What do you mean?
I mean, if I lie there thinking about the day, or something that’s already happened, I can’t get to sleep. But as soon as I let my brain go off and make stuff up — fantasies or whatever — it shifts into dreams. Like I sort of dream myself to sleep. You?
I don’t know. Olpert looked away, looked back, opened his mouth, closed it, and looked away again.
Something on your mind, Bailie? You’ve been weird all day. Still hungover?
No, it’s just. I was. I don’t know.
Talk.
Okay, said Olpert. Okay, I was just thinking about something. Or I’ve been remembering something. Because of what happened last night, at the bar. With. . Debbie.
Yeah?
It’s a long story sort of.
What else are we going to do, twiddle each other’s dicks?
Olpert recoiled. Ew, no.
Then?
Okay, Olpert said, and sighed deeply, as if to refuel himself for what he was about to say. Then he spoke: When I was in fifth grade, a scientist came to our classroom. In, you know, one of those white coats? A real scientist. Anyway what he did was, and he probably did some other stuff first, some other experiments or told us some facts or something, but then he pulled a container out of his bag, a black medical bag, and he was very careful with it. It was that really cold stuff?
Dry ice.
No. A chemical, not nitrous oxide but. .
Starx waved his hand: whatever.
So he opens the container and the stuff inside is steaming, there’s fog coming out of it. Like a beaker in a mad scientist’s lab on TV, like a TV version of science. Or witchcraft.
Right.
Then he, the scientist, asks if anyone’s got a piece of fruit in their lunch. I put up my hand, and I don’t know why because everyone, right away, all the kids, started going, Olpert’s got fruit, Olpert’s got fruit.
Starx snorted: Fruit.
And the thing, this is the main thing, so pay attention, okay? The main thing is I’ve got a huge crush on the girl I sit behind, who’s in sixth grade, Katie Sharpe. I stare at her back all day long. Not even a crush, Starx. I love her. But back then that one year makes so much difference. Like she’s on the other side of a river and there’s no way across? But she has no idea I’m on the other side of the river, or there even is a river? I love Katie Sharpe and she has no idea I exist. The ground could fall away at my feet and I could get sucked into that river and drown and she’d — she’d have no idea.
Where is she now?
I don’t know, married probably. Probably happy. But anyway, now you know about Katie Sharpe. So she’s sitting in front of me and the scientist pulls out a pair of tongs and starts clacking them and goes, Okay, son, bring that fruit on up here, which was an apple.
Better than a banana.
So I took my apple up to him. And he takes the apple in his tongs and he does it all dramatic, he holds it up, he takes the apple and lifts it for the class to see, which is agonizing, Starx, especially because of Katie, and then he slowly dips the apple into the container where the fog is coming out of. And he holds it in there for a bit. And I’m just standing there the whole time, waiting for my apple back. Then he pulls the apple out.
How’d it look?
Maybe a bit white but otherwise the same. Then the scientist pulls a hammer, a little reflex hammer, out of his bag and hands it to me, and holds the apple in the tongs and he tells me to tap the apple with the hammer. So I do.
Hard?
No, regular. And it shatters! Like it’s made of glass the thing breaks into little pieces all over the place — my apple! And I don’t even hit it hard, just a little tap, and it just. . It explodes. Everyone cheered. I remember that, how everyone clapped and I rushed to sit down, even Katie was clapping. I was so humiliated. All I could think was, that was my apple, that was my apple. I felt stupid and, I don’t know. . small.
Small. Yeah.
And a second or two went by, and I can feel it coming, but instead of going to the bathroom I open my desk and put my head inside, and then, can you guess?
No.
I puked, said Olpert. Splash, splash, splash, all inside my desk. And the room went really quiet and I know everyone’s looking at me, and then Katie says, Are you okay, Olpert — and that’s just too much. I run. I run, Starx, trailing puke through the room and down the hallway, I run out the school doors and keep running until I get to Bay Junction, and I ride the ferry across the Cove, and then run across the Islet, all the way home. My grandpa’s out front raking leaves and he sees me, but he doesn’t say anything. So I lie down on the lawn and tell him to bury me in leaves. And he does. He just piles them on top of me. It’s cool in the leaves, peaceful. I don’t remember much else after that.
AS THE POTLUCK wound down, to avoid the towers of stew-crusted dishes Debbie’s friends put together an outfit to camouflage her in Whitehall. A game of dress-up: obediently she tried on an assortment of coats and blazers. Masks. A handkerchief tied around her face in the manner of bandits. And at last in the very back of the hall closet someone found a coal-black anorak, and they put it on and pulled up the hood and Debbie’s face disappeared and everyone agreed: perfect.
Her last-ditch attempts to get them to come along were shrugged off — No, this is your thing, Tell us how it went, Just be safe — and Debbie hugged each one of them long and hard, her people, her community, she loved them, and they wished her well and she stepped out onto the street and the door closed behind her and she stood breathing the chilly night air of Bebrog for a quiet, still moment.
She was tired, the whole night had been tiring. When she’d arrived the potluck’s hosts had made her tour their house, she hadn’t been for a while, they’d amassed a small collection of Mr. Ademus originals. Aren’t they great, she was told, and she had to agree, despite visions of Adine shaking her head in dismay and disgust. The whole night, really, she’d been thinking of Adine.
Throughout dinner the way they’d parted nagged her, she felt the tug of it from across town. What if now she just went home? No, she’d go home after: Adine would be there, she’d always be there, goggled and hermitically waiting, they’d make jokes and/or love, it’d be as if the fight never happened.
Debbie walked to Greenwood Station, transferred at City Centre, and Yellowlined past her stop at Knock Street and up into the Zone. In Blackacres she emerged again into the cold still night, looked north up F Street, back south — a fifteen-minute walk home. But she needed to see. So she flipped the hood of the anorak and crossed into Whitehall, down the murky serviceways to the silos and, finally, underground.
She’d forgotten a flashlight, had to fumble into the tunnel toward that ghastly screaming at its end, a factory of screaming down there in the dark. Along she went, bracing herself — and then with a sudden roar the cavern opened up, a formless howling washed over her, and she stared into the blackness and had to resist the urge to flee.
Noise was everywhere, shrieking, blistering, industrial, the grind and wail of some ruined machine. It stabbed into her ears and buzzed through her face, tingled down her limbs and collected throbbing in her hands and feet. Her skin seemed to surge with it, to expand and contract as though it were an organism apart from her, breathing. But this wasn’t just noise, it was some sort of human music — she had to think of it as music.
As she might enter some black and churning ocean, Debbie stepped between two towers of electronics into the cipher. And here were people. Someone pushed against her, something electric zipped up her arm. Her instinct was to pull away but the person pressed closer. She waited tensely while their bodies touched, her skin humming. And then this person, whoever it was, released and drifted off into the crowd.