1997
Artie, Bertrand’s oldest boy, possessed an amount of charisma rare even among his family members. Everyone loved him. It had been this way for as long as he could remember. He had stood bewildered in the center of a preschool classroom as the other toddlers knocked one another down and cried, competing to be near him.
He experienced the burden of leadership before he understood what it meant. He felt a responsibility to live up to the admiration of his classmates and his teachers. Artie tried instinctively to limit his capacity to harm. He was nice to everyone, he learned to tell jokes, to entertain, to earn the admiration he received. He was a sweet boy, an honor roll student. He tried not to offend anyone or express too many preferences. He learned to be bland and affable, though he grew weary of the way his friends always competed for his notice. He couldn’t help the raw energy he exuded. He did not know how to make himself unseen. His only privacy could be found in total isolation, and he loved to be alone.
When each of the kids turned fourteen, their father taught them how to drive. It was a birthday tradition. He took the lucky child to an empty parking lot to practice, and then led them through the surrounding neighborhoods. He was patient and unflappable in the face of near-misses, lurching brakes. His calm voice inspired his children’s confidence, as it did the confidence of his constituents.
Artie was a natural driver. He wasn’t nervous. Since he was ten, he’d been driving go-karts on a track and golf carts in the gated communities where his friends lived. He learned quickly and soon became comfortable with the pedals and the gearshift and the mirrors, the sense of the car in space. It was a Lexus, four years old, and normally they would have traded it for a new model, but Bertrand had kept the car for this purpose, for his boy to learn.
Artie had assumed he would be a decent driver, but he was surprised by how much he liked it. Loved it. A sense of power and freedom surged in him, a taste of independence, even with his father riding shotgun. He felt something new, as well: a sense of protection, of privacy. The car was like a force field around him, an impenetrable energy shield like in the comics he loved. In the car he did not have to perform. He could simply go. He could be. Adults were always telling kids, Just be yourself. Until Artie learned to drive, he never understood what that meant.
After the first few lessons he began to sneak out at night. He would wait until his parents retired to their bedroom suite, inserted their earplugs, turned on their white noise machine, closed their blackout curtains. They made it so easy it was almost like a kind of permission.
At first when he took the car out he limited his excursions to thirty minutes, and stayed on the sleeping neighborhood streets of Lower Garden. But as he gained confidence, he permitted himself farther distances. He drove to his school, which was on a busy street and required traveling through several well-lit intersections and stoplights, navigating past other cars.
He parked on Palmyra, killed the engine, and got out. He had not expected to find the school so changed. It was an entirely different place at night. Its brick facade and high windows radiated a cool and ancient aura, like a ruin. His steps echoed. During the day it was loud and abundant with color, voices, bells ringing on the hour, bright bulletin boards and clutter. Walking the grounds at night, he noticed the building itself, the architecture. He trailed his arm along the brick, listening to his footsteps and the sounds of traffic and cicadas. The smells were familiar, reassuring. He did not think once of the possibility of being caught. He’d never been so calm and free of worry, so connected with his surroundings.
Does every place have this in it? he wondered. This alter ego, this secret life. Does every person? He tried to imagine his friends as they might exist when he wasn’t around, what they might do or think when they weren’t trying to impress him. I’d probably like them better, he thought, undergoing an odd kind of beautiful melancholy, a generous, expansive sadness for himself and everyone he knew.
He thought about his family, particularly his mother. Did she also contain this alternate universe of silence? He could not conceive of it. She was the same no matter who was around. It was easy for her to be photographed, to be interviewed, to give speeches in front of a luncheon. She was always cheerful, pretty, and energetic, until she fell into bed at nine thirty. She was like their dog Bear when he was a puppy. He would run in circles and chew up everything he could reach until the moment he fell asleep, often midchew, a destroyed sock in his mouth. His naps were pure. He could not be woken. Artie used to try. He’d tickle Bear, pick him up, wiggle his little legs around, but the dog would not alter his steady breathing or open an eye. Bear was a regular grown-up dog now. He’d turned out normal. He went on runs in the early morning with Artie’s mother and lay around the rest of the day.
Artie underwent a pang of loss for that puppyhood, gone forever. He’d been in third grade when they got Bear. His younger siblings probably couldn’t even remember the era before Bear’s existence. How different all our lives are, he thought. None of us can begin to touch one another, not really. He realized not a single person knew where he was at that moment.
In the inner courtyard of the school he found a pencil. Low on the brick wall, behind a stand of ginger plants, he wrote his initials. No one would notice it, but he could look at it during the day and have a connection to the otherworld. After that he returned the pencil to the edge of the sidewalk where he had found it. He drove home and snuck back in.