The Freak Observer (12 page)

I still had my job at Cozy Pines. No more weekday shifts though; I couldn't get there on time. It was just going to be weekends and holidays for lucky me.

Then Friday came around, and I was sitting on a tailgate watching the river current. The water looked thick and ropy as melted glass. I could feel the cold seeping through my jeans. I had a little slice of time I thought belonged to me, just to me, between school and work on Saturday.

I heard the tires squeal.

I heard a blunt thud.

Sometimes I wonder if I really heard that sound, the sound of the truck hitting Esther. Could I really have heard that sound, separated from the rest of the crash? Or did my memory just make that up, to help me try to understand the sequence of events? Do I just remember a blunt thud because I think there ought to have been one?

. . .

There are infinite universes, and each has its observers. A Freak Observer pops into existence as a self-aware entity that makes its universe orderly. Do you ever wonder why time doesn't run backwards? Do you ever wonder why gravity is always on? Freak Observer. Freak Observer. Freak Observer. We owe it all to the Freak Observer. At least I think we do.

This is my universe, and I am bound to observe it.

I have watched babies—both my Asta and Little Harold—discover the world. For weeks they just look and look. Sometimes they cry. They eat and they get their diapers changed. Then they find their hands. It's an amazing thing. They go cross-eyed from concentration. They stare so intently at their hands. One hand touches the other. They get the hand into their mouth, and they are so intense. Honestly, I have seen teenage boys having sex, and they aren't even so intense as babies who are figuring out that they have hands . . . and mouths . . . and the world.

So I have seen how observers are born into the world.

And I have seen how an observer dies.

I have to find a poem for English class. The whole class does. We have all been turned loose in the library on a scavenger hunt, an Easter egg hunt, and we are supposed to bring poems back. Song lyrics don't count. There was much griping about that little point.

I don't know why Ms. (Heartless) Hart hates the librarian, but apparently she does. She shepherded us all through the halls and into the library. Then she disappeared.

Today there are people in the library who are never in the library. They just want to get this over with quickly. They swarm the help desk. I'd say “like maggots,” but they are noisy and calling out for poems about beer and suicide and vampires and baby deer. Maggots are pretty quiet, in my experience. I am quiet like a maggot. I don't even ask for help. I pretend that I'm working on poetry, but instead, I'm writing about noisy maggots.

. . .

I haven't spoken to my dad for a long time. We have nothing much to say. He tells me no stories. I ask him no questions. We don't smile.

Tonight, though, I said, “I need a poem. A poem about stars.”

He got up from the kitchen table and went to the shelves in the living room. He doesn't search around. He goes right to the place on the shelf and pulls out a little book. He opens it and hands it to me:

Stars at Tallapoosa

The lines are straight and swift between the stars.
The night is not the cradle that they cry,
The criers, undulating the deep-oceaned phrase.
The lines are much too dark and much too sharp.

The mind herein attains simplicity,
There is no moon, no single, silvered leaf.
The body is no body to be seen
But is an eye that studies its black lid.

Let these be your delight, secretive hunter,
Wading the sea-lines, moist and ever mingling,
Mounting the earth-lines, long and lax, lethargic.
These lines are swift and fall without diverging.

The melon-flower nor dew nor web of either
Is like to these. But in yourself is like:
A sheaf of brilliant arrows flying straight,
Flying and falling straightaway for their pleasure,

Their pleasure that is all bright-edged and cold;
Or, if not arrows, then the nimblest motions,
Making recoveries of young nakedness
And the lost vehemence the midnights hold.

 

—Wallace Stevens,
Harmonium
, 1922

My dad doesn't say anything. He doesn't help me read. He doesn't explain anything.

He doesn't have to, I guess. I have never seen the ocean, so I'm not really sure about sea-lines, but I have seen the stars. And they aren't really like dew or webs or what I guess a melon-flower might be. They are stars. I know that starlight travels in a straight line for longer than my whole life to reach my eye—but my eye being here is purely accidental. If I blink, that light is gone forever.

That has to be good enough.

. . .

So I read the poem in Ms. (Heartless) Hart's class. She calls on me near the end of the period. If I had a longer poem, it would have been cut in half by the bell. As it is, she asks me a question, “What does that mean, Loa?” She never asked anyone else that question. Everyone else got a round of applause for being able to stand up and make the sound of words. I did that. It isn't good enough.

So I answer, “The stars shine, and it doesn't matter if we see them or not.”

The bell rings.

Ms. (Heartless) Hart raises her voice, “Loa. Where did you get that poem?”

“From home,” I say. I hand her the photocopy with the bibliographic citation—as required by the assignment.

“I can't give you the library research credit.”

I say nothing. She bent the rules for the mouthbreathers who brought song lyrics, but she can't bend the rule for having a dad who reads poetry. Understood.

For just a moment, she's looking me in the eye. I pretend I can see right through her retina into the flabby jelly behind it. I don't flinch.

. . .

When the snow comes, it's the light and not the cold that lets you know.

My dad says that snow is how you know if you are a kid. If it makes you happy, you're a kid. It's that simple.

But maybe it's not. I remember the first time snow made me cry, and I was very little—only in the first grade.

It came in the night, while I was sleeping. I'm pretty sure my mom and dad both knew. They needed to keep the house warm. They kept an eye on the weather. They might have known it was coming because Ed the smiling weatherman told them it was coming—or they might have seen how the clouds were acting. But I was little. It wasn't my job then to keep the fire going. The only weather reports that matter were the ones my mom dished out with breakfast, “Eat your oatmeal. It's going to be cold today,” or “You are going to be hot as a monkey in that stupid sweatshirt.”

I woke up, and the world was white. So what? It happens. Snow happens. But when I went downstairs, Mom said there wasn't going to be any school. Silly Mom. It was only Wednesday. Wednesday is library day. Wednesday is a school day for sure.

Mom said, “No school.”

I cried.

It was Wednesday. Library day. I needed to swap my books in. Wednesday is library day. She was wrong. I was right. I found my own boots. I zipped my own coat. I was right. It was library day.

I opened the kitchen door and stepped out onto the porch. I couldn't go any farther. The snowbanks were in my way.

Mom grabbed my arm and dragged me into the kitchen.

“Harold,” said Mom, “You deal with this.” She pointed at me.

Dad came to the doorway. He looked at me. He looked at me a long time.

“OK,” he said. “You wait here.”

I waited in the kitchen. I was still crying, but I was being quieter about it.

“C'mere,” Dad yelled.

I went out the door. He had his snowshoes. He picked me up and put me on his shoulders. I remember that he did that, but I don't remember how it felt. I wasn't crying anymore. I was happy. I was going to school.

We went across the creek and through the woods. It's shorter to the highway that way than it is if you follow the road.

But when we got to the highway, it wasn't there. All there was was snow. I know it was the bus stop, but there wasn't any highway. There weren't any cars. Dad just stood there with me on his shoulders. It was so quiet. I could hear trees breaking under the snow. I knew then that the bus wasn't going to come. So I cried.

I cried all the way home.

When we got there, Dad put me down and told me to go in the house.

Mom wiped my nose and took off my coat.

I just stood there in my boots and snow pants. I sucked each breath in a long sniff and let it out in a wail.

My mom wiped my nose again and put her warm hands against my face and tipped my head so we were looking at each other eye to eye.

“Don't be an idiot,” she said. “If you don't stop crying, you are going to make yourself sick. And you're making the dog sad.”

Dad came in. I turned my bawling self toward him. After all his effort so far, I still expected him to fix it. I still thought there must be some way to go to school.

Dad walked right past me and opened the closet under the stairs. After a little rummaging and swearing, he pulled out a cardboard box full of yellow books. Then he pulled out another. He put them close to the heating stove.

“Read these,” he said.

So I did. I read
National Geographic
for five days straight. I didn't know what the hell I was reading about most of the time. I mostly just looked at the pictures. I learned though. I learned a girl can ride camels across the desert in Australia. I learned that tulips have tiny seeds, and Newton was a silver-haired man interested in rainbows. And I learned that there are stars in the sky that I can't see.

. . .

I've been going to the library during lunch and whenever else I can make an excuse to be there. I look for information on two problems. Problem 1 is the Freak Observer. What is it really? Is it a real thing or just a fairy tale of physics? At this point, I don't have any confidence in my understanding. Problem 2 is getting rid of The Bony Guy. Honestly, there is squat-all on the library shelves that is useful to me, but the Internet helps.

Today the focus is Problem 2, subpart A: dreams.

It's hard to find useful stuff about dreams. I have to dig through a lot of crap about what things “symbolize.”

Like dream dictionaries. A dream dictionary is a one-size-fits-all-palm-reading-astrology-column-in-the-newspaper-carrot-equals-penis secret-code decoder. On the plus side, the next time I need to write an essay for Ms. (Heartless) Hart, I could probably just plagiarize from a dream dictionary like this, “I think the Nazis in the book represent an evil and merciless force that cannot be reasoned with. They represent the sorts of people who put other people down.” It might be an interesting experiment. I can see a couple of possible outcomes. Maybe Ms. (Heartless) Hart would be happy with an essay like that. It would prove that she was getting through to me. Or maybe she would break out the red ink to circle those prepositions at the ends of the sentences. But that is about the only use I can imagine for the handy-dandy dream dictionaries. They are useless as tits on a tomcat when it comes to getting rid of The Bony Guy.

I'm not interested in doing literary criticism of my dreams. I am the poet here, and I know what it means when I find Asta's slipper in the snow. The snow in my dreams isn't about “isolation” or “innocence.” It was February when my sister died. I live in a world where it snows.

. . .

I find it weird that nobody teaches us about dreams in school. You'd think it would come up at some point, like maybe in health class or something, but it doesn't. There was that inspirational speaker who tore a phone book in half and told us to dream big, but his message had nothing to do with our dream life while we sleep. He was all about goals and, I guess, dislike for phone books.

It's like everyone is living this other life, full of creepy shit, and the whole thing is totally ignored.

As far as that goes, thinking, in general, is pretty much ignored. Nobody ever said to me, “We are going to learn about thinking, now. We are going to learn how to learn.”

I mean, they told me stuff like “Chicken, airplane, soldier” to help me learn to swim. There were little movies about how to wash my hands and brush my teeth. They provided step-by-step directions on—duh, duh, DUH!—using tampons, but as for the care and feeding of my brain, nothing.

I'm on my own.

. . .

It's pretty new science, the science of dreams, and there isn't much consensus.

Still, there are some facts: At least 25 percent of trauma victims have repetitive dreams of the event with feelings of intense rage, fear, or grief. About the same number of children have nightmares with frightening, detailed plots.

Adults don't have nightmares as much, unless they have “thin-boundary creative personalities”—or they are batshit crazy. It's nice to have options.