Lena does not care what is in her head; so she does not know. She does not often recall a morning in school when the teacher read her “The Jabberwocky” and she listened sincerely for the first time to her language. She does not notice in her head a morning when she was eight and she found ten dead butterflies and catalogued them by the marks on their backs, piling similar patterns on top of one another, and ordered them from left to right by their relative amounts of black, while waiting for the bus at the spot where her dusty street meets the paved road that leads to the river and to the school. She has no conscious recollection of the words “We’re all mad here” being read to her, or of the time when, while burrowed in bed, she heard her father quietly sing “It’s dreamy weather” from the kitchen and she felt tingles and her body connected to itself in a new formulation, so she could touch her toe to her finger by sheer will of being—without actually moving, she thought, her toe became her finger, and hence had touched it. But she does not remember.
“I am like a ditch with a stream groaning through the rock and mud in its belly. I dream I am a lily that grows from the wall of the ditch, and reaches out, forever toward the canopy,” she says, not thinking, “heliotrope” or “we’re all mad here.”
“I am like the sun,” he replies, and thinks I am like away. It is night.
They wait for words but none come. The moon droops tonight and the fireflies in the yard and back by the sycamore show much more energy, exuberance, and gall than the sighing gibbous moon as it falls closer to the horizon in morbid descent. They live on a block of eight small houses, one of which loses a piece of siding or shingle at least once a day, the weather slowly but persistently devouring its vacant prey, grinding its various teeth deliberately and without mercy. But unlike some houses in such conditions, the yard does not overgrow—like all the other houses in the neighborhood, its yard is bare of vegetation aside from a layer of tan dirt. Next to it, in the corner of the nine lot square, lies a vacant lot in which grows a giant sycamore, its branches reaching both upward and outward with a mixture of zeal and confusion, branches twisting and soaring, its trunk (the children decided one day—this she does not remember either) the size of at least ten youths, its bark like the skin of an elephant, camouflaged and peeling. To the credit of the town planners, there is a house in the center, surrounded by houses and inaccessible by car except through the Watsons’ long driveway, but the Watsons do not park in their yard, so the path is always blocked. William Weber, inhabitant of the center house, usually parks on the street.
Lena wears red and pink Kellogg’s ankle socks; that is, ankle socks with a Kellogg’s insignia embroidered on each face and stripes of pink and red behind the embroidery. She had gotten them the week before out of a box of Frosted Flakes that her mother procured from Jacobson’s Market after passing the clerk a ticket. Dirt covers the bottoms of her ankle socks and dust darkens the lower parts of her otherwise blank shins, which connect to her pale translucent legs, exposed because it is only April and her shorts are very short still and her skin is still very modest, innocent. Every year around June the opaque cover would spoil over with a sheet of boiled lobster red, and for the next few months, the people would notice the red layers begin to peel as snakes, and proceed until two weeks later there resides again upon her legs a fresh layer of pale translucent tissue paper, born anew. For the rest of the summer she would wear light dresses of orange and red and smell of fresh cherries and banana peels, avocado and preserve.
Lena sits with John the Bartender on John the Bartender’s porch. John the Bartender had his sixteenth birthday party earlier today, and he bartended the event. He does not consider it work and in fact considers it a gift, because he wants to be a bartender. The porchlight illuminates little so John the Bartender laboriously scans the pages of Ulysses Annotated, barely making out the names of drinking songs and English translations of momentary pidgin upshots from transient combinations of Dubliners. Lena notices that the moon is closer to the chimneys than it was when they stopped talking.
“When does he come home?”
“Why do you care?” John does not look up and scold her with eyes but wants to. He reads of Chrysostomos’ golden teeth. He wants to talk but he is vanquished by the dual spires of resentment and jealousy.
Mitch had left the day before on a Red Cross mission in Khartoum. He was to fly into Cairo and proceed to Khartoum by boat. Before he left he had been a bartender at Sammy’s Pub, the only pub in town. He always knew how to joke with the old people, to become one of their own, to infiltrate the fabric of generations, and when he entered the circle of elderly folks, he always acted and spoke in a way that subtly conveyed reverence, respect, and a sense that he regarded these people as treasures. Everyone in town attended his farewell except John the Bartender, who, although he said his goodbyes earlier, still believed his absence from the gathering to be a statement of protest. John’s resentments were never so gloriously displayed, but big brothers anger little.
At Mitch’s departure party, John watched from a small basement window as Mitch made his way around, speaking to nearly everyone, incessantly smiling and shaking hands, exceedingly charming them all, in a straight line from one end of the street to the other, the entire length of the party. He guzzled four Budweiser cans on his journey. When he reached the end of the line he was surrounded by a circle of about twenty, all actively conversing amongst one another with words and hands. John could see and hear with ease from his window, a mere ten feet or so from the gathered group. Amongst many words pertaining to what good work Mitch was doing and what great work he would do and what a downer the pub will be in his absence, a voice, small but full of melody, spoke from just above the basement window. It was Lena. She spoke quietly and slowly, and another brasher but no less feminine voice answered back; it belonged to Jen Weber. The two spoke back and forth for ten minutes or so, at sometimes painfully gentle and at others in crescendo, and as they did, John, hearing every word, huddled into a ball and shook, enveloped within his own silence, and became John the Bartender.
The moon droops further and the fireflies are out. John the Bartender leans in. She says: “This feels sour. I can smell the buds forming. The modern Mary is always knocked up by a boy.” She thinks I am not away. The branches in the great sycamore do battle, swords wielded by the wind. “I hear the Wapping,” she says.
