At precisely this time Michelangelo, old and misanthropic, embittered by history, returned to the Sistine Chapel, now free of San-gallo's sandbagging, to add to his ceiling's Creation a transforming footnote: the horrifying Last Judgment, that most pitiless work in Western art…
(Crayola flowers, houses, their chimneys curly with Prussian-blue smoke, some simple words, a girl's stick face, a fighter airplane spewing pudgy, rainbow caterpillars of bullets …)
Well, yes: of course. Through the arabesques of innocence's syllogisms, the conclusion grows obvious to him. Her insight shines as brightly as the pool of early reader flashlight under the covers at night. Kraft backtracks through the steps of her logic. And she has it weirdly right. Still adept, Joy infers what he has missed. The codger in the Dodger cap is not a little boy propelled into a sensationally aged body. Exactly the reverse. The new kid on the block is the Laotian myth-equivalent of Methuselah, a spirit older than entire generations who perversely refuses to detach himself from boyhood.
The explanation she comes up with is simpler, closer to the bone. A child shriveling from the husk inward still stays green in the core. She asks the boy's name. Kraft tells her, as if he, like Linda, has known the tag all along. He sees her roll the clinical syllables around on her tongue. She tries the name out loud: "Nicolino." Beyond doubt, one of the lost boys. Fell out of the perambulator in Kensington Gardens. Corroded by time in outward stuff, while remaining essentially untouched. All children, except one, grow up. I've seen him; he's just flown in the window of the ward.
"That book you gave me…" He knows what she struggles to protest: every word of it, the literal, documentary truth.
Kraft considers giving her Hutchinson-Gilford disease to add to the pile of homework assignments she keeps by the side of her bed. Prrogeria's Pan, the ward's most fantastic invalid ever, might outdo all the study texts she has so meticulously assembled. The boy who never grew up: brutal practicality leaves her no fiercer a fairy tale. Joy will need myth much more outrageous — absurdly, magically more — to live through the mystery ahead of her.
She will need to believe far worse, and wilder. Kraft can't even compose faith's prerequisite list, so deeply has measurement encroached on his own credence. She will need to hope that escalating pain has some surprise, hidden by design until the redeeming twist. She will have to keep believing that the physician she adores is not poisoning her for pleasure with sloe nausea fizzes and chemo chasers. Let her believe. Let her escape the exam constraints this once, buy in, subscribe to any prognostic faith that helps her account for the nursery damned. Believe any transparency at all rather than come to the one unskirtable truth Kraft himself would still deny if he could: that all children will grow up, except this believing one.
And forty-eight hours suffice to prove that her take on the new boy is in every way superior to Kraft's own. Nicolino is not a child; he is a phenomenon, a hell-raiser of perverse proportions impossible for anyone under retirement age on what Linda still insists on calling God's earth to achieve. He moves in with both overnight bags blazing, and before the week is out, he not only owns the ward, he's backdated the deed. After ten days, he's ruling the rotting, disease-infested roost as if that's the way things have been since time out of mind.
Joy is right: this is no geriatric boy. He's an incontestable old-timer, hanging on to the sandlot by his gnarled claws. Linda's not the only one to get solicited. The better part — and Kraft has to admire the squib's taste — of the female staff assembles with bewildered frequency at the ward nurses' station comparing incredulities. Did that kid say what I think he said?
On rounds, Kraft himself hears the precocious lecher come on to Suzi Banks, the Colostomy Girl. Asks to see the lump under her dress. And virtually in the same breath, the mini-mogul hits up on Joleene Weeks, whose response to acute lymphatic havoc has been to drift into a kind of self-induced autism. "You're cute," he tells her. "When did you first do it?"
"Do what?" the girl manages, her first, faltering verbal steps independent of the Chatty Cathy in more than a week.
"Coy one, are we? I like that in a woman. 'Still waters run deep,' and like that."
Still waters? Kraft's pretty sure that catch phrase died out with democracy in America. Where the hell does this kid come from? Kraft tries asking, with a kind of verbal head-pat, in their first conversational exchange. So, uh, you're not from around these parts, are you? Nico snaps at him, "Right down the street. Read the chart, Dr. Killdeer."
Time-scrambled sass, and weirder than it is rude. Who taught this little Spanky to speak? The diction instructor is revealed after a few days when the little old guy produces, from out of nowhere, several gross of comics — a major-league library of them. Complete, contiguous series span the whole illustrated spectrum from classic demigods down to diluted, contemporary, adolescent chelonians. The collection incorporates everything from old Arthropodmen and Vigilante Patrols to Tender Traumas, Tales from Beyond Terrors, strips starring inflatable bubble-figures, Masterplots Illustrated^ (including four-color, frame formats of The Ambassadors and The Magic Mountain), the adventures of Arnie and pal Jimjam (at a ridiculously recently integrated Brookvale High), Green Stingers, Dark Cowls, cartoon anthro rats, cats, and wombats — all the perennials, and some tides so obscure they barely lasted through single numbers, not to mention a European department complete with a Gallic imperial pocket of resistance, two Fleming kids constantly getting one another into big-time trouble, and a cowlicked cosmopolitan news reporter somewhere between fifteen and a hundred fifty years old.
Nico unpacks not only this Rabelaisian bibliotheque, but also a thick, loosely bound Blue Book of his own devising that accompanies the collection. In it, he has carefully cross-listed, in the block letter capitals of a spastic on a muscle stimulant, every single issue number, its publisher, date, and point of acquisition, a synopsis of the adventure, and, of course, the volume's fair resale price. The pricing scheme has only one foot, size 2½, in the realm of supply and demand. For instance, an old Cosmic Sentinel scarce enough to command the bulk of an upper-middle-class ten-year-old's annual allowance even back when Kraft was doing his own international assets trading costs roughly the same as a buck-a-bushel dentist's office throwaway.
His market yardstick has nothing to do with peddlable rarity. It's something altogether different — use value, readability, the catalyzing spark, or some other subjective look under the hood. Whatever his pricing formula, Nicolino imposes mercantile order upon the naive economic anarchy of the pede department. Every item in his comic inventory is available for open circulation, but only after the book value has been coughed up.
He establishes a cashless barter system. "Gotta watch it or those Fed creeps'll be on our cases." Other kids' comics, from parental care packages once shared out freely, are kicked into the kitty according to a rigorous system of swapped debits and credits. He'll take any currency: broken hand-held LCD games, Mars bars (unwrapped are half value), singing rings — anything with resale potential. Nico introduces new commodity wrinkles from day to day, producing, by spontaneous generation, bulk shipments of cinnamon-soaked toothpicks, iridescent kaleidoscope disks, or silly sand. Rooms of the demoralized listless soon start to hum with the biggest trading racket since Green Stamps. He is utterly scrupulous; he will not skim or scalp. If a Fantastic Forces returns to his pool in roughly initial condition, it will earn back its original price or the equivalent in, say, multicolored water-pistol pens. Yet he's dead firm on the rates of exchange. He's not going to trade a good Saviors of the Universe for anything less than two middleweight ghost yarns plus a knock-off heartthrobber. In this manner his catalog steadily grows. But somehow, so do the smaller satellite stockpiles of his trading partners. In a form of perpetual motion, the ward's magic cottage industries begin to generate wealth.