Seven
What Cesar experienced was much like having the memory himself, although colored by the confusion Willie had felt in those moments now a month in the past. The pictures flashed in Cesar’s mind, and Willie gave him the unmistakable look of “I know…” It was a telling, as irrevocable as any with words.
Though Willie still did not understand the strange talent that permitted it, by animating pictures in his own mind, he could wordlessly pass them to another person. This was not a thing that Willie could do at will, but rather when a certain level of urgency was reached. It happened as a kind relief valve, when something inside him could find no other manner of expression. It had happened once before in Miss Biondi’s class, when he had to go to the boy’s room quite badly.
Some of the boys in his class had taken up the habit of calling-out Willie’s pet name, whenever his hand rose tellingly for that particular permission. They had all learned of the pet name, and how to pronounce it for maximum injury, one terrible day when another boy in Willie’s class from 99th Street brought the delicious bit of information to class and spread it quickly. Until then, “Wee-wee” was not a sound that had been heard from any other lips, save for those of Willie’s mother. Willie had tucked his hands between his legs, and was squeezing in his dire need. He loathed performing the act that would unleash on him the flood of verbal sniping, but his bladder was sorely full. So when he caught Miss Biondi’s gaze, he let her have it, quite uncontrollably, a burst of knowledge that made her walk over to his desk, take his hand compassionately, and walk him silently out of class to the bathroom.
Much like a swollen bladder, what Willie released into Cesar’s head had been bursting against the dam that contained it. It was a thing he realized had no place in his mind. The sight of the bearded man’s tongue, bright pink in the headlights. The way Cesar’s body had moved. The look on the driver’s face. Willie just wanted the pictures gone, out, forgotten. At first he had tried to lose the experience down into the Mind Well, but found, much to his pain and frustration, that it could not be entirely gotten rid of. There were parts of what he had seen that were somehow left stranded on the edge of the Well, and these stubborn fragments would persistently summon up the whole garish event into memory again. For several days after it happened, Willie gave serious thought to finding someone to share what he had seen, someone who could correct what must have been a misperception on Willie’s part, or an embarrassing case of the eyes playing tricks on you. But Willie had found no such someone to share his burden. So when he saw Cesar dancing the catch me dance, he let him have it, just as he had done with Miss Biondi. It seemed fair and correct to Willie that he should hit Cesar with the pictures in that way, and use them against him during the game.
Presently Cesar’s dance of exultation had been stunned by Willie’s silent disclosure. His body was quickly collapsing into a self-conscious knot of limbs. His salacious, too-broad grin, sagged into an expression of mortification, and Cesar slipped into the abyss between the thought just departed and the one yet to arrive. As his arms had fallen from their wild gesticulations, so too did Cesar’s mop of hair begin to settle round his face. All in slow-motion
Willie’s eyes followed the slow descent of the cow-lick down across Cesar’s forehead. He waited for the reliable act of habit, with a patient certainty built on a thousand duplicate moments in the past. Cesar did as always, because there hung, ever-fixed in space before him, an invisible mirror to which profound vanity would pull his attention whenever anything was not perfect with him. His eyes went to that mirror now, in response to the special irritation of disarranged hair, which was even more pressing than the exigencies of the of game or Willie’s silent “I know!�?. As the errant lock of hair was guided back to its requisite place, Willie had already begun moving within himself.
It was time to pounce, and the heartbeats became light, brief quivers in Willie’s chest.
Step. Willie pounced after his scrambling prey.
Step. As Cesar began to uncoil his legs for flight, Willie felt for and found that familiar plastic hilt at his waist.
Step. Before his brain could even choose a tunnel of escape, Cesar felt the deflating touch.
Like a record coming back to speed, Willie was mobbed by the clamor of his act. Staring at the toppled Cesar, he began to hear all the random noises of the world. Somewhere, not very far away, he heard the click and tiny geyser of an opening beer can, and the schluff-schluff sound of the Frio-frio vendor’s ice-scraper wearing down the last of the day’s block. He even thought he heard his mother calling him, offering a Mantecado-flavored ice, his favorite. The various voices of Elsewhere made Willie a scatter of desire, wanting to be anywhere but where he was. The desperate need for the ice, that syrupy, throat-coating sweetness, nearly took him away, but Cesar yanked him back with brutal force.
“Yo dick, that didn’t count…”
Cesar was a slim tower of sinew. He spoke the words between clenched teeth, punctuating the last syllable by pulling a little tighter on the gathered bunch of Willie’s T-shirt collar. “..you got me with the knife.”
It certainly did count. When Cesar stumbled at the hard stick of Willie’s blade, the boy quickly brought up his other hand. And everyone heard the slap of a fair tag against his back. But Cesar wasn’t seeking any consensus. He already had his own verdict. Willie had trespassed and needed punishing, not just for the deflation of the tag, but also for the secret blow.
Only a few seconds had passed and Willie already regretted the silent flinging of his secret arrow. It hung now, invisibly stuck in the soft flesh of Cesar’s hidden life, making his difference throb and glow. Under different circumstances, Willie might have tried to comfort him. But now together with the humiliation of the tag, Cesar was full of poison, and it put a wild hysteria in his eyes — eyes that Willie wanted very badly to avoid. Cesar held Willie up by the shoulders of his T-shirt, as the boy let his head roll left and right, averting the scrutiny of those deranged eyes. Meeting Cesar’s gaze now would only twist the arrow where it stuck.
“C’mon man, lemme go!”
The boy was a mere wisp of life in Cesar’s powerful grasp. He pleaded, with only the tips of his sneakers on the ground. Cesar shoved him down reluctantly, when he realized there was no way he could do anything more and get away with it. There were boundaries of conduct that even Cesar must heed. There was an aura of taboo around the boy, the breaching of which would have inescapable consequences. So Cesar put aside his desire to hurt physically, drew it out of his clenched fists and pushed it down into the pit of his being. As the boy fell back and away from him, Cesar grabbed the fallen dagger from the ground, and set himself to a different satisfaction.
“Give it back, Cesar!”
The brown in Willie’s eyes was scarcely detectable even in the bright sun of day. At night his eyes were but two intense, black marbles. He trained them briefly on Cesar, now daring that consequence, and then met eyes with each of the other boys who looked on. Each set of eyes held the same uncommitted, embarrassed stare in it. The look of them made Willie want to claw at his own face.
“Give it back.”
There wasn’t a hint of play or flexibility in the words. Willie stood before the older boy, vacillating, as if he were on the threshold of some painful effort. His body tensed in rhythm to an invisible spasm that boiled in his head and flowed down into his limbs, investing them with heat and numbness. The grimy T-shirt, with its neck stretched-out over one shoulder, clung wetly translucent to his breathing chest. The too-large jeans, with pale patches of wear at the butt and knees, seemed barely useful, almost confining. A faint, crying agony moistened Willie’s eyes, and he seemed ready to thrash about on the ground like some wild stricken beast.
“Give it, Cesar…”
He wasn’t even holding his hand out now. Willie wanted Cesar to bring it back to him, to come the great distance all the way from where the older boy stood.
“Nah! You wannit, you gotta fight for it.”
At that, a flash of excitement and horror burst whitely before everyone’s eyes. The others, who had by now formed an uneasy ring around Willie, stared at one another, resonating in the echo of Cesar’s pronouncement.
“I can’t fight you, man.”
Willie spoke heavily with a confident grasp of what was absurd and what was not. He knew well that Cesar, and others like him that he’d known, might need to chastise or bring grief to a boy half their size, or need to use him on those occasions when they had temporarily forgotten the total power of fifteen. But there could simply be no pleasure in a throw-down fight with just a…
“You’re not gonna fight me…you’re gonna fight him.”
With a grin, Cesar uncurled flat his new malice like a scroll, plain for all to see.
What was that? Willie lost his thought like a kite string, and let his eyes fall from the source of Cesar’s new words, down along the length of his right arm and out to the pointing finger. A line drawn from the place where Cesar’s finger ended and air began would have extended into space infinitely, encountering as its only interruption the flesh of Bobby’s torso. Bobby seemed to feel that touch of implication, Ow!, where he stood at the group’s periphery, already losing the shelter of nearer bodies.
“C’mon Cesar, cut the shit, awright?”
With the swiftness of reflex, Willie brandished himself into a stance that projected at once an unwavering determination to recover the dagger, and a relaxed aloofness with regard to what Cesar had just spoken. This was an extraordinary effort against the tide within him that now surged even more hotly. I want my fuckin’ knife.
Willie wanted his knife, and if he were to surrender himself fully to that desire, little could keep him from finding the most direct path to the precious object. But still Willie resisted. He clung tenaciously to a training, to the old order, to his faith in ruses and affectations. The thing that Cesar had spoken had to be a jest. If Willie wasted no time, and showed everybody by his cool manner that he knew it was a jest right off, then it would quickly become a jest. This was the politics. The Game. It was something you could learn, and use to your favor, often. What Cesar had created between Willie and the dagger was only a terrible ether, that only a fool’s credence could solidify. Patience would let it dissipate, with all its awful implications. Like the happy exhalation of an ill breathe, it would pass, and everyone present would un-tense in relief. Willie waited for the hardness in Cesar’s face to soften, for that weird, new mask he’d pulled out to fall away. But that was not coming. Within himself, Willie wanted foremost that the strange pictures of Bobby that had begun to flash inside his head would go away. The images were giving him that queasiness again, like after the second dream. It was a singularly intense disgust that he had managed to connect consciously only with the experience of visiting the Carniceria with his mother. And yet, an appetite was awakening in him; it wanted to see the street spattered with entrails and blood.
Still the bad air clung around the group of boys. Willie felt his composure slipping, and he resisted with all his strength. The fury in his head from the taking of the knife was large and insistent, and wanted venting. This game with Cesar, the waiting for a first flinch, the mental ground-holding, was becoming unendurable. The plastic knife seemed to float in space, tantalizing him, itself becoming a source of mockery.
Even at the threshold of total despair, there was a structure within him that let Willie try to quiet himself. The anguish was compartmentalized; it could be understood and directed. First, there was the hate for Cesar in his moment of consummate tyranny. It throbbed hotly behind Willie’s eyes. It wanted to gush out and burn Cesar, vaporize his skin, or strike out as words, so vitriolic and right that they’d make him run away in tears. This could pass though; the cherished toy could still be recovered, and all could be well again. Cesar could give him the dagger back, and say: “Ah, Jus’ kidding”; he could forget or choose to ignore Willie’s secret arrow. They could all still laugh and play another round of Detective. That pain had a visible end, that could, with just a bit more patience, be reached. It could be survived.
Then, there was a second, more dangerous agony. It was a new sort of nettling from the stupidity of the whole game with Cesar. The obvious impotence of this posturing tactic was excruciating, and it wanted to undermine the whole of society. It screamed at Willie’s inner ear with a screeching voice against all the forced order of the adult world, against dressing in the mornings, against all the indirect paths of life. It said, from the depths of that Mind Well: “Take back your knife!”, and this hurting was an absolute and unprecedented surprise.
The rules of the present game with Cesar had seemed as plain as those of Detective, but the strategy wasn’t working, the knife still eluded him. If Willie cowered now, Cesar could hold his ground, and the game could draw on interminably. Cesar would withhold the knife forever, and Willie would have to jump through all his hoops, whatever they might be. And Willie saw a grave danger in that.
This painful act of coolness, the containment of real and direct rage against Cesar, had a finite amount of time within which it must succeed as a strategy. If it failed, the anguish from all that painful self-puppetry would merge with the already over-suppressed and swollen impulse to wrath from the taking of the toy. The newly-found, nettling pain carried in its discovery implications for the future, and a maddening taint of permanent uncertainty. Damage. This made Willie not only angry but nervous. He felt the advance of an irreversible process within himself. What happens if I don’t get dressed in the mornings ?
Willie suddenly became aware of the conscious effort necessary to keep the two furies within him separate and distinct. He realized that if they should merge, the one into the other, nothing would keep him from retaking his property at whatever cost. He panicked against what threatened inside him, and decided to abandon his already faltering composure. Perhaps a cry for mercy, a bow to power and size, could sate Cesar’s appetite for hurting, or at least derail him from his spoken wish. It had to. The words came to Willie, but in speaking them, he found his voice was either too loud or barely audible.
” Please… you’re… stronger than me…”
Cesar felt now, for the first time, the pulse of power in his temples, and Willie was crushed by it.
“…you can make me…, I mean…”
Inexorably, the two sources of pain flowed into one, and a red drape of blood came down over the world in an all-consuming thickness. Thoughts of other things to say alighted briefly on Willie’s tongue, but were quickly dashed away by sizzling projectiles from the Mind Well. Suddenly askew from some eternally incorruptible axis, the kingdom of adult virtue trembled and sank into failed ruin before Willie’s eyes. Inside him, the Mind Well became a geyser of pure disease.
Cesar still held the dagger high over his own head, up in the haze of unreachable altitude. Inside of Willie, something yielded, something gave way. A split formed where the Mind Well had made its crack. The seam ripped apart exposing the surface of Willie’s corrupted memory underneath. The blighted surface shuddered for a miserable moment at the edge of disintegration, then melted into mist, and then the mist parted easily against the pressure of what pushed out.
After a frightening transformation of being as well as of countenance, Willie stood apart and watched a Beast cleave itself off from him, and follow a separate will. That will saddled ferocity like a horse and then rode it straight into Bobby’s defenselessly soft gut. The fat kid barely had a chance to try and tense up his middle before it was on top of him.
While the Beast tore into Bobby, a bodiless Willie stood apart and watched. Willie saw with some curiosity that the Beast resembled him, but there was only the slightest desire to stop the Beast from carrying out its awful work. The desire quickly faded and was lost in a sea of general numbness. Through the numbness, the bodiless Willie became aware of a tenuous tether between himself and the Beast. As the Beast ravaged the boy on the ground, the place where the tether was anchored in Willie’s non-body weakened and the link began to rip free of its seat. With all the detached horror of self-surgery, the bodiless Willie felt the painless tearing out, and knew himself then to be severed forever from the realm of flesh.
Bobby had been utterly stunned by the attack of the Beast, so much so that a small, whole turd had jettisoned at the first impact and now lay ignored in his underpants. All the fat boy could do behind his blubbering protests was hold up his arms, trying to deflect the ceaseless rain of fists.
Entirely powerless to intervene, a now fully-detached presence drifted closer to the scene, as if to see more clearly the face of the Beast. From that detached place, the bodiless Willie watched the seizing hands of the Beast grasp and hold thick, brown clumps of a once-good friend’s hair.
Suddenly, a cry was heard from among those who watched. The sound seemed to come from another world. The youthful voice carried in it a note of adult discernment for the taboo.
“Hey! He’s gonna fuckin’ kill’im!” Eddie cried out. But no one moved.
The Beast held the fragile weight of Bobby’s skull in its hands, and the bodiless Willie watched. He watched those strangely familiar hands slam down the unsupported mass, to meet the sidewalk with a dull sound. Again. Again. Willie watched it all, watched himself kill from a distance, with the mute terror and revulsion of some furtive night bird, like an owl driven to discomfort within its own dusky feathers. To watch was a blight, it was a slipping away like a shrug, and a please, please, as when no one understands you simply must leave a place, must get out. Oh! Let me go…
Willie had been released, from the scene and from his own flesh. Observing from high Baobab branch, perched above the night veldt, he surveyed all and understood well the savagery that pervades all life. His large, black, avian eyes blinked and fully dilated, devouring the scarce light and the necessary spectacle below. Ultra-sensitive ears heard the heartbeat falter in the fat boy’s chest, heard a final breath hiss through his large, white teeth, heard the tiny gurgle and plop of leaking skull contents. And, whispered gently in those sounds of inevitable, fulfilling, and necessary predation, were secrets. Willie listened to these whispers and understood, at last, the message that had carried from the dark pit in his mind. He watched from a place where the sprayed blood couldn’t dirty him. The bodiless Willie drifted still nearer to the crouching Beast, and kneeled right behind it. The Beast had ceased its pounding and had let the now lifeless head slip from its grasp. A moment passed before the Beast turned its face and finally let Willie see the identity of the murdering monster. It was a mirror spattered with blood.
The sudden sound of Willie’s scream released Eddie from the hypnosis of the spectacle. “Willie! Willie, stop! C’mon get off’im. C’mon Willie.”
Eddie had to stop it, compelled as he was by a strangely clear glimpse of two ruined lives, and by the gathering wisdom that allowed him that sight. He pulled the Beast off of Bobby, and looked around and saw how all the world was capsized and wrong. Eddie looked at the other stunned faces and wondered what was it in him that let the trance release him just then, while the others still seemed so possessed and eager for more. Age had not produced a similar wisdom in Danny, who was the same in years but still so lost in the spectacle, positively narcotized by it. Though Cesar was also fifteen, he now seemed to Eddie farther from him in nature even than Willie was from himself. All the boys, from the youngest upwards, seemed like the victims of some horrid accident. They were swaying gently and uncontrollably where they stood, lips parted and eyes dull. It was the aftermath of a tiny apocalypse that had flared suddenly in their midst, and no boy present would ever be the same.
As Eddie held the tiny Beast round its chest, and looked down over the black mop of its head, the truth of the moment came to him and made him alone among the others. Why had no one else seen that Bobby wasn’t fighting back, that something was very wrong? Even his own awareness had been made fuzzy for a while, letting him watch, free of those questions until it was… Was it too late? Eddie saw the enormous spill of blood, and looked up into the deep sky, the sky of Elsewhere. He reckoned silently all the answers he sought, and mourned them.
The Beast had not yet ceased struggling against Eddie’s firm grasp, but rather was winding down like a slow, mechanical death. Tears had made Willie’s neck and slender shoulders wet, and he shone a silvery blue in the dim Mercury Vapor street light. He had the weird, aversive look of the newly-birthed on him, and the blood on his hands made black streaks wherever he touched Eddie. Only when all the fighting was squeezed out did the older boy finally release his hold.
Willie made the movements of looking around, but nothing entered. His eyes were black as shale and unavailable. He felt a coldness from where the tether had been wrenched out. The part of him that had come detached was rising away like steam, still watching him from above. Those outer eyes kept feeding their sight down to Willie’s head, whose own organs for seeing were engorged with blood and ineffectual. Those phantom eyes saw Bobby splayed on the ground, in fallen angel pose. A strange, dark halo was growing around the boy’s shattered head; its slow and steady advance was pushing the younger boys away in a ring around the motionless body. The phantom eyes saw Danny as his already purposeful walk gathered itself into a run, toward the brightly-lit end of the block, toward the domain of the grown-ups and deliverance. The remote eyes saw Cesar’s arm hold out the plastic knife to Willie.
“Here Willie. Take your shit! It’s jus’ a stupid plastic toy.”
Willie took the knife and slipped it through a belt loop. But the motion was empty, like a twitch.
“What the fucks-a-matter with you? Hey, Willie.”
Willie began to walk soundlessly away, not answering, not hearing. Those younger boys he passed, each stared and swallowed back, rejecting whatever their reeling minds tried tossing to the lips for utterance. The bodiless sensibility fed only its pictures down to Willie’s head, so he couldn’t hear how everything was crashing down around him. The adult world stirred awake like a monster. Its roars were the sounds of incredulity and grappling understanding: Como? Que cosa? Que que? Como puede ser? Donde? Imposible! They merged from individual eruptions into a roiling avalanche of noise, that carried from a half-block away. The monster was a mob on a quest of discovery that was being led by its inciter. Danny walked back toward the dark end of the block, with Willie’s mother and Bobby’s mother flanking him in their sleep batas. The trio trailed a swelling wake of some twenty persons. As Willie walked absently toward the crowd, those outer eyes of his, that were now drifting up beyond the tops of the trees, took a last look down at their lost body. Willie and 99th Street were growing dimmer and smaller. Just as those eyes blinked “good-bye” forever, abandoning all that they had seen, Willie’s mother looked into her son’s black marbles, but, of course, he wasn’t there.