“Oh my gosh.”
“Now it’s done.” I smile, standing up. I lean in and whisper: “It took me like twice as long as any of the others. And I’ll make you an ever better one when I get out—”
She pushes me away. “Yeah, like I want your stupid art.”
“You do.” I lean back. “I saw how you looked at it before.”
“I’ll keep it to make you feel good,” she says. “That’s it.”
“Fine.”
She leans in and kisses my cheek. “Thank you, for real.”
“You’re welcome. Hey, what are you doing tonight?”
“Well . . . I thought I’d be hanging out in the psych hospital. What about you?”
“I’ve got big plans,” I say. “We’ve got a movie coming in—”
“Right, I’m not seeing that stupid movie.”
“I know.” I drop to a whisper. “But when it’s halfway done, do you want to meet in my room?”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. Seriously.”
“Your roommate will be there! He’s always there!”
“Trust me. Come to the room.”
“Are you going to try and make out with me?”
“If you must know? Yes.”
“I appreciate your honesty. We’ll see.”
I give her a hug; she holds the brain map with her hands wrapped around me. “And I already have your number,” I say.
“You don’t get any second chances if you lose it,” she says. “I don’t give that number out twice.”
I take a quick wanting look at her as we pull away from each other and she moves off to the side.
Bobby is next.
“Who’s that behind you?”
“Huh, who do you think?” Johnny answers.
“Come on up together, guys. I’ll do you both at once.”
“Cool,” Bobby says, standing off to the side. Johnny stands next to him and I start drawing them, their shaggy hair and baggy clothing making for great outlines.
“So he’s drawin’ us?” Johnny asks Bobby.
“Be quiet, all right?”
“Where did you guys hang out?” I ask Bobby, not looking up from the paper. “Back when you were garbage-heads?”
“What? You’re gonna draw that?”
“No.” I look up. “I’m just curious. What neighborhood?”
“It was the Lower East Side, but don’t draw the Lower East Side,” says Bobby. “I don’t want to go back there.”
“All right, fair enough. Where do you want to live?”
“On the Upper East Side, with all the rich people,” Bobby answers.
“Huh, me too,” says Johnny.
“Wait, no, you’re getting a guitar,” I say.
“Oh, cool.”
I start on Bobby’s and Johnny’s brains. With Johnny, it’s fun to do a guitar in a street grid—some diagonal streets meeting for the body and then a big wide boulevard for the neck, a park for the head. Then I turn to Bobby. I know the Upper East Side pretty well; it’s in Manhattan and the big thing that it has is Central Park, so I draw that on the inside left of his head. Then I put in the stately grid of rich streets. I know the Guggenheim Museum is somewhere up there; I mark that with an arrow And then I put an “X” right next to it, on a corner where an apartment probably costs $20 million, and write Bobby’s pad.
“Bobby’s pad! That’s right! That’s where I’m headed.” He raises his arms. “Movin’ on up.”
“Enjoy.” I hand them the piece.
“Who gets what?” Johnny asks. “You want us to rip it apart?”
“No, man, we’re supposed to keep it together because we’re friends,” says Bobby. “I’ll make a photocopy.”
“Where’s the photocopy machine in here?”
“There isn’t one! I’ll do it when I get out.”
“Where’s that gonna leave me?”
“With a copy!”
“I don’t want a copy!”
“Would you listen to this guy? Nothing’s good enough for him—”
“Hey, Bobby,” I interrupt. “Any way I can get yours and Johnny’s phone numbers to talk to you after you leave?”
Johnny starts to say something, but Bobby leans in and stops him: “It’s not a good idea, Craig.”
“What? Why?”
He sighs. “I’ve been in and out of this place a lot, right?”
“Yeah.”
“There are good things about this place; I mean, the food is the best around; there are good people here . . . but it’s still not a place to meet people.”
“Why not? I met you guys and you’re really cool!”
“Yeah, well, all the worse, then, when you try to call me or Johnny up and find out that we’ve OD’ed, or been shot, or come back here even worse, or just disappeared.”
“That’s a pretty negative view.”
“I’ve seen it before. You just remember us, okay? We meet in the outside world, it just ruins it. You’ll be embarrassed of me and I . . .” He smiles. “. . . I might be embarrassed of me, too. And I might be embarrassed of you, if you don’t keep your stuff together.”
“Thanks. You sure no numbers?”
Bobby shakes my hand. “If we need to, we’ll meet.”
Johnny shakes my hand. “What he said.”
The last guy in line is Jimmy.
“I tell you, what’d I say? You play those numbers—”
“It’ll come to ya!” I answer.
“It the truth!” He grins.
Ah, Jimmy. What’s in Jimmy’s brain? Chaos. I do up his nearly bald head and shoulders and then start putting the most complicated, unnecessary, wild highways through him from ear to ear. I connect them in intricate spaghetti ramps. In one nexus, five highways meet; I have to erase and redraw the ramps a few times. Then I put in the grid—a grid laid out by a hyperactive designer, with blocks going in all different directions. When Jimmy’s brain map is done it might look the best—a catalog of a schizophrenic mind, but one that works somehow.
“Here you go,” I tell him. He’s sitting in a seat that he took next to me to watch me work.
“It’ll come to ya!” he says, and takes the map. I want him to finally open up, to call me Craig, to tell me that we came in together, but he’s still Jimmy—his vocabulary is still limited.
We sit back in our respective chairs; I doze off a bit. Making art on demand is tiring. But the last thing I see before I go to sleep is Jimmy unfolding his brain map next to me and comparing with Ebony, who says of course hers is a lot prettier. That’s not a bad thing to go to sleep to.
forty-seven
“Craig, are you okay?” Mom asks. I jolt up and I have a momentary seizure that it was all a dream, all of it—the whole Sixth North bit—but then I wonder, where would the dream start? If it were a nightmare, it would have to have started somewhere before I got bad; it would be like a yearlong dream. You don’t have those. And if it were a good dream, that would mean I was still back where it started, leaning over my parents’ toilet or lying in bed listening to my heart. I didn’t need that.
“Yeah! I’m—whoa.” I sit up. They’re all there—Dad, Mom, Sarah.
“Are you forcing yourself to sleep?” Mom asks. “Are you depressed?”
“Are you on drugs?” Sarah asks. “Can you hear me?”
“I was taking a nap! Jeez!”
“Oh, okay. It’s six o’clock.”
“Wow, I was asleep for a while. I was drawing my brain maps for people.”
“Oh, boy,” says Dad. “This doesn’t sound good.”
“What are brain maps?” Sarah asks.
“That’s his art,” says Mom. “This is why he wants to change schools. Making this art makes you happy, right Craig?”