Friends, Romans...
Looking up, he saw the shimmery surface of the water, and beyond that, the dark figure with the ceiling light behind his head, making a halo.
Maybe that's what God looks like, he thought.
Sometimes he could almost see through things. Sometimes things seemed to shimmer, like the water, and he could see beyond them, to some shapeless otherness he could never quite remember. Was he dreaming when he saw these things? Was it remembering?
Remembering...
Friends and Romans and countrymen and ears and... something something something, not to praise him.
Quicksilver bubbles rose toward the looming, dark face. Strong hands on his shoulders. Strong, loving hands, good hands. I only want the best for you, Dodger.
It felt good to lie here. It was warm and it was safe and it was wet, and this is what a baby must feel like in its mommy's tummy.
His heart was pounding louder now. It wasn't fear. He just needed some air, that was all. Babies in their mommies' tummies didn't need air. But once you took that first breath, you sort of got used to it, air got to be something you needed.
Friends Romans lend me your praise him.
A big burst of air broke free and he began to struggle. He didn't want to, he'd been so good, so good so far, but his arms and his legs just wanted to move, and his lungs ached for a sweet breath of air. His small naked shoulders squirmed under the big hands, the good hands. He was so ashamed of himself. Maybe he should just take a big breath of water. Maybe he could learn to breathe water again, since he couldn't seem to learn the important things.
He'd heard it three times now. What was wrong with him, that he couldn't remember after hearing it three times?
It wasn't so bright now. Things were getting dim around the edges. The last of his air leaked from his nose, making hardly any sound at all.
And he had it. He became still as a stone and felt it all burst up from whatever depths it had fallen to when he lost it, and it flowed through his mind and his body, and he was nodding frantically as things got darker and darker.
He was pulled into the air and made a tremendous croaking sound as he filled his lungs and began to spew it out, like vomit.
"Frens romans countrymen lend me yerrears I come to, come to, come to bury Zeezer not t'praze'm," all the air was gone again, so he gasped in another breath, "lives after dem d'good 'soft enter'd with their bones." Pause. Breath. "The noble Brutes has tol' you Zeezer was... was..."
He breathed in and out frantically, staring down at the water, at his legs beneath the water, at his penis.
"Ambitious." The voice came from above. He was flooded with gratitude and love. Everything was going to be all right.
"...was 'bitious if it were so it were a grievious fault and—"
"Grievous."
"Huh?" He looked up into Father's face, searching for signs of anger. "Isn't that what I said?"
"Grie-vous," the man intoned. He had a wonderful voice. It filled the small room. It made the water vibrate. "Grie-vous," he boomed again. Then he wrinkled his nose and upper lip and made his voice nasal, tinny, ridiculous. "You said gree-vee-ous. Where did you learn that?"
"I think Gideon Peppy said it."
"I think so, too. No more television for you, young man, especially the Peppy Show. That man is single-handedly destroying the language."
The man lifted his son from the bathwater and set him on the mat. He wrapped him in a big fluffy white towel that said THARSIS HYATT on it. All their towels had the names of hotels on them.
"Now, take it again, from 'it were a grievous fault, and...' "
"...and grievi—and grievously hath Zeezer answer'd it. The boy continued through Marc Antony's funeral oration, happy as a kitten with a bowl of cream, stumbling only over "Lupercal" and "coffers." As he spoke his father's big hands pummeled him and rubbed him dry through the big towel, powdered him, sprayed him, combed his long yellow hair.
"Very good, Dodger," he said, after the boy had gone through it three times. "But you must never say it that way again."
"All right."
"You must never 'say' it at all. From now on you will hear the words. You will learn what each word means, and what they mean together, and you will make the words live. Memorizing is all very good, but we are not phonographs, are we?"
The boy agreed, having no idea what a phonograph was. Then he was lifted, still wrapped in the towel, and brought to his tiny bedroom, where he stood shivering—the landlord, through some misunderstanding, had stopped providing heat three days before—as his father found a pair of blue flannel pajamas with fluffy tassels on the feet, two sizes too small, and held them while his son stepped in and zipped them up in front.
"We'll get you some new ones next week," his father said. "You're getting to be a big boy." He put his son in bed and tucked the big comforter under his chin.
"Good night, Dodger," he said.
"G'night, Father." The man left the door slightly ajar, as he always did, knowing his son was prone to bad dreams.
Dodger lay there in the dark, looking at the sliver of light on the ceiling that came through the door, and thinking about Junior Zeezer, Octopus Zeezer, Marcus Bootless, Mark Anthony, Cashless, Sinna, Kafka, and the Smoothsayer. He knew those names were wrong but he found it helped him remember them to think of them that way. The real names made no sense at all to him. Neither did the play. That didn't bother him; none of the plays Father read to him made any sense, except Titus Andronicus (Tightest and Raunchiest, in Dodger-speak). Now, there was a story, with guys chopping off hands and pulling out tongues and stabbing each other with swords and stuff. It was almost as good as television.
But not Junior Zeezer. Oh, there was all those guys stabbing Junior in the Senate (also in the heart and the back and the gut, if Dodger understood it right), but most of it was no better than Hambone, which other than a neat ghost and some sword fighting didn't make much sense to Dodger, either.
His trouble was that, though he had a vocabulary ten times larger than most children his age, he didn't know what half the words meant.
Now his father said he was supposed to hear the words. Know what they mean, one at a time and all together. The prospect excited Dodger. All his life he'd been hearing these stories by Shaky-Spear, stories none of his friends knew, stories he couldn't tell his friends because he didn't know what they meant himself.
Now he would know. He suspected that learning what they meant would involve more time underwater.
But maybe that was just for remembering. He was getting so good at remembering now that some bath times went by without getting dunked at all.
The boy shivered, and pulled the covers more tightly around him. Soon he was asleep.
Dodger was four years old.
It's me again. Mister First Person.
And who are you? I might hear you ask. A certain amount of confusion at this point would be only normal.
"Your name is just something to put up on the marquee," my father always said. "It doesn't mean a thing." He proved his point by giving me a handful of them: Kenneth Catherine Duse Faneuil Savoyard Booth Johnson Ivanovich de la Valentine, to mention just a few. Alias K.C., Casey, Ken, Cat, Kendall, Kelly, Kenton and Kelvin. A.K.A. Valencia, Valentine, Van den Troost, and Jones. In various combinations of these and others I may have neglected to mention, I had enough noms de theatre, de plume, and de guerre to make a list longer than the memory of most big-city police computers.