The Voices in Our Heads (27 page)

“Yeah . . . K . . . Take the pill on Friday and I get five times as smart all weekend. Then it goes away but I’s still smart ’cause it left stuff in my head, like the gummy shit on the soap instead of the soap. And as soon as I take the pill I’s got to wear gloves because if I touch someone’s sweat or something, I die and they die, like right off.”

He came out of regurgitation mode.

“You sure we’d die like a candle even if it was an after-pill thang? Seems like that would be lef’ for the victim of the guy who went for a thousand.”

Ben shrugged.

“I didn’t make the rules, Stephen. And either way, I wouldn’t want anyone to die on account of me.”

“Yeah, me neither.” He closed his eyes again, tight. “So the other side is I gots to be careful
before
I take the pill, ’cause if I touched someone’s sweat or blood or whatever and then took the pill within thirty seconds, I’d turn him into a candle thirty seconds after swallowing it.” He opened his eyes and found Ben’s. “That’s one hot minute, huh?” Ben nodded, and Stephen continued, face dead serious. “Then, I’d get smart like Jesus, but I’d only live for a year. Just to go up in a blaze o’ glory.”

Ben put the pill down on his desk.

“Remember to lock yourself in the bathroom before doing this if you decide to do it at all.” He nodded at the pill sitting there on the surface between them. “It’s up to you. Take it or leave it.”

Stephen took the pill in his hand and held it tight in his fist. He got up, and Marcus stopped him.

“Stephen.”

“Yeah?”

“Right now, before any of this goes down, tell me. Can you read at all?”

Stephen’s light brown face actually colored with blush, making the freckles on his cheeks darken a bit.

“Yeah, I kin read,” he said. “Like real slow. But I don’t understand books any harder than
Goodnight Moon
and
The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
It’s . . . too hard, and the words run together.”

Ben bent over, reached into his leather carry case, and drew out a text.

“Stephen, this is a collection of essays by a French philosopher named Jacques Derrida. I am reading it for my graduate literature class. He is known for being difficult to comprehend because of his word games and his belief that what is important doesn’t happen out in front of us, but rather at the edges, like the margins on a piece of notebook paper. I know . . . it seems difficult, but you will get it, I promise. His theory is called Logocentrism. After you take the pill this weekend, read this and write me a report on it.”

Stephen looked at the dirty blue carpet.

“I can’t write no more than the alphabet letters, Mr. Marcus.”

“Do you know what they sound like?”

“What?”

“The letters.”

Stephen shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Then that’s enough of a base. Trust me, the pill will do the rest. Read Derrida and write me a report. Even when the magic drains out of you after the weekend, the traces will leave you in a place where you’ll be able to write, at least on some functional level. The Derrida report will be a good memory, like your personal Bible.”

“OK, Mr. Marcus.” He took the book. “Uh . . . thanks.”

“Be good,” Marcus answered.

He only hoped Stephen would remember all the instructions required to harness the power that lay there in his fist, long enough to avoid killing himself and possibly some family member in the process.

The weekend was torture. Friday night Max went out to Narberth to hang out with his friends and hit on girls, and Kim drank too much wine, falling asleep on the living room couch, snoring, the Sony flat-screen droning on with some
Law and Order
marathon, pictures dancing in and out of the contours of her face. Ben drank a six-pack and had to get on the horn and beg Nick’s mother, Doris, to go make the pickup he’d promised. She wasn’t happy. Max came in pissed for other reasons and stormed up to his room to Facebook, and text, and then video chat with Heather Gregorio, initiating enough dirty talk back and forth over that thing to make Ben worry that he was going to get a phone call from her father, and soon.

And besides that, Ben couldn’t get Stephen out of his mind. What if the kid made a mistake, or worse, had a mean streak he couldn’t control with even five times his initial intelligence? He would die, and so would his victim. Ben would be responsible for two deaths. Could anyone trace it to him? He hated himself for thinking this way, almost as if it was dirty or cheap to consciously bring things to the level of “getting away with it,” but he couldn’t help it. While he didn’t really think anyone would dream of pinning anything on him out of the blue, it might be different if Stephen left some kind of will. Would he do that, not meaning to stick Ben with anything, but just for posterity? Ben hadn’t covered journaling and secrecy and about a million other scenarios that could put him in jail, or worse.

It had been just one of those things you did with your heart, sure that you were in the right before thinking about . . . well . . .
consequences
. And according to his sense of universal justice, by “the book,” at least the fairytale version, Ben had done a good thing, a moral thing, even beautiful considering Stephen Wagner’s probable future alternatives. But in the real world of legalities and liabilities, Ben probably made the biggest mistake of his life. He drank yet another Irish beer and went to bed, forgetting to turn on his humidifier. He slept poorly, cold sweats, couldn’t get a good angle.

The next day was a blur, sleeping late, moping around, making shitty eggs and cheese that stuck to the bottom of the pan, half-heartedly reading old King he was sick of, vague lesson planning, drinking early, tossing and turning upstairs in bed for what seemed an eternity and trudging into his Sunday where Kim spent most of the crisp blue day gardening, as he hogged the couch and flipped between college basketball games he didn’t really care about. He also kept returning to local news, waiting to hear Stephen’s name, to hear his own, to see his blurry People First Charter School I.D. picture on the screen with the half-smile because he had been hiding the gum he’d been chewing, and the reddened face from the hangover he’d been nursing, a bit less than the one he was dealing with today.

He wound up hitting the sack at 6:30
p.m.
, claiming he wasn’t feeling well and that he was trying to beat this bug before Monday. Max ignored this, besides showing a bit of disappointment in not being able to watch a little U.F.C. as they always did together at the end of the weekend, and Kim didn’t notice really, glasses on the end of her nose, knitting, caught up in a difficult section of a brown sweater that hadn’t been going right, asking if he could pick up tempura shrimp from Trader Joe’s on his way home tomorrow.

Up in the room it was too bright to sleep and too frightening to stay awake. Ben had visions of the police coming to the door, detectives going through all his shit, techies sifting through his computer, looking for one single suspicious download to nail him on. He pictured going in front of Johnson’s board of directors, trying to defend the fact that he had interfered with the private life of a minor, that he’d aided and abetted something horrific.

When Monday morning finally dawned he was drained, resigned to it, ready to plod into what surely was to be a black sort of nightmare.

He got to school, put up his pre-class, stuck a Shakespeare on every desk. Kids filtered in, and though they all came from different parts of the city, he thought that if anything strange had happened with Stephen over the weekend, they would have heard.

He couldn’t detect anything out of the ordinary. They talked about hip-hop, work, basketball, sex, the usual.

Stephen came in at 8:43. He was smiling.

And he was wearing his gloves.

“Yo, Wags is a
freak,
yo!”

“Dag Wagsie, you a
blade!”
 

“Stone cold
gay
yo!”

Greg Fisher pounded on the desk in front of him, haw-hawing as if he was going to bust, and everyone was bucking in their chairs, cracking up. Stephen played it to the hilt, swishing across the front of the room, the runway model with a hand on the hip, a pout on the lips. He had on his uniform, no blazer of course, and black gloves with rhinestones on the seams. He was also wearing a black scarf with sparkles littered through the fabric. It was perfect, actually. Ben had forgotten to speak for Stephen to Johnson as he’d promised, and the kid had gotten a one-day free pass while the paperwork went through. And he was dressed like the ultra-fag purposely to flaunt the fact that he was still here, rub Tanner’s nose in it. The get-up was also excellent cover for the gloves, at least for a day, and maybe he’d just keep on wearing them, like a permanent badge of defiance. In the back of Ben’s mind a bit of a warning flare went up. Mrs. Johnson didn’t go for this glam crap, mostly because it made the other students laugh and pound on tables and make sexual slurs, but Stephen was a senior, and they got away with shit like this all the time, and there were other things to marvel at here that took precedence to tell the truth.

Stephen
looked
smarter. It was obvious if you were clued in to it, something in the eyes, a sharpness where before there had just been dull silverware. He finally took his seat, stuck his feet up on the desk, and winked.

Ben felt his chest swell with pride. Relief, anticipation, the whole package. He’d been right to do this. Never a doubt, captain.

He did his Shakespeare lesson, selling it with even more verve than usual, walking between the rows emphasizing Lady Macbeth’s dark emptiness, the chalice waiting to be filled with the Devil’s darkness, and he had the class in the palm of his hand, all taking notes, all except Stephen of course, why blow his cover, and yes, the kid was focusing on every word as if language itself was forging new rivers and throughways straight to the center of his mind. Marcus was so taken with the lesson, in fact, that he finished twelve minutes early.

“Get out your notebooks and write at the top ‘Pop Quiz / Journaling.’ I am going to collect these and look at your timed writing. I know, I know, it’s the end of the period, when you graduate I’ll give you all a dollar, all right?”

That got a laugh or two, and they got out notebooks, ripped out pages. And even though it had nothing to do with Shakespeare, Ben just couldn’t help looking for the “thank you,” the little pat on the back. He was entitled, right? He’d just turned a kid’s life around, given him some hope.

“Here’s the prompt,” he said. “Write about someone who has influenced you. Keep it real. You may begin.”

They all bent their heads and got started, and Ben was disappointed that Stephen didn’t join them. Of course he knew that the kid was smart enough to know that showing off a spike in the radar like this might cause his friends to mistake him for the Blair Witch, but Ben couldn’t help it, he wanted to be thrown a bone here. Selfish, yes. But he’d been worried sick all weekend. Seemed a catharsis was in order.

He caught Stephen’s eye. The kid returned the glance, and gave a slight nod. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. A nod was a nod, after all.

The bell sounded, and the class dispersed, Stephen waiting for last. On his way out, he brushed past, pulled his hand out of his pocket, and stuffed a wad of folded papers into Ben’s palm. When Marcus opened it, like a loose, shabby book, he saw Stephen’s handwriting, neat yet simplistic, squared corners, controlled curves, all of which lacked the stylistic flair that years of experience would have painted across the wrinkled pages. Yes, it looked like the report had gone through a trash chute, crinkled, mashed, a red juice stain in the bottom corner of the front page, a coffee mark shadowed through the bottom five or so at the left edge. He probably didn’t have a desk to work on, and he’d penned this thing upon his knee outside on the stoop, in the bathroom, on the kitchen counter. At the top it said “Jacques Derrida and the Fallacy of the Center.”

And the report was brilliant.

Ben read it three times on his prep, and each run amazed him more than the last. So this was what five times the intelligence of the functionally retarded looked like. Of course, it wasn’t at the level Ben had reached during his two-day stint, but it was admirable, certainly legible, and clearly not stolen from the Internet (for little “Stephenisms” were peppered through the prose), similar to a paper one might get from a freshman at a good state school whose expertise sat more on the side of the brain that celebrated the math gene. And of course there was the urban vernacular. Smart was smart, but you only knew what you’d grown up hearing.

But some of this stuff was just priceless: his making reference to Derrida’s explanation of secrecy, quoting “The question of the self: who am I not in the sense of who I am but rather who is this that can say who?” and then responding in classic Stephen-tone: “Yeah, like we wear masks and think we got some secret self inside, but there’s always a secret behind the secret. Like we think it’s a good guy that’ll save some old lady getting mauled by a pit bull, but then for no reason we want to go on the zoo balloon. Yeah, maybe the secret self has a smaller secret self and that self has one and on and on. And maybe they get younger and younger deep inside until we see our soul is nothing more than a baby feeding on a tube.”

And on and on. There were twenty-three pages of this, each more philosophical than the last. It was scary, really. Ben had always disliked Derrida, found him aloof and purposefully vague. Stephen, in his heightened state, thought just like the guy. In the margins.

The question was how much residue had been left in the silo.

He looked up, startled. Stephen was standing in front of him.

“Did I do good, Mr. Marcus?”

Ben smiled. Even now, a trace of the urban accent had been polished off. It was good magic, all good.

“It’s miraculous,” Ben said. “Real good, I mean.”

“I know what miraculous means.”

“Sorry. My fault.”

Stephen reached into his pocket.