Just as quickly, Caidin realized how dumb it was to think so, when it was at school that Juaco had been exposed.
“Cleo’s part of our family. Your friend has a family. Now where’s the Porsche?”
“I got high on salvia and flipped it.”
“We need it in the garage!”
“Most likely it’s already at a garage. After I go surfing, I’ll call around.”
Juaco was up and putting on his shoes. “We’re taking the Volvo,” Caidin told him. “We’ll meet up with my folks in Austin.”
“Dude. Is that even your car?”
“No, it’s my girlfriend’s. Come on.”
Juaco crossed the room, turned to study Caidin. “Best of luck,” he said, and he headed for the stairs.
Caidin followed him down. “I mean, where else would you go? San Salvador?”
“Not to hurt your feelings, but I’d rather live in Fallujah than stay with your folks.”
Juaco had reached the landing. Behind him, Caidin grasped for any threat or promise that would stop him from exiting into the gale. He thought Juaco must have seen what unreturned love had done to Milo, and yesterday’s kiss was his revenge. It was a plan so elegantly cruel that Caidin wondered what percentile Juaco had scored on the IQ test. Separate from his withering heart was a sudden dread that his parents’ maid, Consuela, might be approaching the door as Juaco opened it. She wasn’t. He walked out, and dwindled into the shower of lantana flowers and air plants. What a stupid thing to have feared. So was the entire storm. Rita could destroy Houston for all Caidin cared, because aside from this, nothing was ever going to go wrong.
GAINLINESS
VICTOR WAS A PECULIAR BOY, said his parents’ few friends, an assessment that irked Victor even as he suspected it was correct. Take his cage dream. Lying awake nights, he fancied himself shackled to a wall beside the home-schooled boys from across the road. A hook-nosed villain would poke him and those boys with a pitchfork, naked. If he felt himself falling asleep during this fantasy, he pressed ice to his face to sustain the scene. What was this if not peculiar? He carried needle-nose pliers in his pocket for extracting snot without touching it. Journeys of any length had to begin on his left foot. He peed sitting down. After brushing his teeth he swallowed the toothpaste, risky as that might be, because he’d always done it that way.
In 1985, when Victor was seven, a friend of his mother’s came to visit Yazoo City. This spice-scented, easy-mannered fellow, who had the mellifluous name of Micah, said to Victor, “You’re trouble.”
“Don’t,” said Victor’s mother, but Micah went on: “It’s true. When you’re older, Victor, you’ll be a truckload of trouble.”
Something stirred in Victor to hear it, but he kept quiet. Later, after Micah had gone, Victor found his mother weeping in the kitchen. “I won’t be trouble,” he said to her.
“Micah’s telling people bye is why I’m crying.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I mean he’s sick.”
“I’m sorry,” Victor could have replied, or “Why,” but instead he said, “Micah’s a name I wouldn’t hate.”
“You can change your name when you’re grown.” They’d been through this already. To base his favor on the sound of names was another quirk of Victor’s. If he were, say, a Micah, hearing tell of a Victor, he would hate that boy’s guts — not because Victor meant winner but because the name’s ugly asymmetry suggested an ungainly boy. It disappointed his parents, Mary and Ralph, for him to feel this way. But theirs were neutral names. Victor didn’t adore one or hate the other, the way he did with Albert and Sievert Alfsson across the road.
Albert and Sievert were twins with identically curly manes of yellow hair, but from Victor’s bedroom window perch he could distinguish them readily. Albert was chubby, for one, but more importantly Victor’s grandfather had been an Albert. The name connoted decrepitude, unsightliness. He’d never known a Sievert, on the other hand. Sievert — impish, lithe, fresh — was the only twin Victor yearned to touch. If asked what sounded nice about the boy’s name, he couldn’t have answered. Why were bluebirds pretty? Self-evident. The problem started when Sievert quit coming outside.
For months he showed up only in the back of the Alfssons’ station wagon as Mrs. Alfsson drove out of the garage. Out his window Victor would watch roly-poly Albert bouncing alone on a pogo stick, thousands of times in a row.
“Is Micah dead yet?” he asked his mother one day, thinking that in her grief she might rename him after her late friend.
“I’m sick of your crap, Victor,” she replied, upsetting him so much that he quit breathing. His skin tingled, his sight blackened, and he passed out cold. He awoke to find Mary pressing a cold cloth to his forehead.
“Thank God,” she said, as if she’d solved the problem and not caused it.
Lying there under her pressed washcloth, Victor said, “Where am I?” He wanted to freak her out, because he was hurt by the betrayal of her words. It was more than their sentiment — it was that crap, ugly in both sound and meaning, smack at the end of a blame. A voiceless bilabial stop, as vexing as the voiceless velar plosive at the end of his father’s favorite word. Although he couldn’t analyze consonants that way yet, he knew what he didn’t like. He breathed more quickly, aware of sucking in air, of being a breathing body. When his lungs filled up, would he remember to quit? Could he turn things around? Maybe not. His skin tingled, his sight vanished. Again he was gone.
After a dozen more such spells Ralph suggested specialists, like a pediatric cardiologist, whereas Mary suggested that Victor buck up. “He needs to act like a grown-up,” she said to Ralph, who went behind Mary’s back to find a shrink named Dolf Pappadopolous.
“I doubt your son will ever feel a normal range of emotions,” said Dr. Pappadopolous to Ralph as Victor sat between them. “This will worsen at puberty. His grasp of metaphor will be impeded, if it develops at all.”
“What kind of name is your name?” said Victor, phrasing the query so as not to utter any of its horrid mishmash.
“Greek and German. You probably have not heard of a Dolf, but go to West Germany, you will meet more.” Dr. Pappadopolous might as well have said, “Dunk your head in the toilet, you will eat a turd.” Victor’s head grew light again, his vision clouded. He put a hand out to steady himself.
“He does it again, you see? Makes himself faint? You or I could decide not to, but that is the nature of the dilemma.”
If he was fainting on purpose, Victor thought, he should faint again now. If some illness was causing his problem, he should remain awake. Which action would prove this odious man wrong? He breathed sharply in and out, considering the question. Before he could choose, his lungs ballooned so full of air that he panicked again and it was too late already. He awakened on the table as Ralph pleaded, “Son?”
Victor didn’t mean to reply with silence. He just didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t the names themselves so much as how no one, not even Ralph, perceived why Victor responded negatively. The answer wasn’t as simple as a need for aesthetic bliss. In his dungeon dream the sole color was the dull gray of concrete, of cinder blocks, of skin gone sallow in lantern light. There wasn’t electricity. It wasn’t the 1980s above that cellar maze, but a timeless realm without paved roads or child safety laws. The master of a lush, unspoiled land had banished each ugly thing underground, where Victor sat chained to a ball. How could he explain to his anxious father that he didn’t miss the sun? In an airy meadow overhead, wisps danced in the light, while Victor basked in the well-being he drew from knowing that all was neatly fenced off by the planet’s curve: grandeur above, everything else below.