The tiny creature whose image he saw in the mirror was himself.
—FROM SELMA LAGERLÖF’S
The Wonderful Adventures of Nils
The boy’s father massaged badly: he used only his fingertips and fingernails when stroking his customers. He worked in short, sharp bursts. He pinched. Frequently his fingers would slip, come off the muscle as he was lifting or twisting, and his nails would scrape or gouge a lobe or temple. “God fuck it,” he would say. Then he would pause. He would take a long, sound breath. He was a minister. He knew better. The boy would watch his father dab the wounds with cotton balls and return his hands to the body, resume the pinching.
The boy’s father had set up his massage chair and station in the front entrance of the local grocery store. The grocery store had given him the space as a kindness, for the man was a local minister. Times were tough. They knew he could use the money. They couldn’t see the harm in having a man of god with his son posted in the entryway. They knew him to be a quiet sort of person. They expected he would remain a quiet person.
Indeed, the boy’s father spoke quietly throughout his massages. He talked to every customer. Primarily, he shared the names of people from his parish and his professional knowledge of their personal lives. His best lector had credit card debt into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. He worried that this man might be stealing from the collection plate on Sunday mornings. He was unsure if this man could be trusted. But he was going to give him a little rope, he would say. The Pedersons, on the other hand, were more likely stupid than sterile. They wouldn’t make love in the missionary position because Lena was a control freak and Jorge milquetoast. “I mean I love my parish,” the boy would hear his father say, “but at a certain point physics and chemistry tell us semen has to stay inside the woman. You cannot give rope to people like this.”
In point of fact, the boy’s father seldom had customers. Customers were unexpected. Thousands walked right on by, waving at the minister and his son as they passed. As such, his son was made to fill the hours. The boy really at first had no say in this involvement. He was quite young. His mother had died; his father was plainly alone and poor. When no customers stopped for a massage, and most did not, the father called his son over. If he protested, the boy was seized and dragged and made to put his face into the chair’s padded pillow. He held his breath while his father practiced his techniques on him.
The father’s techniques were brutal. The man had no training. He had no touch. And he seemed to know this. He often asked for his son’s feedback. “Stop crying,” his father would whisper into his ear, “and tell me how the hell to do this.” The one time the boy told him (“Maybe use more palm?”), his father thanked him sharply. The boy was then chopped across the spine in one fantastic blow. Those who were purchasing their groceries at the front of the store heard this. They turned to look at the minister and the boy, facedown in the massage chair. The father smiled at them. He waved. “Tapotement,” he explained. “Just the tapotement technique. Very big in China!”
The boy would not offer his feedback again. He stopped speaking to his father. He could be found in the massage chair for six or seven hours a day, listening to his father comment on the lives of people from his church, yet never speaking a word. The father pressed and stroked and pummeled and pinched his son’s body. He could feel it give beneath his hands. Whenever the boy’s body tried to grow, the father could feel it, so well had he come to know the boy’s body, and he pressed and pinched those developments away. As a result, the boy stopped growing. He began, indeed, to shrink. By the age of sixteen, the boy was as big as he’d been at four years old. He required a booster for the massage chair.
Those who walked past the two of them over the years became concerned. They asked the father, sometimes, if he had more than one son. The father only laughed and nodded vaguely. But they were moved. It would have been difficult to ignore: the once-large boy was now a helpless imp. It was clear to everyone what the minister was doing. So they began asking for and offering money for massages, and when they pulled the little boy out of his father’s massage chair, they handed him to another person who took the tiny child away to be fed.
They slipped the boy food right from their grocery bags, just out of the sight of the minister. The boy ate frozen fish sticks, chocolate cereal, fruits and vegetables, candy, eggs, tea bags, entire loaves of bread, bags of cornmeal—anything at all they showed him, anything he could grab from their bags. They laughed about it. They were pleased. They did not mind his gluttony. They watched as he snapped up anything he could find. The only thing that stopped him was a can of foie gras.
The boy just looked at it. He smelled the can. He shook it. He looked up at the man who had offered the boy his bag of groceries. The man nodded. “Goose liver,” he said. The man took out his pocketknife and cut open the can. He handed it down to the boy. The boy smelled it and fell backwards. His vision blurred. He had to sit up. He swiped his fingers through the foie gras and shoved them in his mouth. He was suddenly in the air. He was out of doors, soaring over the grocery store. He took the wind into his eyes and cried. He yelled out and swept over large spells of forested land, deer herds, and white-tipped lakes. Then he returned to the grocery store. The man was slapping him in the face. “Are you there, little man?” He was shouting. “Are you there?”
The boy went after the foie gras and was flying again. When he returned to the store, he was laughing. He smiled and was red with pleasure. The man laughed and told others to buy the boy goose liver, because it seemed to make him happy. And they did. They shoved it at him. He ate as much goose as they would give him. They shook their heads (What sort of child likes foie gras?), but they brought it to him just the same. And the boy began growing rapidly until his father noticed.
One day the boy was called over. He was told to sit in the chair. The boy situated himself. The father felt the boy’s size beneath his hands. “You’re a fat Herod,” he whispered into his son’s ear. “You will be crushed,” he said.
“I doubt it,” the boy said.
But his father worked against his son’s body. He pressed and pinched him. The boy cried out. He squeezed and twisted the boy’s flesh. He punched and hacked at it. He pulled a metal bar from the handle of a broken grocery cart and throttled his son’s shoulders. But when he returned his hands to the boy’s flesh again, he could see that it was not giving way. Still, he went back at the child, punching and kneading and grinding and tearing.
Hearing the boy cry out, an older woman came over and demanded a massage.
“Not now,” the father hissed. “I am at work on my son.”
“I will pay you well, Pastor,” the woman said.
The man paused for just an instant, and the boy slipped from beneath his father’s hands. He leapt up and offered the woman the chair.
“Get in that seat,” the boy’s father said to his son.
But the boy laughed and, though the father lunged to grab him, moved swiftly and sprinted into the depths of the store. There, he was given as much foie gras as the butcher had on hand. He ate it so quickly that it filled his mouth, fell out, and tumbled to the floor. He bent down and licked the floor clean. The butcher shook his head. “I’ll order more,” he said.
When the boy returned to his father at the front of the store, the massage chair was empty. His father was slumped against it. The boy put his hand on the father’s head. His father looked up. “You think you’ve outdone me,” he said. The boy nodded.
His father tried one last time to grab his son, but he had no chance—the boy was too smooth, too quick, and this was the last day of the father’s strength, the last day the boy would sit in his father’s massage chair.
Each day the father and son returned to the store. They sat and stared at the empty massage chair. They waved or nodded at the people walking past. Often these people greeted the son warmly and asked if he might massage them. The boy’s father winced, but he said nothing. The boy would agree. He would ask his father to sit on the stool where he once sat, and he would begin massaging these people. They would pay him well. The boy was quite good. He knew how to touch the body, how not.
This went on for years. The father, slumped and silent, simply watched his son’s massaging. Customers would greet the old minister, and he would not reply. They would look at the son, and the boy would smile and shrug. Then one evening, the old minister suddenly fell off the stool. The boy let him lie there until he’d finished his massage. When the customer stood to leave, he asked the boy if he’d like help lifting his father off the floor. The boy thanked the customer, but said he had it under control. When the customer left, the boy went to his father. “Touch me,” the father said. “Rub me, please.”
The boy said he would not do that, no.
But the father was lying on the tile floor and could not seem to lift himself. He tried to reach for the boy. But the man did not have enough strength. The boy could not ignore it; he was not quite the same person his father had been. He took his father’s hand and lifted him to the massage chair. There, he felt his father’s body, the shrunken muscle, the thin flesh. The boy tended these gently. He rubbed his father’s body with soft supplication, tender rubbing. The father asked him to work harder, push and pinch him.
But the boy would not.
“Hit me,” the father begged. “I cannot even feel your hands.”
But the boy would not. He would only touch the man more lightly. Sometimes he just let his hands rest on his father’s back. He would not move his hands at all, only leave them to rest there on his father’s body.
At first this made the father writhe. But in these final days, he began to grow softer and smaller. The boy took no other customers. He carried him from their home to the store, and from the store back to their home. The father breathed shallowly. His final request was something the boy could not hear. When the boy came closer, he asked that the boy speak to him. He asked that the boy shut off the rolling wave soundtrack and tell him what news he’d heard from the church. The boy knew everyone’s story at the church, having also taken over for his father there, and yet he withheld.