Partner
by ALEX CARNEVALE
He didn't like school that year. It was more difficult than it should have been, and his new clothes chafed at him. When he came home his parents had an expectant look on their faces. He went to his room, closed the door. It was the ending of a John Updike story, but it was still going on.
He was not the first boy of this sort, whose imagination grew too large for the confines of his little life. His father had played with him as a child, but work grew more time-consuming, and he never saw joy in his father's cheekbones. His mother cut her hair.
Snow came heavy and sogging, getting in his clothes and things. The warmth of fall evaporated. The trees lost their leaves. In the back of his closet, digging for a textbook he'd misplaced the year before, he saw an old-stuffed animal, dirty with the smell of sand and a vacation he found he didn't remember with any clarity. He took it out, never put it back.
A creek a quarter mile from his backyard had frozen over. Despite explicit instructions from his parents and classmate neighbor, he trod on the ice, feeling a growing excitement at the thought of being something larger than himself. After an hour, he went back to his room to look for the stuffed tiger. Not finding it, he searched every room, each nook, each spot worriedly. There, finally, sitting by the curb, was Hobbes.
While he danced on the ice, waiting to fall through and possibly die, Hobbes spun on his vibration, watching him. A dance wasn't silly if someone watched you, a joke was funnier, more perceptive.
Later: he and Hobbes spinning like a galaxy.
He became more and more distracted at school, less interested in what was going on around him. He spent his life in a near constant daydream, imagining the vagaries of entertainment where none could readily be found. Snow was a continuous reminder of the distance between him and everything, in his shoes and bartered clothes, his mother's hand on his neck, writing something at a hard desk, walking with his head down.
The world was tight with a fervor he could not explain, a method that was madness.
He was convinced, finally, that he would remain a little boy forever. When he looked in the mirror, nothing changed, at least nothing he could track. He grew no stronger; he ate, but did not get fat like some adults did. When he and Hobbes went into nature, even their visions were enigmatic, sinister.
Slowly, he learned to ride on the little joys: a burst of fleeting violin, a strike of lightning, a salty manner, a playful and clever trick. He found pleasure in mayhem caused to his neighbor, his parents. Tearing events apart with your fingertips was fulfilling, watching it burn from the inside begat a twisted sense of joy. He could make the world -- others could make the world -- but he could also make the world.
The mind is a bitter friend, he learned, but it was the only one he had. If he could ring in the day this way, if he could craft himself in his own image, drift off in the tiger? Who knows what gleeful horror might unfold.
The world is a cynical, needless place. We have nothing to do to pass the days here but mere amusement. There is no future; there is only the present, hanging by a thread. To see ourselves in others is a great joy, but it is a simple one. Nothing complex survives very long in space.
Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.
"I'll Take The Long Road" - Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens (mp3)
"Trouble In My Way" - Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens (mp3) highly recommended
"He Knows My Heart" - Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens (mp3)
