My words sound impressive to my own ears, but they seem to have the opposite effect on the guards. They step forward, each grab me by the elbow, drag me out of the patient’s room, back through the swinging doors, past the receptionist, through the automatic door, and then deposit — deposit and, indeed, dump — me on the sidewalk outside.
Outside the Crystal
After advanced reading I had study hall, math, and social studies (I was an advanced eighth-grade reader, but a normal eighth grader in every other subject). Then it was lunch. I got in line in the cafeteria with my tray. I got my little carton of milk, my thing of pears swimming in syrup, my two slices of white bread with gravy and chunks of meat on top. I pushed my tray on the metal track toward the cashier. As I did, I looked to the right, toward the cafeteria tables, and saw Harold. He was sitting by himself. There were plenty of reasons why. Harold whinnied instead of laughing, and always at things that weren’t funny. He had never made it even halfway up the rope in gym class. He had a long, skinny neck, and that long, skinny neck housed a huge Adam’s apple. Probably the biggest ever. Probably even bigger than Adam’s, whose apple must have been really big, since it was named after him. And Harold had terrible raisin allergies. He might have been the only person in the world allergic to raisins. I don’t know what else I can say about him except that I was the only person who ever sat with him at lunch. But I just didn’t want to be that person right then. Not when my dad was in the hospital, waiting for me to bring Exley to him. So I left my tray there on the track and walked in the other direction. “Hey, you can’t do that,” the cashier said. But I did. I left the tray there and ran: away from Harold, the cafeteria, the school, until I was running down Washington Street, toward the Crystal.
Washington Street looked completely different than it had the day before. The buildings and the people were still there. But after reading A Fan’s Notes, Washington Street was a different Washington Street. Exley described driving down Washington Street on the way to the hospital when he thought he was having a heart attack. In the chapter, the leaves were turning color and falling, and Exley said that “Washington Street was as lovely as I had ever seen it” and that it “looked like some dream of a place.” He also said he hated the place, but the writing itself said he didn’t. Sometimes how you say things matters more than what you say. And now that I’d read Exley, I could see how pretty Washington Street really was. The leaves had already fallen and had been raked into neat piles along the side of the street. Most of the snow from the night before had melted, but there was a little bit left on top of the piles. It looked like frosting. The trees were bare, their branches waving happily in the wind. I had never seen the sky so deep blue. The sun was so bright that it was everywhere; it seemed to be bouncing back and forth from one hospital’s windows to the others’. But I wouldn’t have noticed all this without Exley’s book. As I walked by the VA hospital, I remembered the time when me and my dad and Mother drove down Washington Street. It was fall then, too. The cigarette smokers were outside the YMCA, the fat women were in a slightly shorter line outside the welfare office, the soldiers were on their cell phones. The trees were bare. The sky was blue then, too, but Mother didn’t seem to notice it. All she noticed was some guy walking around and around the Public Square. We were stopped at a red light. The guy was wearing sweatpants with one sweatpant leg pushed up to the knee, and old cracked leather basketball sneakers without any laces. He walked bent over at the waist, looking at the ground, like he was going to get sick. But he didn’t get sick. He just kept walking like that, around and around the Square. I don’t know where he thought he was walking. It didn’t look like he was out there for the exercise.
Finally, just when the light turned green, the guy stopped — right in the middle of the intersection. He reached down and picked a cigarette butt up off the street and put it between his lips. I could see the little twisted, burnt nub of it sticking out. Then he started patting himself down, turning his sweatpant pockets inside out. He was still in the middle of the street. Mother reached over to the steering wheel and beeped at the guy. He glared at us and for a second I was scared. I pictured him whipping off one of his sneakers and beating our car with it. I figured maybe that’s why he wore them without laces.
Anyway, he didn’t do that. The guy tipped his imaginary hat at us and then kept walking, around and around the Square, as we drove on.
“It’s so depressing,” Mother said.
“It’s not so bad,” my dad said. He said that because he’d read Exley. I didn’t know if Mother had read Exley or not, but if she had, she’d read him wrong. I knew that now. This was how my plan would work; I knew that once I found Exley, he would make my dad feel better, because his book already had.
LIKE I SAID earlier, the Crystal was my dad’s favorite place in Watertown. And it was my dad’s favorite place because it was one of Exley’s. I knew that after reading his book. According to his book, Exley went to the Crystal on Sunday, and only on Sunday. But I didn’t think I could wait a whole six days to look for him there, and I didn’t think my dad could wait that long, either. I know it’s Monday, I told Exley in my head. But please be at the Crystal.
I crossed the Square and walked up to the Crystal, but I didn’t go in right away. Because there was a guy sitting on the sidewalk, his back up against the empty building just to the right of the Crystal. His arms were crossed over his chest the way I’d seen the girls in my class do when they were underdressed. Maybe because he was underdressed, too: just a thin flannel shirt and paint-spattered white jeans with loops at the hips to hang your tools on and unlaced work boots and no hat and no jacket. His eyes were open a little, not enough to tell if he was actually seeing me with them, but enough to see how red and runny they were. There was a green army backpack on the ground next to him, and on the other side of him was a bottle of vodka. Its red label said Popov. The guy had a gray beard and messy gray hair, just like S., the guy at the New Parrot; and just like S., he looked old and used up. He looked like he could have been Exley, in other words. He also looked like he could have been half the guys in Watertown. I was trying to be smart. I was trying to be realistic. I was trying to use my head. And my head was telling me, Miller, remember what happened with S. You can’t just draft the first or second guy you meet and expect him to be Exley. But then I told my head, What if I don’t draft him? What if he volunteers?
“Who the fuck are you supposed to be?” the guy asked after he apparently noticed me standing there, looking at him. His voice was faraway and wet and rattling, like he was talking from the bottom of a deep, phlegmy hole. I didn’t answer him, and so he asked the question several more times, using several of the same class of swear words, the same sort of swear words Exley used in his book. This went on for a while, I don’t know how long exactly, because I was still having the argument with myself, in my head and with my head, and my head was saying, Another drunk bum? Why do you think Exley has to be another drunk bum? Why couldn’t he turn out to be that guy? Then my head pointed at the guy walking past us, a tubby, clean-shaven guy with slicked-back black hair who was wearing a shiny blue suit and obviously worked in a bank. Because Exley would never turn out to be that guy, I said back.