It seemed as though ever since the day at the lakeside park everything was different—as though all that Tim had known of life for the past seven months receded and stayed distant. As the school year drained down to its close, he felt estranged from the excitement and concern of his fellow students as he walked the halls. It was the time of the impending pressure of exams and the opening vista of adulthood, but Tim felt none of it. He was in limbo, neither anticipating nor worrying, but in a continual posture of dread-saturated waiting.
The final exams of the year were upon them, and Tim’s classmates had entered an austere period of solemn studying. Sherrie, too, was busy studying—or at least that’s what Tim told himself, for as the remaining days of school elapsed it seemed as though she had disappeared from the halls. He tried to pass her locker several times a day, but she was never there, nor in any of the other places they once met up at. He asked her locker-mate Mike where she was, but he didn’t seem to know. Everybody was buckling down in order to guarantee their futures, but Tim was unable to take any of it seriously. None of it meant anything, as far as he could see, if he didn’t have Sherrie.
Walking down the hall at school one day, Tim saw a poster for a play the drama club was putting on at lunchtime. It was The Zoo Story by Edward Albee. He was stunned to see that Ran Hutchison was listed as one of the actors. Seeing the name, he realized he had not thought of Ran Hutchison for months, and had not been greeted by Ran Hutchison hissing “Fuckin’ faggot!” at him for some time. He marvelled that this individual who had been such a negative focal point of his life, who had caused him no end of anxiety and fear, could’ve faded from his consciousness so easily.
At lunchtime, Tim went to the drama room. He took a seat in a far corner, hoping to avoid the slight chance that Hutchison might see him in the audience. The play, a product of the sixties, concerned an upwardly mobile, conservative man on a park bench being confronted by a half-deranged, hippie-esque street person who challenged the dishonesty of the conformist’s way of life. The truth-telling outsider rants at some length, and the play concludes with the frightened, conventional man accidentally stabbing him. Ran Hutchison, with his small, slit-like eyes and the bangs of blond hair dipping over them, played the demonic iconoclast, a role calling for all the sense of viciousness and menace that Tim had seen in him.
But it was plain from the first moments he stepped on stage that Ran Hutchison was not alive with fury in his art in the way he had been in life. He moved uncertainly, spoke his lines hesitantly—too quietly—and couldn’t bring forth the rage that the role required. It seemed to Tim that he had been like the man sitting on the park bench, trying to hold onto some shred of normalcy while Ran Hutchison had hissed in his face every day that no matter how much he felt he could belong, he would always be a “fucking faggot,” a boy crying to his father over his broken glasses in the park. Now the tableau had been transmuted into art, and Hutchison was an uneasy, fumbling amateur with no stage presence—trying, like Tim, to be an artist and failing in the most ignominious manner.
The anxiety Tim had once felt at the mere thought of Hutchison was now replaced by discomfort, for now Tim felt embarrassment for the other boy. It was as though through acting, Ran Hutchison had been revealed to be a small, thin, tremulous boy lacking the audacity to channel his pain into his art. His eyes, once so feral and angry, merely looked frightened. After the play, Tim happened to pass by where Ran Hutchison was standing by his locker. In the past, he would have looked around to find somewhere to duck into before Hutchison sighted him. Tim walked up to his former nemesis and with a generosity born of pity said, “Good job, Ran.”
“Thanks,” muttered Ran, looking down. Tim reeled within, thinking how shocking this diminishment of his former demon would have been to him if only it hadn’t happened of its own accord, unbeknownst to him, months before.
Later Tim ran into Mike in the library and asked, “What’s happening with Sherrie? I haven’t seen her in a week.”
“You’ll have to ask her,” Mike said in his customary deadpan manner.
“What’s going on with her?” Tim asked, his plaintiveness betraying him. “Why hasn’t she been around?”
Mike sighed. His eyes looked away, then came back to the business at hand. “Sherrie’s fighting a losing battle with herself,” he stated.
“What does that mean?” Tim asked. But Mike wouldn’t say anything more, and his expressionless features gave no indication as to whether the situation was good for Tim or bad for him.
Classes had ended and the week of exams had begun. Tim dutifully studied, but he felt as though he was sleepwalking, walking through a strange, out-of-kilter simulation of existence.
“You must be happy!” Roberta Cameron called to Tim when he came out of the school after an exam one day.
“Why?” Tim asked her, her smile warming him in his turmoil.
“I heard Sherrie broke up with her boyfriend,” Roberta volunteered. “Oh… didn’t you know?”
Tim was perplexed. Of course, Roberta only heard it—she could be wrong—but it definitely felt as though something was in the air. Could it be true? What did it mean? Was it possible? That night instead of studying, Tim began writing a letter to Sherrie. It was by turns whimsical and philosophical, recounting their months of friendship and ending with the assertion that they would be friends forever, and that he hoped they could form a lifetime partnership.
The spiritual pontification and the expressions of devotion now seemed false and unconvincing to him, so that he couldn’t sign the letter. He put it in his desk drawer. The next day he was to go over to Russ’s house to study for a history course they shared together. He rode his bike over through the bright, warm day, one of the first that signalled summer’s displacement of the spring. The two boys carried their books upstairs to the bedroom Russ shared with his brother. They talked and joked around in their usual manner for a while.
After holding off for a time, Tim ventured, “Hey, have you heard anything from Sherrie? I haven’t seen her for like a week. And someone told me that she broke off with Bruce!”
Russ was balancing his stockinged feet on one of the barbells Tim had noticed in the basement a few months ago, and was steadying himself against the upper mattress on the set of bunkbeds in the room. “Sherrie broke off with Bruce,” he said, looking Tim in the eye, “to go out with me.”
Tim looked away from Russ and stood staring at the floor for several minutes.
“You okay?” Russ asked.
Tim said he was, and Russ asked him if he wanted to study. They sat down and opened their books, looking at the questions they needed to ask each other. It was quickly evident that Tim could not take in the meaning of the words. “You want to not bother?” Russ asked.
“No… I’m going to go,” Tim said, rising to his feet.
Russ walked Tim downstairs to the front door. He opened the door for Tim, then turned to him, holding out his arms. “How about a hug?” he asked. In best Charitas fashion, Tim threw his arms around him, holding him close for a long moment before walking out.
People who have nearly drowned speak of seeing their lives pass before their eyes. Tim felt as though he was drowning, and his life and the world were distorting and receding behind a watery veil like the sky glimpsed by one being pulled by invisible tentacles into the deep. He walked through the bright afternoon, the leaves shining as they flickered, casting dancing coins of sunshine and his eyes blinked actively, seeing nothing.
He passed through the yard he cut through to get to the main road from Russ’s subdivision, not fearing anyone would catch him, striding slowly, methodically, as if trying not to disturb something fragile inside him. He had forgotten that he’d left his bicycle at Russ’s townhouse, forgotten that he’d ridden his bicycle there at all. He trudged along the side of the road, the cars whisking past, the multicoloured triangular flags on the sign in front of the gas station whipping and snapping smartly in the warm wind. He came up over the crest of the railroad crossing until he could see the tops of the trees in his front yard billowing over the roofs of the condominiums before it.
So that was the way it was. Russ had won the drawing competition, he had attended the art camp and had the sexual experience with the woman there, and now he was Sherrie’s boyfriend, the one that Sherrie had at long last broken off with Bruce Ferguson for. It was all so logical that Tim could not believe he had never suspected it before, never discerned the pattern of a submerged temple beneath the sand. Russ was and had always been a part of the majority who did things like win competitions, have sexual experiences and attract the love and devotion of like-minded females. Tim could never expect to participate in such essential endeavours. He was and would always be an observer, a ghost in a world of actual, tactile, active individuals. He was unloved and unlovable, good for a laugh, perhaps, but unworthy and undeserving of ever being taken seriously as a human being, ever being considered a suitable partner. He had been a fool to ever hope otherwise.
Had I known it all along? he asked himself. Had the signs been there every step of the way and he had ignored them, pretended they weren’t there? Tim’s throat ached as he stared, dumbfounded, searching the gravel at his feet as if to find the answer there. Everything around him was glinting, impermeable, impassive, like the shocking truth delivered as simple fact; life was merciless and oblique, it offered nothing to him but the glib refusal of his dreams, and he cursed himself for thinking that he could ever have a part in it.
To think of their shared conspiracy against him, which was a simple knowing that excluded him, induced a nauseating vertigo within him and seemed to pull him back from life like the centrifugal gravity created by the spinning cylindrical rooms at amusement parks. His agony was only mediated by the extent of his shock, for he still could not entirely believe it, still thought that perhaps in a moment he would awake to a world in which those incomprehensible words had never been spoken. Yet he knew, deep within the sinking pit of his being, that it was true. It made perfect sense, he realized as he walked down the laneway of his house, that this outcome was consistent with everything else in his life up to that time. Tim would stay unattached and untouched, cloistered with the eunuchs, the undesirables, the beings that the eyes of the world passed over with so little interest that they might as well have been invisible. As he could never be a man according to the dictates of his father and his uncles, so he now saw that he would also never be a human deserving the designation of friend or lover to his peers. How stupid and blind he had been.
Tim walked through the empty house, through the kitchen and down the hall, his history book in his hand. He went to his room and closed the door behind him as if shutting himself into a cell. He dropped his book on the floor and lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling, allowing reality to sink into all parts of his body, trying to absorb what could never be absorbed. An instinct of self-preservation let the truth come to him incrementally, like the steady drip of an intravenous device. The shadows lengthened in the room, and soon the day grew dim outside the sheer curtains covering the window. Soon the room was dark, and the lights and flames of the oil refineries sent their orange shimmering reflections against the wall. The trains coupling and uncoupling in the railyard across the field crashed and rumbled and shook the windows with their booming thunder.
There was darkness, and then somehow his room was bright again, the walls shining with a light as gold as honey. The bedroom door was open and his mother stood there, dressed for work. Her mouth was moving but Tim couldn’t understand the words she was saying. He blinked as he stared at her and the full force of reality came down on him again, plastering him to the bed. “I said, aren’t you supposed to be getting your yearbooks today?” she asked, her voice rising angrily. “Why don’t you answer me?”
Tim turned away from her to face the wall. She banged her hand in frustration against the door. “Hey! We paid ten dollars for that yearbook! So get up out of bed and get down there to the school and pick it up!”
Tim had the dim memory that this morning was when the yearbooks were to be picked up. To brave the horror of seeing his fellow students was inconceivable, even if he had been physically capable of making it to the school. “Leave me alone,” he groaned.
“I won’t leave you alone!” she snapped. “We paid good money for it, so you’ll get your lazy ass out of bed and pick it up.”
“No,” he murmured.
“Why?” she demanded, her puzzlement almost overcoming her anger.
“Because Sherrie’s going out with Russ now!” he shouted back.
His mother stood at the door irresolutely for a moment then turned and walked down the hall, through the kitchen, out to her car and drove to work. On the way, she stopped by the school and picked up the yearbook.
Later in the day, the phone rang and Tim lay in bed listening to it. It continued with shrill insistence for some time until he finally got up and padded down the hall to pick it up.
“Hello.”
“Hi.” It was Mona, calling from work.
There was a silence, and then she said quietly, “I just wanted to say that I think it’s really awful what Russ and Sherrie did to you.” Tim muttered some sort of response, and after he replaced the phone on its hook he began to cry.
For several days Tim stayed in his room and around the house, leaving only to work his shifts in the variety store. He was silent and fragile, like the invalid survivor of a devastating accident. At times he went out into the front yard and sat in the grass under a tree for hours. One night he grew agitated and called Russ. Russ’s mother answered: “No, Russ isn’t in right now, but I’ll have him call you when he comes in.” That night and the next night, Russ didn’t call back so Tim angrily called him, asking why he hadn’t gotten back to him.
“I did,” Russ said. “But your mother said you were sleeping. She must have forgot to tell you.”
“I guess I must’ve been sleeping a lot lately,” Tim observed.
“What do you mean by that?”
“With all that’s gone on,” Tim said. “I must’ve been sleeping not to see it all.”
“We didn’t go behind your back,” Russ stated.
“It sure seemed like it,” Tim said. “I had no idea. It was a complete shock.”
“We didn’t go behind your back,” Russ repeated in the same tone and intonation. So flatly was the statement reaffirmed that there seemed little left in the conversation to say, and it ended shortly after.
After spring had steadily loosened and broken the frozen grip of the preceding five months, summer always came in brazenly and ferociously, blasting its oven-like heat in temperatures as extreme as the most frigid depths of winter had been. The sweat-inducing glare asserted itself in the last days of school and prevailed over the next two months. People flocked to the lake and the river, drawn to the water and the breeze that blew over it. In Tim’s house, an electric fan stood at the end of the hallway, rotating between the doors of Tim’s bedroom and those of his parents and his brother.
Through the summer, Tim retreated further into his world of books, spending virtually all the time he wasn’t at the variety store in his room reading. Every week, his mother drove him downtown to the public library, and he came out the door with a pile of books against his chest. He would read them hungrily all the way home, and after they had parked in the driveway and his mother went in the house, Tim would remain in the car reading. The idle machine was the perfect sanctuary in which to disappear into an imagined world, halfway between the library and his home, free of the interruptions and stresses of the latter, suspended in space and time until the shadows grew long on the gravel outside and one of the family came out to call him in for supper.
One night, Tim’s father noticed something missing in the garage as he came in the door. “Where’s your bicycle?” Dirk asked.
“I left it over at Russ’s,” Tim said.
“What’d you do that for?” his father asked.
Tim shrugged.
“When are you go gonna get it and bring it back?” Dirk asked with puzzled irritation.
“I don’t know,” said Tim, looking down at his food
“We paid good money for that bike. You’d better go over there and bring it back,” his father ordered.
Several days later at supper, Dirk asked again, “You go get that bike yet?”
“No.”
“When are you gonna get it?” Dirk asked, his voice rising. “Why’d we go spend money on a bike if you’re gonna leave it in some guy’s garage?” he argued, gesturing with his upraised palm, fingers splayed. “Go and bring it back here!”
“No!” Tim was on his feet and screaming. “I’m not going to go get it!”
As Tim hurtled down the hall, he heard Dirk ask his mother, “What’d I say wrong now?”
It was mainly due to the good-heartedness of the teacher of Tim’s home ec class that Tim was able to collect the necessary credits to qualify for university. It was fairly obvious that Tim was not interested in the class, spending most of his time in it drawing cartoons. When a major project was assigned, he used all the time allotted for research to achieve precisely nothing, and when it came time to make his presentation, he asked to be excused so he could retrieve his notes from his locker, at which time he went out and walked the halls aimlessly, the class waiting patiently for him to return. When he came back, he put on the most ridiculous, improvised pageant of nonsense possible. But in the end, the teacher gave him the passing mark he needed, seeing that there were times when removing the impediments to future happiness for what she thought of as a unique, confused boy was more important than protecting the integrity of home economics.
Tim had been accepted to several universities and chose one in a large metropolitan city four hours to the east. A grant was tendered by the government to help pay for his education there, though his parents and many of his relatives felt that he could get just as good an education at the local community college. Tim told the variety store that he’d be quitting at the end of the summer, and as the weeks went by, the significance of his departure began to loom before him. He had begun to talk to Russ on the phone occasionally and confided some apprehension at leaving everything he knew to go to a place so far away.
“I think you’ve gone as far as you can go with your family,” Russ remarked.
Tim avoided the shopping mall and anywhere else he thought he might meet people from school or from Charitas. It had been so apparent to so many of them what his passionate dream had been, that to see them when they knew of its grotesque failure would have been unendurable. He could not have withstood their pity or their scorn. One exception was Eric Dunphy, who insistently called the house to fill Tim’s ears with the same clucking chatter as before. Tim began to look on Eric’s ramblings as a diversion, and his gangly friend began picking him up in his car from time to time.
“Did your dad tell you I came by the other day?” he asked Tim once. “He came to the door to tell me you weren’t home. I guess he’d been brushing in his teeth, for his toothbrush was in his mouth and foam was dripping from his lips.” He’d start chirping away in his strange quasi-English accent about his favourite subject—the various females he had on the string.
“Well, there’s Bernice, and isn’t she the coy one, always asking me out for ice cream after choir practice, but God there’s Angela too, and the way she hugged me after prayer meeting—well—I was seeing stars, let me tell you…”
Eric’s family had a small motorboat in which he’d use to take trips up and down the river and around the small islands in the midst of the rushing current. He took Tim out in the boat several times to go swimming. One afternoon Eric picked Tim up in his car to drive aimlessly around the city, keeping up his endless monologue. “I took Russ and Sherrie out in the motorboat one day last week,” he noted, almost as an afterthought. “I dropped them off on one of those islands and went off for a while. I came by to pick them up later but they were… well, let’s just say it didn’t look like they wanted to be disturbed.”
He chuckled. “Oh, look, there’s the hydro building,” he said, pointing out the window. “My mom’ll kill me if I don’t take care of this bill while I’m here.” Eric pulled his car to the side of the road. “Wait a minute, I’ll be right back,” he said, slamming his door and sprinting to the building. Tim sat in the hot car as the sun glared in through the windshield. He watched the people walking past in the late afternoon down the undistinguished street. After a while it seemed to Tim as though he had waited a long time. He waited for some time after that, then he opened the door, got out of the car and walked home.
One day as Tim was waiting for his mother to drive him to the library, he was surprised to have his father volunteer to give him a ride instead. Dirk was going to the Ex-Servicemen’s Club and it was on the way. As they drove into the city, Tim watched his father from the corner of his eye and saw him turn his head slightly from side to side, sighing heavily through his nostrils at intervals and making periodic clicking noises with his lips, as if he were about to speak. Tim watched these motions with rising dread, for he knew they were the signs that his father was about to say something significant to him and was rehearsing it in his mind.
It took Dirk until they were within five minutes of the library to dart his head forward suddenly as if to shake the words from his mouth, make the clicking sound with his lips for the final time and turn to fix his eyes on Tim: “So, you’re still hurtin’ pretty bad about that girl, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” said Tim.
His father nodded his head with a grave frown. “Well, I’ll tell ya somethin’ I learned,” he said, poking his finger and narrowing his eyes as if giving out a piece of confidential information, “and that’s ya can’t let ’em get to ya. You gotta be cool. Back when I was single, I had this one, and one night she says she wants to break up, and I said, ‘You wanna break up, let’s break up,’ and hey, she was really built, no foolin’,” he confided. “So I said, ‘Alright baby! See ya later! Bye!’” Dirk waved his hand and assumed an expression of kingly indifference.
“Then she comes to me a couple of months later and what does she say? She says, ‘We gotta problem—I think I might be pregnant.’ Oh shit, I’m thinking.” He bowed his head and shook it. “‘Will you come with me to the doctor?’ she says.” They arrived outside the library and Dirk brought the car to a stop, turning to face Tim in his seat. “We go to the doctor—they didn’t have none of them home pregnancy tests like now,” he explained. “And the doctor says, ‘Yeah, you’re pregnant, three months gone.’
“Well, shit… We walk out of there and out to my car. She’s crying and she says to me, ‘What’re we gonna do?’ I says, ‘What’re we gonna do? Whaddaya mean what’re we gonna do? Look at your calendar, baby!’ I says to her,” said Dirk, leaning forward and grinning with triumphant vehemence. “‘That can’t be mine—we weren’t foolin’ around three months ago—I know right when we broke up…’” he said, emphasizing each word with a jab of his forefinger, “‘and that was two weeks before three months ago! So don’t ask me what we’re gonna do,’ I told her, and I opened the car door for her. ‘It ain’t my problem!’
“‘So long,’ I told her,” he said, waving his hand again, and smirking with satisfied vengeance. “‘See ya later!’ See, that’s what I mean,” said Tim’s father, a vague gesture of his hand indicating how easily his hypothesis had been proven. “You can’t let ’em get to ya. You gotta be cool.”
With time, Tim was able to bear his days without entertaining thoughts of his own destruction—or rather these thoughts lessened to the rate of prior to Russ and Sherrie’s union. There was a definite point several weeks into the summer, though exactly when was unclear, when existence crept back into the realm of the bearable, and his voice and spirit returned, both changed.
As the summer wore on, Russ and Sherrie even came over to visit his home one afternoon. Tim still looked on Sherrie’s small, childlike body and her high-cheekboned face with adoration. She sat in an easy chair in the living room that swivelled from side to side, and Tim would always remember how Russ, sitting in the chair beside her, kept his stockinged toes on the side of her chair, spinning it from side to side with a sort of playful, easy propriety that Tim knew to be so far beyond himself that it didn’t even make sense to envy it.
The visit had in part come about because Tim had written a novel over the summer about a dystopian world in which to safeguard humanity from war, people were denied the ability to gather into countries or to unite in any form at all. The mad dictator left over from the society that had existed before laughed at the vain spectacle of the people from atop a hill of broken glass. A young teacher, however, was moved to teach his students about connection and intimacy in violation of the laws of the global state, and in the end was martyred for his efforts, as the old mad dictator laughed. Tim had given it to Russ to read and with Tim’s permission, he gave it to Sherrie. She had sent a note expressing appreciation for his work, which opened the channels between them again. I really liked it! she’d written. I could see you in every one of the characters.
“I’m not really a fan of stuff that tries hard to be profound,” was Russ’s verdict.
Finally, Tim’s last day at the variety store came, and it was time to leave. At one time, the trains leaving for the large metropolitan city ran four or five times a day. Now, after budget cuts to the rail system, you could only leave before dawn or in the early evening. The night before his early departure, Tim’s mother helped him pack. They should have been sleeping but there was still so much to do, and at eleven the phone rang. It was Sherrie.
“Russ told me you were leaving tomorrow, and I realized oh my God, he’s leaving for good tomorrow! I’m gonna miss you!”
Tim was thrilled and charmed by her voice all over again, and although he knew it made no sense, he felt the old flood of warmth across his chest to think that she had called him.
“I don’t think it really struck me till just tonight that you were leaving!” she exclaimed.
Mona approached Tim. “Who’s that on the phone? You can’t talk all night! We’ve got a lot to do! Your train leaves in the morning!”
Tim put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Shut up!” he shouted at her.
The warm, calming tones of Sherrie’s voice continued to flow into his ear. They talked for some time more, despite his mother fuming and pacing as she smoked her cigarette. Sherrie reiterated how much she would miss him, how she couldn’t believe he wouldn’t be around anymore. “You have a really nice voice,” she said suddenly. “Did I ever tell you that before? No? I just realized it now. You have a really nice voice.”
Mona, Dirk and Tim pulled out into the dark with several suitcases in the back seat and a large cloth bag containing clothes in the trunk. The bag was a linen sack from a company that used to supply the barbershop. Tim’s mother blacked out the name of the company on the sack with a magic marker so the company wouldn’t see it and want it back. They drove through the quiet streets over to the train station. The night before, Dirk asked Tim to sit in the living room while he watched The Rockford Files, giving him the rundown on the plot so far. As Tim was heading to bed he heard a sobbing coming from his brother’s bedroom and Tim went in and asked what was wrong. “Well, it’s kinda sad you’re leavin’ tomorrow, ain’t it?” Jason had asked.
They came to the station all lit up with golden lights and entered, squinting at the other sleepy-eyed travellers blinking in the harsh fluorescent glare, and soon they were moving with them out to where the train stood, black and majestic in the dim light. They were in the line, moving to the ticket-taker when Tim said to his mother, “Thank you.”
His mother said, “Oh, you’re welcome,” with tears in her eyes.
Dirk said, “Remember pal, you can come back anytime you want. Anytime you want, just get on the train.”
Tim sat and watched his parents out the window as they slowly moved from view like small, shrinking figures on an unrolling scroll passing by as the train lurched into motion, gliding smoothly, slowly down the tracks from the station, picking up speed. The pitch black had lessened to grey, and the backs of garages, garbage bins and junkyards fluttered past in dim sepia. The humble houses on the outskirts of the city passed by, the occasional lit window signifying those making coffee before heading off to work, and then there was a lumberyard and some industrial buildings. The bleak wastelands and the sparse cars on the parallel road kept pace then floated back as the train’s speed grew and for the briefest moment Tim’s house was visible between a car dealership and a sheet metal place.
Back it was spun, spiralling into the past, and pressing his forehead to the window glass, Tim could see the sun rising in the east, bleeding light across the black sky, ragged patches of red slashing out above the rapidly passing fields, the crossings, the barns and hydro towers. As the train charged through the small town, it sounded its baying whistle, roaring its bellow across the countryside. Soon Tim’s eyes were smarting as the sun took its final dominion, glaring with prickly, white rays that bristled on the madly passing leaves of the field, the train speeding through the back acreage of his grandfather’s farm as it bellowed again and flew in the direction of the sun.