WHEN I GOT UP that next morning, I didn’t stumble blindly into my old workout routine. I still woke before everybody else, but this time I just lay there, knowing I didn’t have to get my body in shape for anything. I lay there staring, listening to the breathing of the animals all around me inside and the chirps of the animals outside. I thought about the impossible geekdom of the Arts Sector and laughed, wondering what I was possibly going to do over there. I rustled, adjusted my pillow, closed my eyes, pretending to myself that I wanted to enjoy some more lazy sleep. Then I did what I really wanted to do. I got up, dressed, stretched, feeling my muscles screaming yet alive again. Then I went out and ran. Just because I felt like it.
I started sweating the instant I stepped out the door. It felt good. I jogged, I strode, I ran. I stroked it. Fluid, right arm up, left knee up, left arm up, right leg up. Two breaths up, two down. All my parts were working together, like they knew what they were doing, like they knew each other well. It hurt, of course. It was hard, of course. I was still tortoise slow, of course. But I was in sync, and I was enjoying it. I was better, running down the road, down the path, amid the trees, up the hill, than I had ever been before. Because I took a day off? Why didn’t I think of that before, to just take a day off to recharge?
Because I was an athlete before. An organized athlete. A slottist. And they don’t do that. They don’t take days off, ever.
Now I could enjoy it, and I did. I felt stronger, freer, more efficient. Better. Because I was doing it for nothing and nobody. I ran and ran harder, pushed myself, panted, felt the heartburn and the charley horse burn. I almost wished I did have football players to smash into later that day, almost wished I did have wrestlers to break.
I laughed as I ran up the hill—no small effort to do those two together. I remembered I’d need all my strength to slay the wild arts horde.
I was very nearly to the top of the hill when I caught myself. I stopped dead before reaching the peak. The campsite. I didn’t want to see that. Whatever it was like now, I didn’t want to see it. I turned around and rumbled back down.
There were a hundred million differences, give or take a mil, between the Arts Sector and all the others. Starting right at the top, the Brothers. While all the sports slots had one or two official Brothers hanging around drinking iced tea and clapping just to make the “non-sports” camp look legit while lay coaches did all the real work, Arts Sector was crawling with Brothers. Busy Brothers. And while the Brothers who did nothing everywhere else went out of their way to look Brotherly—the black suit, shoes, socks, half-white collar even in the blistering sun—you couldn’t tell that the Arts Brothers were Brothers unless they told you. The largest swatch of black in the whole library—other than on the students, who were dripping in it—was Brother Clarke’s cloud of fuzzy black hair. It was about a foot high off his head—like Larry of the Three Stooges if he wasn’t balding.
I met Brother Clarke first, the instant I entered the library. It smelled wonderful, and he was the reason why.
“Drink?” he asked, still hunched over a small hissing black machine on a table.
“What?”
“Drink, I said. Or, rather, Drink? with a question mark. As in, Do you? Would you? Like a drink? Café? Espresso?”
I dumbfounded him with my dumbfounded expression.
Brother Clarke gently put his cup down on the table, then not-so-gently grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “Coffee. Coffee, boy. For god’s sake, don’t you smell it? Are you with us, son?” Even after he stopped talking, he kept shaking me.
“No-o-o,” I burbled. “None-for-me-thanks. And-you-might-think-about-cutting-down-yourself.”
He laughed, gave me one last good shake, and pinched my cheek. “So, what do you do?” he asked, challenged, really, but in a funnish, robust way. He swiped up his mug with one hand and put the other hand in his pocket, waiting for an answer. When I hesitated, he dramatically looked at his watch.
“What do you mean, what do I do? Like, do I have a job?”
Brother Clarke blinked at me fifty times, shifted his weight back and forth and back and forth as if waiting for me to answer was like waiting in a long bathroom line.
“Artistically speaking,” he said finally. “What is your gift?”
“Oh, that,” I said, nodding and pointing my I-get-it finger at him. “None.”
“I see, no gift. What, then, is your strength?”
“Okay,” I said, nodding some more, “now we’re getting somewhere. My strength? None.”
“I see, no strength. How about... er, proclivity? You got a proclivity?”
“Nope.”
“Leaning?”
“Straight up and down.”
“Inclination?”
“Without.”
“Aptitude?”
“Getting colder.”
Brother Clarke let out a great sigh, refilled his coffee, and asked with his back to me, “Have you got any ambition at all?”
“Yes,” I said surely. “I want to go home.”
“Finally,” he proclaimed, throwing his coffee-free hand up into the air, “we’re getting somewhere. Tap your ruby slippers together and follow me.”
I followed along as Brother Clarke led me through the library. It was a different place now from the building that had belonged to only me the week before. The lights were all on. Here and there guys were slumped at tables, reading, painting, or doing projects that were unfathomable to me, making god knows what out of god knows what. One guy was making a model out of what looked like mud, building, I think, a Madonna except she kept disintegrating because the mix was too watery.
“What is your name?” Brother Clarke asked over his shoulder.
“Bishop,” I said. “Elvin Bishop.”
“Bishop Elvin Bishop. It’s dramatic. Like Ford Maddox Ford, right? Or William Carlos Williams. Or Flavor Flav. What do you want to be called? Bishop? Elvin? Bishy?”
“Elvin,” I said, stopping to do a double take as a guy stroked a coat of shellac over what I swore were dog droppings. After a few seconds the guy felt my presence.
“Gonna be a napkin holder. For my mom,” he said icily.
“You haven’t been deloused yet, have you, Bishy?”
“Elvin.”
“Come on, you can’t tell me you got through over two weeks of sports camp without being nicknamed.”
“Big Booty,” I sighed.
“Good one,” Brother Clarke said.
“And if you were at the talent show, you may remember me as The Masked Potato.”
“No way. You were The Potato? Hot damn.”
“Ya, I’m kind of a celeb. Free Willy, The White Tornado, Squishy Bishy...”
“Ouch. Free Willy, huh? Is that because you’re heavy, or because you’re boring?”
I stared at him deadly.
“We’ll go with your regular name then. Okay, Elvin, let’s get you deloused.”
“Let’s,” I said, though I had no idea what he was talking about.
He threw open the door to the periodicals room, where a meeting was in progress. Brother Clarke shoved me down into a seat at the back of the room as a student stood to speak. It took the kid a long while to stand all the way up to his full elongated height, but when he did, I brightened.
“My name is Paul Burman,” he said sadly, tentatively, “and I hate the shit out of basketball. I spent the last two weeks taking passes in the pivot from some psychopath who would not let me alone. They were so hot to have my body in the slot that they wouldn’t let me out until I took off all my clothes in the middle of a scrimmage and played naked for five minutes. I blocked three shots with my privates dangling.”
There was polite applause all around.
“My name is Lennox,” the next outcast said. “I was a prisoner of wrestling for two weeks. I want to paint.”
“I want to sculpt.”
“I want to draw.”
“I want to build.”
“My name is Eugene, and I do bathe, twice a day. And I don’t have to be here. And when school starts I will be back on the wrestling team, but I want to do other things. I want to sing.”
I knew them. I knew every one of them. I hadn’t been slotted with every single one of them, but I knew each one, somehow. We’d sat at adjoining tables at mealtimes, or crossed paths while being ejected from one slot or another, or logged some time together in sick bay. There wasn’t a guy in here who hadn’t nodded his head or said “hey” or “how ya doin’” to me as we floated by on our paths to very different places. The football players didn’t do that. If I didn’t keep my head up and jump out of the way, they’d trample me rather than say “hi” or “excuse me.” My own Cluster mates would go days without acknowledging me or half of their other neighbors. But all these guys...
What was I doing here with all these geeks?
And where did they get all this focus? Half of them couldn’t tell you what month it was out there in the real world, or if they needed a drink of water, but suddenly, here, they had the answer. “I want to be a dancer. I want to be an architect...” Where did all this come from?
“You, sir,” Brother Fox said, pointing to me.
“Me, sir?” I repeated, also pointing to me.
“You, sir.”
Brother Clarke nudged me, and I got up. Nervously, I spit it out. “I started in football. Then I got knocked out and went to sick bay. Then I went to baseball. Then I went to sick bay. Then I spent a long time in wrestling, a little more time in sick bay... then I golfed, which put me really in sick bay; then I got Religion Sector.”
That brought the big reaction. When I bottomed out with the Religion Sector, the heartfelt moans that were directed my way—even from the Brothers—even made me get all choked up for the poor sap we were discussing, whoever he was. Heads shook, the hands were raised to cover mouths, as if what I’d really said was “and then the big one held me while the little one pistol whipped me. And then...” We were all on the brink of tears.
“It’s been a long road, hasn’t it, son?” Brother Fox said. “What is your name?”
“Bishop, Brother.”
“Well, Bishy—”
Brother Clarke started waving his arms at Brother Fox. “Ix-nay on the ishy-Bay,” he said, kindly.
“Well, Mr. Bishop,” Brother Fox said, pausing for emphasis and looking all around the room to include all the sad sacks. “That shit’s history. You’re artists now.”
There was a round of laughs and applause as everyone stood.
“Whoever wants to do performance, drama, music, follow Brother Crudelle that way,” he announced, and three guys walked out behind the Brother who looked like Jesus only skinnier. “Those of you who want to try painting, drawing, sculpting, or other visual arts, go with Brother Mattus.” Half the group got up and followed after Mattus, who looked like a cross between Santa Claus and Rasputin. “Those of you interested in exploring print-making, textile art, mixed media, abstract art, experimental art, and the study of art history will be coming with me.” There were six of us left, obviously the six who had no idea what we wanted and were waiting to be struck by something. “And the last group, going with Brother Percy, will be those interested in poetry and prose.”
Well that decided it. The other five fence sitters hurried to line up behind Brother Fox.
Myself, I remained. Like the moment before, and the year before. Undecided. Unclear. Unmoved. Unattracted. Paralyzed with the depth of my own nothingness. I made my decision the way I made all my decisions. By sitting passively.
Brother Percy walked up to me, chuckling. The last of the last were filing out of the room as he sat backward on the chair in front of me. “You don’t know it yet,” he said, “but we are an elite class, you and I. After sifting and sifting, weeding and sorting, picking and cleaning, and sifting again, out of the bottom of the sieve drops only the finest grain of all.”
I looked at him, leaning closer, to try and see if he was for real. I couldn’t tell.
“The dregs, you mean,” I said.
He stood up over me, a medium-built six one, with prematurely silver collarbone-length hair. “Son,” he said with a generous face, extending a hand for me to shake, “I perceive in you a problem of perspective.”
I shook his hand and he tugged me up out of the chair.
“What if I hate poetry?” I asked as he led me out with his arm around my shoulders. I figured I’d break it to him in stages that I did, in fact, hate poetry already.
“Then you move on,” he said, shrugging. “You are not tied to any one art while you’re here. Everyone is welcome to float from one area to another if he likes, and every year most of the fellows do. In fact, I insist you do.”
“What if I don’t want to?” I snapped, out of reflex. My wick was burning down quickly in the last days of camp.
“Ah, a bona fide contrarian. This is going to be a pleasure. A pleasure,” he said.
“But look at them,” I said, making a sweeping gesture with my hand over the main room of the library. It was already abuzz with eager rookie artists making a lunatic formless cheery colorful mess of the place. Santa’s workshop merged with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “They’re all geeks. They’re all mental.”
Brother Percy took it as a compliment. He inhaled deeply, as if he could breathe all the mentalness in. “Yes,” he said. “Aren’t we?”
Mama,
Whole new me, volume eighty-seven.
There once was a boy from Massachusetts
Whose mother thought him dumb fat and useless
So she threw him a bone
Ninety miles from his home
And today he was slotted with the fruitses.
Yours,
Elvin, Lord Bishop
When I showed up the next morning, the first person I saw was Oskar. Because he was doing his work outside on the lawn.
“Steee-rike!” he yelled after nailing a three-by-three-foot cardboard square with a glob of paint. “Elvin,” he called happily when he saw me. He stretched both hands to the hazy white sky in greeting. It looked like he was wearing psychedelic gloves, paint coating his hands and halfway up his forearms. “Congratulate me—I did it. I got ejected from the previously unejectable Arts Sector. God, I’m a man,” he said, scooping a handful of black from a jar and slinging it.
“You didn’t,” I said.
“Nah, not really. Partway, though. I was making such a mess, they asked me to take it outside. I can go back in when I’m done.”
I looked around. There was not a brush anywhere near him. He was exclusively throwing paint at his canvas. And having a ball.
“Yar!” he said. “A little titanium white there. Yar! A bit of vermilion up there.”
“Looks like fun, Oskar. Can I have a throw?”
He turned on me darkly, stopping his fun for a minute. “What do you think, this is a joke? This is no game, this is a work of art I’m doing here. I can’t let you just come in and screw it up.”
I stared at the work. “Oh. Sorry.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said, returning to his work, and to his bright mood. “Indigo!” he called. Splatch.
“Um, what is it?” I asked, half ducking in anticipation.
“You don’t know?”
I shook my head.
“Come on, Elvin, it’s right there. It’s our class picture. It’s us.” He rushed up to the portrait, pointed excitedly to a gob of green half on, half drooping off, the lower right-hand corner. “That’s you.”
I don’t know what happened to me there—maybe it was Oskar’s intensity, or his pride and enjoyment of it all, but I saw it. It looked like me. It looked like all of us.
“I like it,” I said. “Except I have a little more hair than that, and I part it on the other side.”
He held up his dripping hands as if to stop me: “Sorry, man. That’s my vision.”
I left him with his vision. I went inside.
“Drink?” Brother Clarke said cheerfully, hunched over his espresso machine again.
“No, thank you,” I said, walking on past toward the busy crafts table. Just as I got there, three guys plunked their faces down into bowls of puttylike goop. Three other guys pushed the heads down deeper from behind, held them there, then helped them back out. I crept closer to check it out as they toweled off, and saw perfect impressions of their faces in the bowls.
“Beautiful,” Brother Fox crowed, clapping. “Then we’ll pour liquid into this mold to make the mask. And when that is hardened, you can paint it or do whatever you like, to make it look however you want it to look.”
“Cool,” I said, not meaning to say it to anyone but me.
“Come on over, Elvin,” Lennox said. “Do one.”
I was already backing away. “Nah, I’m just looking,” I said.
I backed into Brother Percy. “Morning, Elvin,” he said. “You ready to do some work?”
Now I backed in the other direction. “Um, no. I thought I’d float for a while. You know, investigate other stuff.”
“Bravo,” he said, and walked away just like that.
The music was hard to ignore. It was also hard to like. Anyhow, it drew me down to the farthest end of the library, under the short balcony that ran the width of the building with stairs at either end. The door to the conservatory was ajar, so I nudged it, not really accidentally.
Brother Crudelle was seated at an upright piano, wearing a starched white short-sleeved shirt buttoned to the collar, but still looking cool crisp white. Opposite him, leaning on the top of the tall piano with their elbows, were the two giants. Eugene and Paul Burman. Singing.
Sort of. They didn’t sound good. They didn’t blend. They weren’t singing words, only sounds to match whatever chord Crudelle hit. They sounded like old cars, with the springs gone and many small holes in the mufflers.
But as far as I could tell, they didn’t know it. They were up on their toes, both of them, as if they needed it, trying to reach notes that would bring the rest of us to our knees. When Eugene saw me, his glossy face beamed, and he made a “yo” fist power sign. Paul couldn’t see me because he had his eyes shut tight.
When I first followed that sound, I was hoping it would be good for a laugh. But when I got there, it was a whole different show. I left the room and closed the door quietly. I sat down on the steps with my chin on my fist. This was a better place, I could already tell, because everyone here seemed so comfortable. But they were gripping something I wasn’t quite gripping. I mean, I was happier here, but I was no less confused.
“Ready?” Brother Percy said, calling down to me from the balcony at the top of the stairs.
“No,” I said.
“Start with this,” he said, dangling a book between his thumb and index finger. When it was obvious that I was looking at it, he let it drop, and I caught it.
It was Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. I looked at it for a few seconds, didn’t open it, then threw it back up.
“Listen, you,” I said boldly. “I hate this stuff. I hate poetry. I hate Edgar Allan Poe except for the detective stories. The horror stuff is about half as scary as Barney the Dinosaur. I saw all the movies with Vincent Price. They were hysterical. I read ‘The Raven’ a hundred times in school, and it got more boring every time. Nevermore, already.”
He didn’t speak. He smirked like he knew everything. Then he dropped a second book. The Poetry of Robert Frost.
“Car commercials,” I snapped, and threw it back.
The third book dropped, and Brother Percy’s smile along with it. It was a paperback with a bright-pink cover. Final Harvest, poems by Emily Dickinson.
“I think I’m going to try clay modeling today,” I said, and tossed the book back. He refused to catch this one. It rose, arced, then fell back to me.
“Fine, but hold on to that one anyway. It’ll fit in your back pocket, and you can read it when you feel like it.”
This seemed like a good escape point, so I gave in. Even though he was exaggerating a bit—good thing I have large back pockets. I stashed the book and made busy, spending most of my time just poking around, looking at other people’s work, watching, feeling the textures of what everybody else was working, the clay, the paint, the piano keys, the soft metal, the wet paper. Watching it all from over shoulders.
Once, just after lunch, when nobody was looking, I picked up a brush and tried to make a picture. Of a house, and a small car, and a road and two people. When the painters returned, I crumpled mine up and threw it in the trash, burrowing to get it underneath the other trash.
“What is that?” Frankie demanded as he walked up behind me at Nightmeal. He pulled the book out of my pocket and took it with him to the other side of the table.
“It’s a book, ape boy. Give it back.”
He stared at it in his hands as if it was a talking severed head. “El, it’s a poetry book. It’s a pink poetry book.”
I made a stab to get it back, but Frankie was too fast. Then, quick as a cobra, Mikie snatched it and gave it to me.
“God, this is the worst slot yet, Elvin,” Frank said, real concern on his face. “How are we gonna get you out of this one?”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Don’t help me anymore.”
Mike extended his palm. He wanted to have another look at the book. “You really into poetry, El?” he said, browsing as he talked.
“NO,” I insisted. “That’s just what I backed into. Now I have this poetry teacher who has absolutely nothing to do except follow me around, haunting me with this stuff. He’s got nobody but me.”
“Do you have to stay?” Mike asked.
“No. Everybody’s pretty free over there.”
“So move, then.”
“Ya, Jesus, move out of there for god’s sake,” Frank said. “That stuff’s got nothing to do with you.”
“Move to where?” I asked. I asked Mike, not Frank.
“Good question,” Frank answered. “That whole Arts Sector gives me the creeps. All the weird guys are there.”
Mike and I banded together to try to ignore him. “Well is there something else you want to do? Like do you want to paint or something?”
“No. I don’t know. Ya. I don’t know.”
“That’s good, Elvin,” Frank jumped in. “Things are clearing up nicely now.”
“Okay, so here’s what I’m doing. I’m watching. I’m watching a couple of guys mixing paints together, and you wouldn’t believe it. They combine this kind of yellow, that I’ve seen somewhere before, and that kind of blue, which I’ve seen before, and they mix and mix, and add a drop and another drop, and they come up with a green I have never seen before. Mike, I watched paint mixing for an hour and a half. And all this one guy did when he got the color just right was he painted a circle, like a moon or a planet or something near the top of his canvas. Then he went on and mixed something else.”
Frank said nothing, just stared at me like I was retarded. Mike said nothing. But he stared and waited for the more of it.
“But I felt like I did something there. Like I had been someplace. Seeing what they did, being there for it, hanging over their shoulders, was like, so satisfying. So I tried it. The kid saw me hovering, offered me a brush, and I tried.”
Mike thought this was the big discovery part of the story. “There we go,” he said.
“No, there we don’t go,” I said. “I hated it. I painted with watercolors for ten minutes, then went crazy and threw a glass of water all over what I’d done.”
“You’re getting really weird, Elvin,” Frank said, looking at me sideways.
“So painting wasn’t for you.” Mikie shrugged.
“No, it wasn’t.” I said, banging my fist on my supper tray. “And neither was music or pottery or collage. All that was for me was watching. Watching. Watching and watching. Mikie. I found out, that’s all I really want to do. But when I’m doing the watching, I feel like I’m doing the doing. You know? I mean, it’s much better than when I do it myself.”
“We have to get you fixed. El,” Frankie said, drop-dead serious now. “I don’t like the way you’re sounding. You’re not your old self.”
I thought I wasn’t listening to Frank, but he was getting to me anyhow. I leaned more desperately toward Mikie, who had the ignoring Frank thing locked. “Is that all right?” I asked. “Can I do that? Is something wrong with me? Is that a slot a person can have? Watcher?”
“Does anyone mind, that you’re doing all the watching?”
“No. I think they like it, even, having an audience.”
“Then it should be fine.”
“Ya. I suppose. Except that poetry guy. He seems to think I should be doing something.”
“We have to get you straight,” Frank repeated, shaking his head slowly. “Listen. Last night of camp, this Saturday, Obie and the guys are having a send-off party. Gonna be a big blast. Now this time, you guys are not invited, because of your awful behavior in the past, but I bet I could get you in, seeing as I’m like the guest of honor and all.”
“No, thank you,” I said quickly. “Actually, the Arts Sector is having its own little party Saturday night in the library.”
“What do you mean, the guest of honor?” Mike finally addressed Frank.
“My debut party. My coming-out party. Passing of the torch stuff. I told you guys this from the beginning. I told you these guys were the people to know. Now they’re handing the keys over to me, making me the new king. Like I said, they’re leaving, I’m coming in. Changing of the guard. I’m going to be king. But don’t worry, I won’t forget you guys.”
Frank grinned. He had been waiting a long time to make that speech, or one just like it. Mikie went stone cold again. I was—no surprise—confused. I was happy for Frank, because Frank was happy for himself and that didn’t happen as often as most people thought. But I was afraid too. I didn’t think I wanted him to be King of All the Wild Things.
“So they’re having a party, your whole Sector?” Mike asked, shutting Frank’s story off.
“Ya,” I said. “Goofy, huh? They’re all really weird, Mike.”
“Basketball Sector’s just going to show a highlight film of the Knicks-Rockets finals. Even big hoops fans don’t want to look at that.”
“Yuck.” Frank and I finally agreed on something.
“And you’re allowed to do pretty much whatever you want?” Mike went on.
“Pretty much,” I said.
“Cool,” Mikie said.
“Cool?” Frank said. “Please, Mike, we only have a few days left here. We need at least you to come out of it the same as when you came in.”