The Book of Other People

Newton Wicks by Andrew Sean Greer

Newton’s best friend, back when he was New, was chosen for him. First friends often are. Hard to know how it started, though two children, five years old and wary from the world of kindergarten, must have been put in a living room together, as zoo handlers will place two creatures of the same species in the painted setting of their habitat. The young adults – untenured colleagues – sat in some other room and laughed over the clattering ice of their drinks, over the Peter, Paul and Mary album (they will call the kids in when Puff comes on), and the boys were left to stare wildly at each other. Who knows if they even recognized their own kind? Who knows if this was even hard for them, a first friendship, when every single thing is thorned with newness? The boy’s name was Martin, and, since this was his house, he introduced Newton to his various toys. There was a tense silence as Newton held a small plastic fireman with Felix-the-Cat eyes; he moved the arms and legs, and suddenly he was miniaturized into the deep beige pile of the carpet, shoulder high, and the world was a jungle for a fireman to escape from. ‘No, no, see,’ Martin said, and Newton was full sized again, ashamed, as the toy was taken from him and made to sit in a dirty carriage clearly made for some other toy, now lost. ‘No, see, he rides in here and goes around, see, he’s in charge of looking out for bats.’ And indeed two rubber bats were taken out of the box and jiggled in the air menacingly. Like a TV show – like everything, in fact – Newton had stumbled upon a long-running story whose beginning he would never be able to deduce. He was given another fireman, who wore his vest backwards and no hat. ‘You be the princess.’ This was only fair. In time, at Newton’s own house, Martin will himself be forced into minor roles, talking animals and sidekicks. And eventually Martin will relinquish even his own heroes to Newton, the better storyteller. But this is probably why they became friends: because Newton, in the first few moments of their meeting, rather than snarl and complain, accepted the shame of playing the girl. At other meetings, Martin revealed that these toys were minor, like a preamble set before the curtain rises, or the series of people who interview you before you are shown into the executive office. Newton was shown into Martin’s bedroom, where a hopeful puppet theater sat on folding feet, striped and painted with an elaborate foreign announcement (German, it turned out, meaning: ‘The next performance is at…,’) drawn above a clock with real cardboard hands, set to 4.30. It was 4.00. The performance – scheduled by optimistic Martin – never came. Instead, Newton was drawn to a tableau of paper knights, each only two inches high, in a magical woodland setting. Martin explained he had punched them out of a book, but he did not explain his problems with their paper half-moon stands, how they bent in his eager sweaty hands, or why his favorite one – the Black Knight – had a mangled stand and had to be leaned against a wall or a bedpost in order to take part in battle. Once they were in the fur of the rug, of course, it didn’t matter. They could be pushed down into the pile and made to sit there forever. The bunkbed became a tower, the sheets became a mountain, the underbed a cavern, and, while they kept to realistic roles for a while, eventually each was granted one wish: to fly. Soon the knights did battle from bookshelf to bookshelf. The bats were brought up from downstairs. Nobody had to play the princess.

There was also a secret cache of cars, gold-and-red metal, with real turning wheels that got carpet fluff caught in them and wouldn’t go anymore, except it didn’t matter because Newton and Martin couldn’t be bothered rolling them along the carpet but ran them almost anywhere else, up and down the bunkbed and the little blue desk with a matching chair (both glossy from a repainting) – all the while imitating each other’s noises that went from Martin’s antique ‘burton burton burton’ to Newton’s futuristic ‘vvvvuuuh’ – until they ended up, magically, backstage at the puppet theater, where Martin parted the curtain to reveal (as in a comedy) the headlight-eyes of the cars staring out unexpectedly at the audience. Then, with a scream, they plunged to their doom.

There was a pet, as well, a hermit crab in a shoebox (crayon-decorated with the coral-hands and seaweed boas of the ocean), and the two boys would set the striped shell on a table and wait patiently for it to emerge like a celebrity from a limo: first the filament feelers, then the dainty little legs, and then at last the great brown claw that meant Hermie was feeling bold. As soon as its eyes appeared, one boy or the other (the honor was shared) would poke the thing in the claw or the legs, and the creature would withdraw, suddenly, creepily, with just the tips of his toes showing in the orifice of the shell. But the stupid thing would never learn; another wait, and again the sensual nudity of his legs would tap one by one against the tabletop.

Martin, like any child, also had unplayable toys. Either broken, like the legless horse who rode only in Martin’s solitary playtime, or out of sync with his age. There were, of course, the puppets themselves, lovingly donated by a rich aunt. These included hand-made finger puppets, representing a family, and a trio of knitted hand puppets: a tiger, a cop and a wizard. What scenario these three could enact was a puzzle. In the very back of his closet was a marionette of a small boy with a cap, something the old childless woman must not have been able to resist, though it was complicated, and too precious for the boy until he was much older, when he would probably consider it girlish or haunted. There was a dour, eyeless collection of animals housed in a hinged barnyard. Each was badly made of colored plastic, and long tabs from the extrusion process showed along their backbones, like the spines of dinosaurs. One was forever coming across them hidden in the carpet, yelping barefoot and retrieving a little pink pig with sharp feet and no smile at all on its face, though you felt it deserved one. They were too featureless to be loved – no child’s mind could fold itself small enough to fit inside – and there were so many of them, a hundred, perhaps, that one could only imagine a child lining them up dutifully along the barnyard wall, species by species, like a slaughter of innocents.

They were at the age when every movement was as incredible as a spacewalk. Leaping from the front step could entertain them for hours, even though the step was identical to every step they’d ever seen in their lives. The stunted San Francisco backyard, though – so much better than Newton’s own precipitous one – could telescope from an ant-kingdom in the grass to an interplanetary realm below the sadly unclimbable eucalyptus trees. But mostly they were so young that they needed nothing more than to run in circles among the trees, slipping now and then on the sickle-shapes leaves, finding new and yet newer hiding places for their tiny bodies among the bushes and the few patio chairs, waiting with a tiny beating frog-heart in the darkness of the woodpile until either the other boy leapt upon him with his own squeal of terror or the game went on too long, with the seeker beginning to cry beneath the scent and the surf-sound of the trees, and the hider jumping up, nearly in tears himself at having been lost for so long. At those times, an adult had to go outside to comfort them. They were for some reason incapable of comforting each other.

That was during the day. At night, their bodies still longed to run in circles, and, though it was clearly forbidden, they did it anyway. It was amazing to them that Martin’s mother could sense immediately if they were jumping on his bed; they both stood with wide-eyed looks of wonder as she ran in, clairvoyant perhaps, and scolded them for ruining the bed, telling them to find something else to do. Sometimes there were spankings; if Newton’s own parents weren’t there, Martin’s mother did not pause to spank him as well. For instance for standing on a stool and reaching into the cookie jar, fearing it was empty, and having the exhilarating sensation of feeling, among the ocean of crumbs, the half-raft of a cookie… before bringing the ceramic jar crashing to the floor. Or for getting into Martin’s mother’s closet and making a mess of things, rooting through her exotic paraphernalia like pirate treasure and tossing long rosy satiny things onto the floor in search of diamond buckles and pearls, which Martin, at that age before a boy knows better, would wear around his own neck. But mostly Martin’s father believed in letting them be wild, and if he were around, they could take the sofa apart and make the most astounding fortress out of it, and even – on the best of all possible days – be allowed to eat dinner inside and watch, through the cracks of the cushions, an hour of blessed television. That was life until thirteen.

There are a thousand kinds of thirteen, more than there are kinds of fifty, or eighty. There is Oddly Childlike Thirteen, and Worried and Obsessive, and Alarmingly Manly, and Girlish, and Gothic Horror, and Scapegoat, and Something Happened to Him as a Child, and Beatific and Despised, and Lonely, and Just Plain Stubborn. There is Manic and there is Depressed, still leading separate lives. There is Loves Adults and there is Steals Dad’s Antique Pornography. There is Steals Everything, Period. There is Already Smokes and Already Drinks and Already Screws. There is Weeps Alone. And Misses Childhood. And Hates the World. He was none of these; he was less than these. He was the kind of boy who had been a prodigy at six and faded by seven, the kind who would be handsome by twenty and show his old yearbook photos to girl-friends, unable to feel joy when they’d exclaim how hopeless he used to be. Somewhere in between those points was where he lay, and somehow – and this was the hopelessly sad part – he knew it. If you asked him, on a test sheet, to name his own type of thirteen, he would write in his seismographic hand: ‘Waits for Time to Pass’.

Pictures, also, reveal very little. There is one of him at that age, in 1984, standing by the fireplace in a navy blazer and gray slacks his father had helped him pick out, clearly dressed for some acquaintance’s bar mitzvah, his hair parted and set with a wet comb, dried into long lines like grass when it’s been raked of leaves – possibly also sprayed with a canister of his father’s Commander, it’s that solid. It’s a shame that photos, like children, remember only rare moments and never the everyday, for he has never looked like this in his life. A look of guilt, of surprise. Eyes a deep blue, the blue of a baby’s eyes that will eventually turn to brown, wide open. Eyebrows raised, perhaps in his first failed try at posing, at elegance. Or perhaps he has set his face this way as he waits. For his father to adjust the lens; for the sweat to trickle into the pits of his new shirt; for the terrible moment when they have to go. A dismembered hand floating in the ink of navy. One gold button, the only proud thing in the room.

The photo has captured nothing. Not the glow from the flowers on the mantel behind him, a present, which in this picture might as well be fake, or the evaporating droplets on the windowpane. Not this boy’s beautiful, desperate love, tamped-down inside him like brown sugar in a measuring cup, which should fill every corner of the frame. Which should make that sad house plant beside him burst into flower. You would never guess that he is not looking out of a picture at all but is standing in a room looking at a grown man, at his own father, and what he thinks of that man we, looking at the picture, will never know. His is not the first photo not to capture these things, but for the viewer they might as well never have existed.