Chapter 2: Cause: Unknown

The county building on Fennimore had been a school before it was a clinic, and it still had the hallways for it. Six steps with nothing on either side of him before the cane found a wall. The water fountains were set low, at kid height, so the cane found them at the shin and not the hip.

Dana walked on his left with her purse flat against her forearm. Toby came behind, and the glasses case knocked against his leg every other step until he switched hands.

“Voss,” Dana said at the desk. “V-o-s-s. I’m the guardian. Insurance is the same as last time.”

The woman typed. Toby sat down two chairs over and swung his legs and let one sneaker squeak on the floor until Dana said his name, and then he stopped.

There was a television on the wall with the sound off. Adrian could hear the hum of it and nothing else.

“Adrian Voss?” the nurse said, and Dana was already standing.

Two flights. At the end of the hall a door with a slow closer on it, and Kessel’s voice saying come in before Adrian knocked.

The office smelled like floor wax and coffee and, under that, dirt. There was a plant somewhere that had died and not been taken out.

“Take the chair. Sorry. It’s still warm. The gentleman before you sat in it for forty minutes and mostly cried. You don’t have to do that.”

Adrian sat. He put the cane against the arm of the chair where he could find it without reaching.

“Last Thursday,” Kessel said, “I sat in your bedroom and told you we were two guys in a hot room and that nothing went anywhere it shouldn’t. I meant it then. I mean it now.”

“All right.”

“This is the annual. The annual has a form, and the form has a line, and my boss reads the line, and the district reads the line, and Thursday morning a woman from the high school is going to read the line.” Paper went down on paper. “I’m not asking you to convince me. I’m asking you to say it once while I’m holding a pen.”

“Fine.”

“Start with the roof.”

He had told it Thursday, and it had come out of him in pieces, with the fan going and a pan banging around downstairs. Now he told it in five sentences, flat, the way he would have read a name off a list. The porch roof of the old house. Summer, eleven at night, still warm. A book of moons open on the shingles next to him. A shape in a crater that stood up. Light from one rim of the crater to the other, and then no light, and then he was lying on the shingles with his eyes open and nothing coming in.

Kessel didn’t write.

“That’s shorter than Thursday.”

“It’s the same.”

“You said six wings. You said it was standing on something.”

“It was standing in the middle of a crater,” Adrian said. “The big ones have a peak in the middle. It was on the peak.”

“Which crater.”

“Tycho.”

The pen had stopped. Adrian could hear it not writing.

“How far away is the moon, Adrian.”

“Two hundred thirty-nine thousand miles. Give or take.”

“And it was standing on a mountain in the middle of that, with its head up.”

“It had its head up. It was looking at the earth.”

“At the earth.”

“Like a man on a hill looking down at a house.”

Kessel breathed out through his nose. It was a thing he did instead of saying something.

“Why,” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“It was watching the whole planet and you didn’t ask it why.”

“I was seven,” Adrian said.

“It wasn’t me seeing it,” he said then. “Everybody gets that part wrong. I looked up and it was already looking. That’s the whole thing. There wasn’t any distance in it at all, and then there was nothing but distance, and I was on the roof and I couldn’t see the street.”

“It saw you.”

“Yes.”

“You know how that sounds.”

“I know.”

Kessel’s chair took his weight again. “There are pictures,” he said. “Not from a backyard telescope. From things we put up there. You can see the tracks. You can count the rocks in a field. If there was something standing on Tycho with a mile of light coming off it, one of those pictures would have a second sun in it.”

“Maybe it doesn’t want to be noticed.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” Adrian said. “It’s not.”

The chair went back. Kessel crossed the room — the window was on the far side, over the parking deck, and the blinds knocked once against the frame — and came back and sat down.

“It’s not possible,” he said.

“That’s what I said.”

“No, I mean—” He stopped. “Go on.”

“Do you know what’s on the moon?”

“Rocks. Dust. A flag.”

“I don’t mean the list. Do you know it.” Adrian turned his head. “There’s a book that says we’ve mapped about a fifth of that thing up close. A fifth. The rest is photographs from a long way off, and the photographs have had the same shadows in them for fifty years.”

Kessel said nothing for a while.

“It’s not possible,” he said again. He said it toward the desk and not toward Adrian, and he didn’t seem to know he’d said it.

Adrian heard him turn pages.

“Here’s the part I can’t get past,” Kessel said. “Ten years, and the best anybody ever wrote down was two words.”

He turned the file around and pushed it across, and then, because it cost him nothing, pushed it the rest of the way.

Adrian’s thumb found the edge of the page. Three-quarters down, past the dates and the discharge and the school’s name, a line with a colon on it and a lot of white paper after.

Cause: unknown.

He could feel the dent where somebody’s pen had pressed too hard, years ago.

“Two words,” Kessel said. “Ten years.”

“Three if you count the colon.”

“Don’t.” But he was almost smiling, and then he wasn’t. “You know what I’ve got in this building. I’ve got a man on the east wing who will tell you, hands folded, no blinking, that he used to sing country music and he died in a hotel in Cleveland in 1979 and he’s come back to finish the tour. He’s got a set list.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’ve got another one who stood up against the wall all night because he believed he was a coat rack. We had to take the hook out of his room. He was very upset about the hook.”

“And the one who’s married to every woman in the dayroom,” Adrian said.

Kessel stopped.

“He picks the new one,” Adrian said. “He tells her he’s been looking for her his whole life and he gets her to hold his hand.”

“You’ve heard that one.”

“I’ve heard all of them.”

“Right,” Kessel said. He put the pen down and left it down. “Then you know the rule.”

“Tell me the rule.”

“The more it sounds like it makes sense, the worse off the man is. That’s it. That’s everything I know, and I’ve got the certificate on the wall behind me where I can’t see it.” His chair creaked. “The ones who yell at the wall are fine, relatively. It’s the ones who explain it well.”

“I explained it well,” Adrian said.

“You explained it like a man who’s done it before.”

The printer downstairs stopped. Somewhere in the building a door closed hard enough to come through the floor.

“None of that’s true,” Adrian said.

“Mm.”

“I was seven and I fell off the roof.” He kept his voice flat and pleasant and a little tired, the way you tell somebody about a bad day at work. “It’s a flat roof. I rolled in my sleep and I went off the edge and I landed on the bricks by the back step. Nine feet, and I was small. I hit the back of my head. There’s a scar. It’s in the file, somebody measured it in centimeters.”

“Go on.”

“The eyes, I don’t know. A nerve went. The doctors said there’s a nerve that runs back from the eyes and if you hit the back of your head hard enough it can go, and then there’s nothing wrong with the eyes at all. That’s what they wrote. Nobody ever argued about it.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“About nine hundred times.”

“Yeah,” Kessel said slowly. He picked the pen up. “Yeah.”

He wrote for a while. Something rustled, and he checked a box, and checked another one.

“All right,” he said. “Stable. No acute concern. Return to school per plan.” The pen clicked. “One other thing. Twelve hundred kids in a building is different from twelve.”

“I know.”

“If it gets bad, you don’t have to wait a year for me. You call the office, you say you want the review moved up, and they move it.”

“Okay.”

“You won’t.”

“Probably not.”

Kessel stood and put out his hand, and Adrian found it. Dry palm, a callus on the second finger where a pen sat.

“For what it’s worth,” Kessel said, “I’d rather sign this one than the other one.”

“The other one being what?”

“The one where I write it down. If I write it, it goes in the file, and the file goes to the district with everything else in it, and Thursday stops being a meeting about a folder.” He let go. “And they’d move you, and I wouldn’t be in the room. So.”

“So.”

“So go be a sophomore,” Kessel said. “Don’t make me regret it before Christmas.”

The door had a slow closer on it and took its time.

Adrian stood in the corridor with his back against the wall and the smile came off his face all at once, the way a sticker comes off glass, leaving the glue.

He counted to three. Floor wax. Somebody’s coffee. The printer starting up again downstairs.

“Delusions,” he said, to the wall.

Then he picked up the cane and went down the hall.

He heard Dana catch Kessel at the stairs from twenty feet away, because she had the voice on that she used when she was being polite with her whole body and none of it was real.

“Doctor. Doctor — I’m sorry. Just one thing.”

“Ms. Whitlock.”

“Is he all right? Really. Not the form.”

There was a pause. Adrian kept walking, slow, cane out.

“He’s doing better than the file would make you think,” Kessel said. “That’s not me being kind. That’s what I wrote.”

“Because he says he can see now.”

“Because he sat in a chair and answered questions for forty minutes and he wants to go back to school,” Kessel said. “That’s what better looks like. It isn’t a light going on.”

“All right,” Dana said, and her voice had gone down half a step. “All right. Thank you. Listen — we eat at six-thirty, and I made too much, honestly. It’s already too much for three people and it’d save me from eating it Thursday. It’s nothing fancy.”

“I’ve got two more this afternoon and then rounds, or I’d take you up on it.”

“Some other time.”

“Some other time.”

The door at the bottom of the stairs let in the parking lot and the heat, and then Dana’s hand was on his shoulder, warm through his shirt.

“Come on, baby. Car.”

In the lot Toby walked ahead of them and didn’t swing the case. He squeezed it, and the hinge squeaked twice.

The table was under the window with the plastic cloth on it, cold where it hung off the edge, raised in a pattern under his wrist.

Four chairs. Three place settings. The laundry basket had been on the fourth chair since Sunday and nobody moved it.

Dana put the plate down in the middle and slid them off the spatula one at a time, and he counted four. Then she sat and rolled her shoulder, once forward, once back.

“Elbows,” she said. “Both hands.”

“Some of the macaroni’s burnt.”

“Some of it’s extra flavor. Eat.”

Scrap came out from under the table, low and hopeful, nails on the linoleum. He put his head on Adrian’s knee, and Adrian put a hand on him and felt the two bald patches on his hips that he was touchy about.

Then he took the smallest chop off the plate and put it in Toby’s bowl.

“Give him the bone.”

Toby didn’t say anything. He picked the chop up by the bone end and bit. Nobody at that table thanked anybody for food.

“Green beans,” Dana said. “Toby.”

“I’m eating them.”

“You’re moving them around.”

“I’m eating them in a minute.”

“You’ve been eating them in a minute since you were six.”

The window was open. Three houses down somebody was either rebuilding an engine or taking one apart. The fan on the counter turned its head left, right, left.

Toby put the bone on the floor and Scrap took it and went under the table with it, and Toby wiped his fingers on his shorts.

“Ade. For real though.”

“For real what.”

“Your eyes. Are they like—” He moved his hand in a circle. Dana did the same thing with her hand, and Adrian had noticed it, and had said nothing about it. “Are they fixed?”

“I can see,” Adrian said. “In here I can open them a couple of seconds and it’s fine. In a room with a lamp I get maybe three and then it’s like somebody’s driving nails. Outside in the sun, not even one.”

“So they’re not fixed.”

“It’s a lot better. The doctor says nerve stuff comes back slow. A few more weeks.”

“A few more weeks and the scarf comes off?”

“A few more weeks and it comes off.”

He said it easily and he believed it while he said it. Then behind the house a car came out of the lot, tires on gravel, and he heard it and turned his head away and shut his eyes, the way you do, and then he said, “More macaroni. Pass it.”

Dana was cutting a chop into pieces she wouldn’t finish. Toby was watching the dog. Nobody said anything about it.

“You know what I got,” Toby said, and the case came up onto the table and opened with both thumbs.

Adrian held out his hand and got one of them. Metal at the corners. A rivet under his thumb. The lens cold and thick and not quite flat.

“I got the cans,” Toby said, “and I did the Hendersons’ grass all summer, both yards, and Mr. Henderson gave me ten for it and it took forever.”

“How much did they cost?”

“Not telling.”

“Toby.”

“Thirteen dollars at the flea market,” Toby said, “and they’re real Ray-Bans, the guy said, and he took a dollar off because of the scratch.”

“Can’t wear them yet.”

“I know.”

“The cloth’s better. I know it looks like it should be the other way around. The cloth goes all the way around. Glasses let light in at the sides.”

“I know,” Toby said, quieter. The case turned over in his hands. “I just thought, when the scarf comes off, you’d have something.”

“It’s great.”

“You don’t have to say that.”

“It’s great,” Adrian said again, and he put the bone down and found Toby’s arm and gave it a shove. “When this is off I’ll wear them every day. And we’ll go to the mall, and I’ll get you a pair, and we’ll both look like assholes.”

“Language,” Dana said, from the sink.

“You look like an asshole for a week and then it’s just how you look,” Toby said.

“One week. That’s the rule.”

“I’ll wear them to school.”

“Yeah,” Adrian said. “Me too.”

Dana brought the folder back from the counter and put it down and sat.

“All right,” she said. “It’s done, so let’s have it out. The district signed off. It came Saturday and I didn’t say anything until I had all of it.”

“So?” Toby said.

“So Thursday morning there’s a meeting. Nine. Somebody from the high school, somebody from the district, and me.” She opened it. “It says tenth grade.”

“I know what it says.”

“You should be a junior.”

“I’ll be a junior next year.”

“Mm,” Dana said, which was not agreement. Paper came out of the folder and went down flat on the table. “It’s different there. There’s eleven hundred of them and the halls run two ways and somebody’s always got a radio on. You won’t have a woman sitting with you. You won’t have a room to go to.”

“I know.”

“And I’m on second shift. If something happens at ten in the morning I’m at the plant with brine on my boots and it’s forty minutes before I’m even in the car.”

“I know.”

“Then there’s the other thing,” she said, and stopped, and started again. “You were little. And I don’t know how much of that was the school and how much was—”

“None of it was the school.”

The fan turned. Down the street the engine and the compressor quit at the same time and the crickets got loud.

“It’s the schedule,” Adrian said. “That’s all it is. Chemistry, algebra two, Spanish. The same six periods as everybody else in that building, with the same teacher marking the same paper. Not three periods down the hall in a room with a beanbag in it and a certificate at the end that says I’m employable.”

“All it is,” Dana said.

“All it is.”

“You know I’d just keep you.”

“I know.”

“I’m serious. I’d keep you. You wouldn’t be the first man in this family I’ve fed for nothing.”

Adrian laughed the way she wanted him to laugh, and she found a pen in her purse, and it took her a while to get it started, and then it went down on the paper.

For a while after that nobody said anything and the refrigerator did its noise.

Then she reached over and squeezed his wrist hard enough to hurt.

“Listen to me. If it goes sideways. If they hand you a piece of paper that says you should go back to—”

“Then I come back.”

“Then you come back and you eat,” Dana said. “I don’t care what the paper says. I’ve got a can of elbows and a boy who’s home.”

“I could get a job,” Toby said, from the other side of the table, too loud, and he didn’t take it back. “I’m not even kidding. I could do the Hendersons’ for real. Like a real account, not just the grass. If it was ever — I could help.”

Adrian’s shoulders went, once, and his mouth shut, and then it opened into a smile and he shook his head, once, firmly, and didn’t say anything at all.

“Eat,” Dana said. “Both of you. The macaroni’s not getting better.”

He did the dishes. He took the trash out. He waited out the whole evening, and at a quarter past ten the house ran down the way houses do. Dana’s alarm set for a quarter to five. Toby’s console clicking off. The third stair twice. The dog’s claws on the boards and then the dog’s sigh.

He closed his bedroom door.

The window over the bed stuck the way it always stuck, and he hit it with the heel of his hand and it came up and let in the crickets and the cut grass going damp. One leg out onto the porch roof, and he found the flat part with his foot, and then the other leg, and then he was sitting on the warm shingles with his knees up.

He unwound the cloth. Four turns. It pooled in his lap.

The moon was up there somewhere. It had been up there for ten years and it had done nothing in all of that time, and he sat with his face turned up and his eyes shut and gave it a while anyway.

The streetlight at the end of the block went out. He heard the buzz quit. It did that every summer, some timer in it or some wire, and it stayed out for a count of nine, and then it came back with a buzz he could feel in his teeth.

He counted.

It came back on at twelve.

He sat a moment longer. Then he wound the cloth around his head, four turns, and it took him three tries to get the knot the way he liked it. He swung himself back through the window, and pulled it down, and turned the latch.