Fiction by Stephen Beachy
WADE'S FATHER DROVE him to a different farm, to buy a bike. A uniform golden green covered the land there, like grass. This was a crop. They stood in the barn with the farmer and studied the bike in silence. The bike was simply green, yet they gazed and gazed upon the bike. There was some process of boredom and suffering in time required to facilitate the purchase of this bike. Finally, the farmer's twelve-year-old son came in. He was a teenager now, and too big. Wade's father and the farmer went outside to work out the details of the exchange. Wade blushed. He was terrified to be alone with a teenager, who had plucked a piece of straw from a dusty bale, and was chewing it. Wade did not believe that he would live to be so ancient and ferocious. The young man chewed thoughtfully and lost himself in the pleasure of chewing. Wade thought he was a delicious, impossible animal. He let Wade stare as if he was used to being adored. Wade loved the young man the way men's mothers loved them when they were going off to war. The young man patted the bike seat with affection and an obscene familiarity, and then sat on it to show Wade that it was just too small. Wade thought that the sparkling green banana seat was excited. The young man took the straw from his mouth and poked it into Wade's.
They came back a week later to complete the exchange. The son was nowhere in sight. Wade's father had to sit in the kitchen with the farmer; he hadn't yet endured enough lazy speech to justify the extravagance of the bike. The bike glittered, it was green. Wade walked out by the barn. The color of the crop was beautiful and intricate. He waded into it and it was higher than his knees. It was varied and shimmering, green, gold, green, gold. He chewed on straw and walked back into the trees, where a small stream flowed.
Out on the land, he saw someone walking, and he thought it must be the farmer's son. As the figure grew nearer, he realized the man was too tall. It was a stranger; he had been following Wade and decided to come get him perhaps. Wade stepped boldly into the light, lay down in the grassy plants, and closed his eyes. He thought the crop would be ruined, and this thrilled him. He thought the stranger would come and think that he was sleeping or dead, and touch him and wake him up. He thought that ants were going to bite him. It seemed he was waiting for years and years. He opened his eyes and sat up and peered through the trees, trying to locate the dark figure in the light.
Wade developed a fever and was kept home from school. It was on that day that a shooting occurred on the playground. A sixth grade teacher and a girl were killed and two children were wounded. The man with the gun escaped, but was killed by the police later that evening outside of Mr. Tippy's Hamburger Restaurant.
On Monday Wade's teacher, Mrs. Avery, introduced a new woman to the class. The folks in the capital don't think Mrs. Avery knows how to talk about feelings, Mrs. Avery told them. The new woman arranged them in a circle on the floor around her. My name is Brenda, she said. She was large and maternal, wearing soft, nurturing clothes. I'm here today to talk with you about some scary ideas and feelings, she said.
Their hands popped up, and the children offered anecdotes of dead dogs, dead grandmas, dead fish, cows, neighbors, people in movies, baby brothers born dead, dead mothers and fathers.
My sister was stomped on, said a girl named LeAnn.
My daddy got took out, said a boy named Terry. The windows of the classroom were so dirty that the sky out there seemed smudged and colorless, grimy and webbed. Brenda wanted them to talk about their feelings. It seemed that nobody had ever before asked such a thing from these particular children. Brenda had cards that showed frowning faces, smiling faces, each face tagged happy or sad or silly or scared. This seemed ridiculous to Wade. He decided to feel different ways, that didn't match those words, and not to give those feelings names. Later, Brenda stood in the center of the circle and wept. The children began sobbing around her.
Brenda took Wade aside to the book corner. She was concerned that he hadn't been sharing, and Wade thought that meant she was upset that he hadn't cried like the rest.
Maybe you could share some of your feelings just with me, she said.
OK, said Wade.
She asked him what he remembered about that day. Wade concentrated.
I was right next to that girl, he said.
That girl was shrieking and looking at the tattered remains of her arm. The blood just kept coming.
The teacher came out with some wet paper towels, he told Brenda. And he tried to soak up the blood, but he couldn't soak it all up.
You must have been very scared, said Brenda.
The man was shooting and shooting, said Wade.
He thought about his decision not to name feelings. Unfortunately, other people's feelings were too interesting to ignore. Since he didn't know how to discuss feelings without naming them, he decided to pair traditional words in unusual ways.
The man looked happy and frustrated, he said.
Brenda nodded.
He looked like he wanted somebody to play with, Wade added.
Do you think that's why he was so mad? asked Brenda. You think he wanted somebody to play with him?
He was mad and he was silly, Wade offered. Brenda looked puzzled.
He was sad and he was excited, he said instead.
It sounds like that man was very confused, said Brenda, but Wade knew she was really saying that he was confused.
Mrs. Avery interrupted them.
Miss Dinkins? she said.
Brenda, please, said Brenda.
She whispered to Brenda. Wade knew that she hated him, but Brenda was just annoyed by the less cheerful woman.
What are you getting at? said Brenda.
Wade heard the word "sick," and then something else. Mrs. Avery shrugged and returned to the circle. Brenda gave Wade a hard smile and patted his shoulder and left him there.
He remembered it all so clearly; that bloody, screaming little girl and the man at the fence. Somebody get her a Band-Aid! Wade had yelled. At Circle, Barry was saying that he was inside at recess, doing his homework when the shooting began. Wade picked up a book about dogs on bicycles and looked at the pictures. Barry was saying he had missed the whole thing, crouched in safety under his desk, as they'd been taught to do in case of tornado. He had never been in danger; he had never seen a thing. Although Wade had seen Barry's picture in the paper, bawling and splattered with the dead teacher's blood, he accepted this new version as equally true. Nobody challenged Barry. Another child raised her hand, and then another child began to weep.
When the wounded children returned to school, there was a huge celebration. Cookies with frosting, and a march around the playground. Shortly thereafter came a whole range of tests. The other children had to draw pictures of the houses in which they lived. They had to draw pictures of their happy time; they drew pictures of swimming and snowball fights, throwing things at cars, buying new things at the store, wrestling with dogs, and blowing up the school. They were asked whether they would rather work under someone who was always kind or someone who was always fair. Wade was left to read animal books in the reading corner by himself. The cheetah leaps through the air with all four legs bunched underneath and its supple backbone arched like a bow pulled taut. He read about coyotes and hyenas and elephants made sad by their impending extinction. There were fewer every day. Wade discovered a word for what had happened on the playground. The children had been culled.
Shortly thereafter, a new line was formed at lunchtime. This meant that Wade had to sit by himself even longer, while other boys with bag lunches waited for their pill.
The days were getting hot. The boys especially had become less interesting. They didn't seem to have moods anymore, or even a mood.
Many years later, on the radio, a man was listing symptoms. You aren't sure who you really are, he said, or you don't feel like yourself.
If enough of the symptoms suited you, it meant you were a candidate for some new syndrome. A feeling of loss that has no referent, the man continued. The need to be invisible, perfect, or perfectly bad. High risk taking or the inability to take risks. The feeling of carrying an awful secret, the urge to tell, feeling oneself to be unreal and everyone else real, or vice versa. Lost memories, or blacking out a period of years ...
Wade felt that way sometimes. It seemed he'd been to some colleges. He'd learned things and had brief affairs with the men who kept up the grounds. But he could remember it all if he really wanted to. The man driving the car pulled over at a rest stop. I need to check my e-mail, he explained.
Wade wasn't sure how that was possible. The man sat at a picnic table and typed away at his laptop. They were somewhere in the desert, in transit from one dubious location to another. Their relationship was based on an accidental convergence of two paths of least resistance. They were both too lazy to try and change other people to suit their own preferences. Wade wandered off into the scrub. A dry gully twisted around through it and he could see how high the stream had been by the garbage that was stuck along the banks. Plastics and fast-food cups and a surprising number of articles of clothing, shirts and rags and underwear, and bloodstained jeans. The desert was the worst place to hide evidence, because nothing decayed.
The land just went on. He was pretty sure there'd been human sacrifices around here, he could sense it. Blood had soaked into it. Blood was curdling and the sun was blazing. You couldn't see the creatures, but they were out there, waiting and chewing each other for sure. They sucked up each other's juices, he guessed. He walked haphazardly along the gully for some time, letting the heat and his thirst empty his mind. When he came to a barbed wire fence, he turned back. At the rest stop, the man was clicking his mouse and talking to him as if he'd been there next to him the whole time.
It really facilitates community, he was saying.
Wade guessed he was talking about the World Wide Web. This man thought everyone in the world together was turning into the planet's brain. It had become the source of a mild but nearly constant irritation between them.
Not everyone has a computer, Wade said.
The man snorted.
I talk to people in Kenya, he said.
The man's skin was dry, hair frazzled and bleached. He seemed crisped, a little bit fried around the edges, like an asteroid that had come through the atmosphere a few times too many. Wade knew that his time with this man was approaching its end. The sun was blazing out here and the electronic screen seemed grotesque. Wade thought there must be a club of dictators or child murderers he was connecting with in Kenya. The man was wearing a stained undershirt and suit pants. There was a weird hair or blue fiber there where the shirt, drenched with sweat, was sticking to the man's back.
More evidence. Guilty, thought Wade, but surely nobody cared. He thought then that his mood was the same as America's, or he thought that his mood was exactly "America". The man shivered in the heat, as if he was finally ready to move on, but then he continued clicking away. A sort of hopeless scratching noise under the sun.
Stephen Beachy is a San Francisco writer and Lit contributor. This story is excerpted from his forthcoming novel, No Time Flat.