Upstairs, Charlie Parker was getting tangled in the curtains and I could hear Henry cursing not so quietly under his breath. Mum banged on the front window and frowned, breathing Rorschach clouds against the glass, her skin already clammy with the heat and blotched like sausage meat. I said, “Did you see that?” but she pulled a face at me, arms spread out like, What, I have to do all this unpacking myself? so I waved her away and pretended it wasn’t anything special, even though I knew already that it was.
The mailman parked his truck at the top of the road and made his way to Mrs. Midler’s front door, head down, whistle-whistle, same as usual, delivering mail to a lady who no longer existed, putting it through the letter box like nothing had changed. He didn’t notice the battered black car, didn’t feel all that novelty pulling on the air until it was tight as a bow. I don’t know how he could have missed it.
I closed my book without bothering to mark the page, and I wondered if anyone else had heard this central thing in me, this core thing snapping like a twig. SNAP when the car pulled up and I saw that boy inside it. SNAP when we looked at each other. SNAP when those eyes blackened and that mouth opened and the breath tumbled out of him in soft clouds. He saw me watching, I’m sure of that. We watched each other, and I still dream of it now, his body turning away like it was supposed to but his eyes staying with me, the way dancers do it, the dark and light of them the very last things to go.
NINE
I was still in my sunlit place in the yard when Novo left through his new front door, singing, and I remember thinking how brilliantly shameless that was, to exit a house you just invaded, hands in pockets, loud, like nothing-to-see-here, breezy and carefree. I recognized straight off that the rules of normal did not apply. He was untouchable. Dazzling. I imagined the force field glinting around him, all that fearlessness catching the light. And at the same time I had this feeling that he wanted me, of all people, to notice him, that he was thinking right then about me.
I hid from that feeling in the long grass because I didn’t trust it. He was the width of the street away from me, and I told myself it was nothing, even though my palms felt hot and my thoughts were giddy and my heart might as well have been beating in my neck. I tried to count ordinary things—blades of grass, gravel on the path, bricks in the wall, the contents of my pockets (mostly receipts and a twisted half-pack of gum)—but none of them were ordinary enough. None of them talked me out of getting up and opening the gate. I knew straightaway that something impossible was happening, something about this boy in the world that couldn’t be explained, not like a cheap magic trick anyway. I had this feeling, the kind that comes from your gut instead of your brain, the kind you should listen to, because your gut knows what it knows, and is usually right, and doesn’t need anything as complicated as logic to prove it. I had this overwhelming feeling. So I followed him.
The walk to civilization from Henry Lake’s house was steeply downhill, quiet, just houses, and then a right turn at the cinema onto the main road. One-way traffic, a couple of streets of shops. Less than five minutes. Not much more than ten after that to walk all the way down to the sea. The boy was fast. He moved through town the way he’d scaled that house, fluid and quick as mercury, comfortable in his own skin, happy to take up space. Everyone seemed to know him. More than that. They all wanted to welcome him, or touch him, or give him something, this returning prince, this little town’s prodigal son. I’d never seen anything like it, not for real. It was more like a film set. Shopkeepers hovered in their own doorways and forced free things on him as he passed—apples, honey, bread, a bottle of wine. Fresh-caught fish. Flowers. Books. A newspaper. They competed for his attention, elbowing one another out of the way and calling after him to come and have free haircuts and tattoos, a free massage, anything he wanted from the gallery, the new collection, from their own backs. Anything at all. Children fell in behind him like ducklings, a real-life pied piper, and their parents beamed, hands clasped at their hearts, and blushed with pride. A virtual game, dreamlike, a fairy tale. As finely choreographed as a dance, seamless and elaborate, but a piece of theater all the same. It had to be. A piece of fiction. Not real. Even though I could see it unfolding right in front of me, it was somehow not real at all. A woman crossing the road held out her child for him to take, and the boy smiled and shook his head, politely declining while more children grabbed at his legs and other passersby stopped to offer him the contents of their wallets. A jeweler chased after him with a tray of watches, begging him to consider, and he took a moment to appreciate them, but he turned down those too. He walked without breaking his rhythm, weaving through the narrow lanes and around his grateful subjects as freely and elegantly as a royal breeze. He didn’t stop moving forward, didn’t once look back. After he’d passed, behind him, in the space between us, those spellbound extras woke up from their dream, instantly forgot the delirium of his passing presence. The virtual went back to actual, the bright lights turned down, the extraordinary color gone. The real world zipped itself back up in his wake like water after a boat. And I saw all of it.
Down at the beach, dogs chased each other in and out of the sea. A gang of kids burrowed heads-down furiously while their parents sat in a half circle talking and staring at the waves. A pile of students played dead on blankets by the rocks. A café bustled behind where the street gave way to the sand. The boy strolled ahead of me, vivid like sunshine, and the kids looked up in unison, alert as meerkats over their castles, the talk stopped in their parents’ mouths. The students stood up and drifted closer like sleepwalkers, slack-jawed with fascination, blissed out and bleary-eyed. At the edge of the water, he bent down and let his hands trail and circle, crouching low; and where he touched the sea it seemed to shimmer with phosphorescence, every cell in it lit up from within. The dogs splashed through the glimmering water, leaping and barking, surrounding him, challenging him to play. He stood up and the sea-lights flickered out. He moved backward to the line where the wet sand turns to dry, and then he sat down lead-heavy, with a sigh. The sea breathed, and he breathed, and everybody, even the dogs, went completely still. It was the loneliest thing I think I ever saw, the square root of loneliness, him sitting there with nothing moving around him at all, apart from the shifting, dimming water. Lonely warped the air around him, the way heat hangs over tarmac in the summer. It was a visible, wavering thing, clear as day. I thought I knew what lonely was until I witnessed that.
I stood there on the sand behind him, not frozen like the rest of them, immune for some reason, but still, blank with wonder, a clean slate in the shape of a person. I was trying to catch up with what was happening here. I felt as distant as Icarus suddenly, from the things I thought I knew, as far from my certain little life as that farthest single star, nine billion light-years away. The boy turned his face from the water and bit into his apple and the stilled beach started moving again. The dogs thrashed and wrestled in the waves, and the kids and their parents raised their voices in a dispute about the finer rules of their game. Amnesia swept through them like a blizzard. Nobody looked at him again. Nobody noticed. Only me.