One minute remains of the twelve-minute film. The crowd disperses, the camera pans left to show us two tall men engaged in animated conversation (no voices now, but the Baumfelder returns), presumably describing the spectacle they’ve just witnessed. One of the men is Klaus, whose back we saw in the opening shot; the other is Dr. Tom in tweeds. They look like dignitaries, presidents; they shake hands, maybe in parting, maybe to seal some mysterious pact between Old World psychiatry and new, then walk out of the shot in opposite directions. And here come two smiling women in hoop skirts, half a minute left, Sima and Jane, governesses probably, each leading two small children by the hand. Jason (Sima’s son) and Adam, Darren Eberheart and a girl whose name is lost. (Their excitement when they were picked up from Bright Circle, where they were allowed to skip their nap.) They are walking toward us fast and slow, in the present and the past.
Things Darren dreamt began to show up in the bushes—the plastic figurine from a parachute firework, the small dull saw blade he thought of as a throwing star—and he pocketed those things. His pockets were large: all year he wore one of the three pairs of Army cargo pants he had purchased with his own money from the Surplus on Huntoon. Desert camouflage. Understand he had over four hundred dollars in mainly twenties. He had a dozen Buck folding knives. He had in the same drawer with cash and knives a Crosman pellet gun he had often claimed was an actual revolver and once pointed at the half-breed Jason Davis, prompting Davis to open a cut above Darren’s eye. The coconut smell so strong he experienced it as a taste of the young nurse who stitched that up and the thin gold chain against her collarbone appeared now in his dreams, but that was okay, Dr. J said, the problem is when it goes the other way. It was like that paper TOPEKA HIGH SCHOOL banner the cheerleaders held for the players to burst through when they took the field. More than to actually play that’s what he’d wanted, imagined when he was a water boy in middle school. (See him in pure joy sprinting up the sideline when one of our running backs breaks away.) The banner between sleep and waking had torn and now people and things were passing through it.
He’ll be at the McDonald’s on Gage Boulevard getting his hot water and he’ll suddenly just know the man ordering in front of him is Dad, particles of windshield in his matted hair. So he walks right out head down and gets back on his Schwinn Predator and pedals full speed to the bushes of Westboro Park where he can breathe and pocket stray items from the dreams. What about the bushes makes you feel safe? Dr. J asks him every time he mentions sheltering there. Understand there is a network of tunnels through the big mass of honeysuckle and he has supplies, a plastic bag of small Snickers and PayDay for energy and some jerky lightly buried under brush in a place he will not reveal, not even under torture. Are there other places like the bushes? What about thinking of this place as kind of like the bushes, Darren?
Well, maybe he could do that if Dr. J didn’t say at the end of every hour, Come on in, Ms. Eberheart, and then Darren has to listen to his mom complain. Most recently about how he ruined the perfect job at Dillon’s that Dr. J had helped arrange for him, calling in a favor. Because Darren was dishonest, unreliable, and let’s not even talk about the GED. What requires Darren to slow his breathing deliberately is how her voice goes very high-pitched, almost a squeal, animal in pain, right before she starts crying, then goes deep again: I don’t know how much / More of this I / can take. His lies. My diabetes. Working night shifts at St. Francis. That’s when Darren feels like he is about to cry himself or choke her out but instead just looks at the clown painting on Dr. J’s wall hard enough that its colors start to change. Do you like it? That’s by a painter named Marc Chagall.
It can’t be like the bushes when that bitch is here. At first Dr. J would say we don’t use words like bitch, faggot, pussy, but since he started catching glimpses of his dad there aren’t really rules. Because understand Darren is not a faggot or a pussy no matter what Nowak or Davis or Dad said before he hit the median and went through the windshield underground. Darren had more than once confessed to killing him, at which point Dr. J said very slowly, like he was reading it off a billboard at some distance, No, Darren, you are not responsible—in any way—for your father’s death. Having bad thoughts about someone doesn’t cause their car to crash. But Darren had flipped the blue Honda over and over in his head before the wreck, pressed rewind, flipped it again. In his mind he’d sat bored and sweating through the service in the front pew of Potwin Presbyterian before the highway patrol had even called them. Feel the starched collar against his recently shaved neck.
Ever since he was a boy he would drink hot water in the morning to pretend along with his mom and dad that he was having coffee, Here is your coffee, Darren, black no sugar, almost time for work. Rare shared laughter. The joke was that he was a man but now he is one, eighteen, and it’s just what he does in the morning. At McDonald’s they give you hot water for free although it can be hard to explain that you don’t want to buy their Lipton tea. More than once he’d had to purchase the bag he would discard. (On Gage Boulevard they gave the steaming Styrofoam cup to him mostly without trouble, but the one time he’d tried at Twenty-First someone from among the cooks he might have known said tell the retard to fuck off.) When he’d started the job at Dillon’s his dad had not yet come back through the tattered banner and Darren would sit in one of the red plastic swivel chairs near the front glass façade and watch through his own watery reflection the Phelpses holding their picket signs. He’d sip his steaming water, stir it with a plastic spoon, sip it. Then he would rise with a purposefulness he believed the other men could sense.
If you are going to your job, the scenery organizes itself differently around your bike as you cut through it, elms and silver maples lining up respectfully to let you pass. Stacy, the friend of Dr. J’s, had showed him where he could lean his Predator just within the side entrance and where he could take a green apron from a hook. Tie it in the back like this. Then just ask me and I’ll tell you which of the checkout lines you should help with first. Here come the heads of broccoli the box of frozen waffles Wonder Bread the two-liter Dr Pepper slowly over the black rubber conveyor to be rung up at which point he is to put them in doubled tall paper bags and, if asked, to carry them or push them in the cart to the trunks of cars, beds of trucks. Often he was transporting the food of people he knew, had known, and they would speak to him, and it was fine. Eggs and milk get their own plastic bag, don’t ask me why. The satisfaction of jamming the empty shopping cart into another shopping cart in the corral. Four twenty-five an hour times thirty was more money than he could imagine once you timesed thirty by however many weeks there would be in the years he planned to work. One thing for sure: he would buy Ron Williams’s silver Fiero and even let his mom use it if she followed certain rules.
Halfway through the first month a large can of something doesn’t ring up and Mike the senior he is bagging for tells him to check the price which means first finding the aisle and then the shelf and then whatever number on whatever label corresponds to the can in question before carrying all that in his head and hands back to Mike who will have long since finished ringing up the other groceries, the customer pissed for sure. Stacy never said that pricing was his job. By the time he locates the right aisle he already sees himself returning to the register unable to account for how the label with the price was midway between two similar but distinct sets of cans, or how those distinctions blurred as he looked hard, the color of the labels transitioning until he could not define a border between what costs this, costs that. He would match the words if letters and numbers didn’t go ants running across pavement twigs floating away on water as he stood there and if the other shoppers hadn’t started to laugh at him until he turned to catch them. Only standing in a cold sweat before the shelves does he become aware of the Muzak that’s been circulating through Dillon’s all of 1996.