When Malcolm was ten years old he got word his mother and father would not be hosting him at home that summer, and that he would spend the coming months at the academy. The headmaster told him as much, in his oak-paneled chambers, and it was this typically domineering man’s observable discomfort in sharing the news rather than the news itself that encouraged in Malcolm a true dread. This was doubled when the headmaster explained, in as casual a tone as he could manage, that the extent of Malcolm’s society would be the assistant headmistress, a clammy stoic with a paste of hair across her weirdly miniature forehead, and the groundsman, known to the children as the Moss Man, as he looked like a creature just emerging from moss-covered swamp waters.
The headmaster exited the room. Malcolm sat wondering what the man had been paid to allow for what was doubtless an oversight of academy protocol—likely a good amount, he thought. The assistant headmistress and groundsman were given less, or none, judging by their displeasure at his presence. The three of them took their first meal that night: a rubble pile of unpeeled, unseasoned potatoes, lukewarm liver, and a glass of tap water. The assistant headmistress and groundsman were having an argument in pantomime, each trying to get the other to explain something to Malcolm. At last the assistant headmistress told him, “Meals are at nine, one, and seven. We won’t come looking for you if you don’t show up.” She glanced at the groundsman and back. “Neither of us is going to watch after you. We’ve got our own work to do. Do you understand?”
Malcolm nodded. There was a silence.
The groundsman told him, “Just so long as you understand that.”
The academy was situated in a remote section of the Adirondacks. The experience of walking through the halls without another student around was momentarily thrilling for Malcolm, but as the sun began setting, and the shadows grew longer on the walls, then did the dread return to him. Night came, a proper night, and it was awful to lie in the dormitory with all the empty beds. He had never felt so exposed, so perfectly killable. He demanded sleep of himself, and sleep came, and he woke at dawn to pace the grounds, the sun low, full, and blazing. Having attended the academy for several years, he knew the surrounding terrain well, for miles in each direction, but it was different now that he was on his own, and he would only venture to the edge of the nearby forest, keeping the academy within sight, a short sprint to safety. In recent months Malcolm had found his thoughts shifting from the benignly strange to the grotesquely sexual and apocalyptic. He supposed this meant he was growing up, but he didn’t want to grow up. Adulthood had no benefits that he could see and he was loath to join that cruel population.
The assistant headmistress and groundsman did not warm to Malcolm. Actually they resented him increasingly as the days passed by, and though Malcolm tried to win their favor, this always went badly: in clearing the table he dropped a dish; in pouring out water he missed the groundsman’s mug. After such attempts, Malcolm disliked himself. When he realized the shame made him feel worse than their silence and meanness did, he quit trying, and simply endured.
There was one meal that stood out as comparably pleasant. The assistant headmistress and groundsman were laughing together when he entered, and the woman half-smiled at him and said, “Here he is, ready to feed,” a foreign civility that made Malcolm blush. The meal was more elaborate than the rest had been: roast chicken and vegetables, mashed potatoes, milk rather than tap water, and a lopsided chocolate cake for dessert. Malcolm ate it all, ogling the assistant headmistress and groundsman, who were drinking wine and chatting away as though nothing had ever been the matter. He wondered at the nature of the friendliness that had come between them. It made him wince to think of them in romantic embrace, but still, this new scenario was preferable to the other. Unfortunately, in the morning the chill had returned to the table, and the food was once more merely edible. The assistant headmistress and groundsman were hungover, and the friendliness was gone.
Malcolm’s days grew interminable, his boredom so acute he felt he could scream, or slap his own face. He had never once taken up a book for pleasure but now passed dense hours reading novels curled up on the deep-brown velvet couch in the librarian’s office. The librarian was named Ms. Roach, and the boys all loved her because she was quietly kind and would tell no secrets of herself. Malcolm inspected her work space for something personally illuminative but he found nothing, every drawer clean as a pin. He had the sense Ms. Roach enjoyed her work there, and so he too was pleased to be passing time in her office. But he soon came to learn that books were not the solution in entirety. They were about life, but they were not life itself, and he closed them up and put them away. Summer break was two-thirds passed.
One night at dinner, the assistant headmistress was more terse with Malcolm than usual, and when the groundsman left for his postmeal cigarette she clamped him at the arm. “Let go,” he said. But she gripped him tighter still, pinching the tendon in his small bicep. There was not an anger in her eyes, but fear; she was trying to tell him something terrible, he realized. “He’s not well,” was how she phrased it.
Malcolm understood. “All right.”
“Keep clear of him,” she said.
The assistant headmistress and groundsman had had an alliance, but it was soured, and now the groundsman treated her with contempt; and she was increasingly afraid of him. Rather than endure the quiet at mealtimes, Malcolm took to fasting, so that he often became dizzy from hunger. He slept long hours to kill away the days, but unhappy dreams pursued him. His father was an occasional extra, an opaque man crossing a room in the background. He dreamed of his mother more frequently, and in overvivid color, and she was sweet, and doting, and curious—always pleased to be near him.
One morning the Moss Man sat alone at the breakfast table, gnawing a piece of bread and drinking black coffee from a dirty wineglass. Malcolm was very hungry but there was nothing prepared for him. “She’s gone off,” the Moss Man said.
“When’s she coming back?” Malcolm asked.
“Not ever.” The Moss Man went away, to lie beneath the tractor in the field. He spent whole days at this. Sometimes he did seem to be working toward fixing the tractor but more often he was only dozing, drunk on port wine. Malcolm watched him from the library; when the Moss Man’s feet hadn’t stirred in hours he went outside and crept close enough that he could hear a low gurgle of venom coming from the man—he was lying under the broken tractor hissing unkindnesses. Malcolm thought something had gone wrong inside the Moss Man.
Late in the night he woke to find the Moss Man standing at the foot of his bed, in a slack, stained T-shirt, swaying in place, and his hands were fists and Malcolm told him, “Please go away,” and the Moss Man did go away. But all through the night Malcolm could hear him smashing glass and howling from corners of the cavernous building. It was quiet in the morning and Malcolm knew enough to leave. There was no food in the kitchen besides wilted carrots and a bottle of wine, and he took these, along with his toothbrush and a Jules Verne compendium, all in a sack, and he walked in what he believed was a southward direction, because he knew there was a town to the south. Actually he was walking to the north. Not that it mattered in the end.
Malcolm understood that he was having an adventure. He was running away from the academy and he felt bold on the one hand, but unsure if he was a match for the outsize task. A nervous shiver took him up as he set out, but after a mile the shiver eased. At two miles he was untroubled. At five miles he stopped walking and ate the carrots. It hadn’t occurred to him to pack a corkscrew so he couldn’t open the wine; he flung it down a steep, forested incline. It fell and fell and when it finally disappeared it made no sound, which was at once heartbreaking and divine.
His sack was lighter, with nothing in it except for the book and toothbrush, and he was following a logging road and it was warmer now, the sun directly overhead. Why hadn’t he brought a hat? Wait: why hadn’t he brought a blanket? Why hadn’t he brought a knife, or matches? It was too far to turn back, and he knew he couldn’t face the Moss Man again. He walked on; it was so hot the ground was ticking. When his flesh began to burn he steered into the forest, which was slower going but shadier. He spoke to his mother, imagining the scenario of his showing up at the door of their home in Manhattan. He would say, “No, I didn’t like it at the academy. There was a bad man there and I was very bored without my friends to talk to.” He tried to think of some interesting things to say to her. This was what he believed his mother craved the most, for a person to say interesting things. He came up with nothing but he felt hopeful the interesting things would materialize when he truly needed them.
An hour passed and he began to sense he wasn’t alone. At first this was an abstract fear; but then he heard a knock! in the distance at his back. He stopped walking, listening over the drumming of his heartbeat. He hadn’t imagined it, there it was again: knock—knock! It was the sound of wood on wood, a club on the trunk of a tree, he thought. He knew that it was the Moss Man in pursuit of him, toying with him. He quickened his pace but now he worried the Moss Man was close by at his heels, or possibly to either side of him, even in front of him. The Moss Man was omniscient, and Malcolm was lost, and the afternoon was passing and he wished he’d stayed on the logging road, with a clear view a mile in each direction and the occasional fleck of trash in the bushes, a comforting reminder of civilization. It began to grow dark and he was sure that at any moment the Moss Man’s great hand would dart from behind a tree, catch his hair, and drag him off to an unspeakable end. He started running. He ran until he couldn’t, and he hunched over, spitting foam and heaving. He ran again and stopped again. He ran again and found a bowed river and drank from it. The river cheered him somewhat because it afforded a plan, a route of escape: should the Moss Man appear, he would jump in the water and be off.
He walked downriver and soon came upon a campsite situated on a grassy ledge up from the water. A boy his own age stood beside a large canvas army tent; as soon as he saw Malcolm, he ducked under the flap and a moment later a family of six poured out: a mother, father, two sons, two daughters. The mother asked him, “What’s the matter, honey? Are you lost?” And Malcolm, knowing he was finally safe, became hysterical.
As an adult he would remember: the mustiness of the tent, and that he ate four hot dogs in a row, and that one of the daughters was pretty, friendly, and unafraid. She wore a silver crucifix necklace and a Nike half shirt and she touched his face in the tent and said, Don’t worry, Martin, we’re nice, and Malcolm loved her. But none of what happened after—how he found his way back to the academy, what became of the family, or the assistant headmistress, or the Moss Man—was recoverable.