, his three-speed and Melissa Reznick. He shakes a Gobstopper from the box. “Okay, let’s say this: there’s a nuclear war, and you’ve got an island in the middle of the ocean. You can save five people. Who do you take with you?”

“Five people including me?”

“Five people
in addition
to you,” Kevin clarifies, and names his own five: Ethan, Sarah, Melissa, Bateman, “and Carina,” he finishes. “No—Ann. No!—Carina.”

“So no one in your family?”

“Oh!”

“No room for your family on the island. Tough luck, family! You can go ahead and burn to cinders.”

Well, no, but his family would overturn the whole question. “Let’s say our families are already taken care of.”

“All right. Then you and Bateman, and I guess Chuck, and Jennifer, and Shane Wesson.”

“Shane
Wesson
?”

Ethan is the kind of person whose entire personality flashes through in his laugh, quiet, calm, and unpretentious, as if somewhere deep inside his body he is always cushioned in an old recliner with a comic book propped open on his chest.

“Be serious.”

“Okay, okay. Clay Carpenter.”

“Good answer. So are you saying you
like
Jennifer?”

“I don’t like anybody right now.”

“Huh. I don’t think there’s ever been a single time in my life when I didn’t like anybody.”

Ethan laughs again. “Yeah, I know that about you. So when did you say you leave for your dad’s?”

“Shit. Wednesday. Man, I don’t want to go to Mississippi. Everything always changes when I’m in Mississippi.”

“Well, we’ve still got a few days left. I have all this stuff to do tomorrow, and Sunday is Sunday, but what are your plans Monday?”

“Yeah! Do you think your mom would drop you off? That would be excellent. I get paid tomorrow. We could go see a movie.”

“I’ll ask her.”

Last summer Kevin was leaving for Mississippi, and
Gotcha!
had just opened, and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” was the number-one song on the radio. Now he is leaving for Mississippi, and
Top Gun
has just opened, and “West End Girls” is the number-one song on the radio.

The Gobstopper clacks against his teeth, and he takes it out to inspect the colors. Though the streetlamps have dimmed on their timers, the light is still bright enough for him to see the miniature swirling planet the layers have formed, some Jupiter floating far up in the night. He tucks the candy back in his cheek, then crosses his hands behind his head.

“Thad called it a queerbook,” he says.

“Did what?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Someone’s tires whisper past on the road, and suddenly Kevin’s mind carries him back to Monday morning, when the sixth-graders paid their year-end visit to the school’s main campus. How nervous they must have been as their bus coasted to a stop in the parking lot, yet how carefully, he thinks, they hid
it, slouching in their seats and trading jokes with their friends. On one side of the river stood the brown-brick building where they had grown up playing war and inventing fan clubs at recess, on the other the redbrick building where half the students drove their own cars. Between them lay five minutes of curving highway and sandstone bluffs and hillsides green with a million trees. The kids descended the bus platform onto the patio and jostled through the school’s front doors. The halls absorbed their footsteps. The crowd rolled around them like a wave. And in chapel, when Principal McCallum said, “Now will you all please join me in the Mustang Anthem,” they sang so much louder than everyone else—

Kevin listened to their voices reflecting off the rafters, a great unanimous chorus of pre-altos and pre-tenors. Even the coolest of them had not yet learned that it was better not to demand too much attention. A year ago he was one of them and had no idea where his life was going. As the next song began, he sat in the bleachers remembering what it was like. Thinking, Before you know it, nothing will be the same. Saying, You’re not me yet, but I’m still you.

I owe thanks to the William F. Laman Public Library for a fellowship that allowed me to complete this book, as well as to my editor, Edward Kastenmeier, and his colleagues Tim O’Connell, Jocelyn Miller, and Emily Giglierano; to my agent, Jennifer Carlson, and her associates at Dunow, Carlson & Lerner; to my publicist, Josie Kals; my production editor, Victoria Pearson; and everyone else at Pantheon and Vintage; to the editors of the various magazines in which portions of this book were originally published, most especially Carol Ann Fitzgerald and Marc Smirnoff at
The Oxford American
, Meghan McCarron at
Interfictions
, Stephen Corey and Jenny Gropp Hess at
The Georgia Review
, Rachael Allen and Yuka Iqarashi at
Granta
, and Aja Gabel and Karyna McGlynn at
Gulf Coast
; to Jessica Easto and Chris Bertram for helping me in my hunt for a title; to Jessica Brogdon for refreshing my memory; and to Karen Russell for responding to this odd little memoir-thing with enthusiasm, sympathy, and acuity.

In addition to
A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip
, Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels
The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead
, and
The Truth About Celia;
the story collections
Things That Fall from the Sky
and
The View from the Seventh Layer;
and the children’s novels
City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery
. His work has been translated into seventeen languages. He has published his stories in such venues as
The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope, Tin House, The Oxford American, The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror
, and
New Stories from the South
. He has recieved the Borders Original Voices Award, three O. Henry Awards (one, a first prize), the PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Grant. In 2007, he was named one of
Granta
magazine’s Best Young American Novelists He teaches frequently at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and he lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised.