“Careful out there, your father’s tools are lying all over the place. Take a towel.”
Now there’s the hill, that lost wall, and the weasels are wiping their gums against it. At a distance, somewhere above Jane and Finch, two airplanes are waiting at an intersection. And in the lawn below and to the west is a small rectangle punched into the ground coated with concrete and filled with water.
In this wading pool stands an eight-year-old girl. Beside the pool stands a seven-year-old boy. The boy strolls over to a saw that hangs at an angle in a plank that is stretched between two sawhorses. He rocks the saw until it squawks out of the wood.
There are thoughts going through this child’s head, which is normal. As normal as it is to place thoughts in a head. And they are arriving and departing in the usual custom. That is, as far as it is usual for thoughts to arrive and depart. These thoughts, idle and wandering, are picking up speed, accumulating a motive from the way they are arranged. There is a dangerous belief in the corners they turn.
These thoughts:
The grim little mouth the saw has made in the plank blows blonde fibres from its lips and gives the word. Jimmy slips into the pool clumsily, dragging the saw behind him.
Behind Julie’s head is the deep blue of the sky. A blue most like that colour is at her shoulders, whitening as it leaves her, travelling upward. On the surface of the sky, microscopic bacteria living in Jimmy’s eyes flow from the sun into Julie, who is smiling. They’re glancing down at her shoulder, inviting the saw there. Jimmy lays it on her shoulder and draws it towards himself. Then he pushes it along a groove that starts easily in the skin. A bright strip of blood highlights the course — down through her body — the saw will take. Julie’s face is calm, at least as calm as Jimmy’s, and she smiles with a full understanding of what is happening.
When their father runs around the pool, as if up a ramp, his mouth is open and through it an airplane comes out of the sky. Julie and Jimmy lean towards each other and kiss in the silence of this moment. Now husband and wife, they kiss each other goodbye forever. When the airplane advances past the sky and their father’s voice starts up in his mouth again, Julie and Jimmy pull apart sheepishly and Julie begins to howl in pain, holding her shoulder. Jimmy sees, for the first time, all the blood in the water.
In every home movie and photograph that their father will take this summer, the girl’s shoulder will have a large pad of gauze taped to it. And Julie and Jimmy will grow apart like brother and sister.
This event also marks Jimmy’s first deliberate silence, a silence that will last three months and will return every three months. Like now, as they make their way up the path in the dark, four cottages away from where people are eating each other alive in a now brightly lit bedroom.
At his desk, Grant Mazzy sits across from the only person at Big Town TV who is willing to spend time with him.
Steve is a student volunteer, which means he is something of a slave. He’s young, eighteen or so, with an anachronistic blond pompadour, tight rockabilly pants, and pointy boots. Grant has asked himself whether this look, the way the kid features it, the way it precedes everything else about him, is trendy or disdainful of trends, or trendily disdainful of trends. Is he ultra-hip and ironically retro-quoting another ultra-hip that had hotly retro-quoted another ultra-hip that once, long ago, railed against, what? What? Uh, squares? Grant has decided, in order to get through the day, that the kid is just a bit silly looking. And that is that. Besides, because of the way Steve has followed him around and bumped against him and bobbed his head like a good dog, Grant figures those old squares, as referentially obscure as they have become, have nothing to worry about anymore, anyway.
