“Lisette, I’m so sorry.”
“You are?” she said. “You don’t think I’m lying?”
I said I hadn’t thought so, but that now I wasn’t sure. “Are you lying?” I said.
She took her head off my shoulder.
“You think I killed her on purpose,” she said. “You think I wanted to see what it was like.”
“That’s not even the lie I imagined you meant when you asked if I was—”
“Blah blah blah!” she all but screamed. She leapt off the couch. “If you believe me, then prove it. Let me see yours. Take it out of that sleeve thing and let me hold it.”
“No,” I said.
“Go to hell, then,” she said, and roundhoused away.
I didn’t go after her. I was afraid she’d convince me to let her hold Kablankey.
* * *
—
Soon it was lunch, and Kablankey was shoeboxed. I approached the window seat on which Lisette sat eating her sub.
Stood there in front of her.
I said, “Hello,” and she chewed her sub. “Lisette,” I said. No response.
James came up behind me. “Dude, you gotta meet me after session seven,” he said. “Screwball’s doing the best new thing. You pull on his whiskers a little and he yawns, and if you do it three or four times in a row, then when you stop he makes a sound like ah-cha-cha cha-cha and blinks his eyes really hard!”
“Lisette,” I said. “Please don’t be mad at me. Everything is terrible. My mother’s got cancer.”
“You’re so full of it,” she said. “That’s the oldest, dumbest lie.”
“I wouldn’t lie about this. The doctors say she only has three to five weeks.”
Lisette mimicked me saying, “I wouldn’t lie about this.”
I heard sobbing behind me.
“You just want me to feel bad. You just want attention.”
“No,” I said. “I do want your attention, but—”
Lisette looked away. She looked over my shoulder. “Why are you crying?” she said. “Stop crying.”
“She’s dying,” James said. “His mom’s gonna die.”
“She’s not,” Lisette said.
I spun on my heel and smashed James in the face.
Lisette looked surprised, eyes and mouth O’d.
“It’s okay,” James said. “I knew you were a hitter. I shouldn’t have said that.”
I smashed him a second time, harder. He fell.
Lisette said, “Good one, but I still don’t believe you.”
Manx took me away. He took me to the office, where I sat with Abed, and he had Blank brought to me, along with some cookies. A couple hours later, Rick and Jim picked me up. I didn’t return to the study again.
* * *
When I got back home, my mother was asleep. My father grabbed my shoulders and pushed me down the hall. “You beat a kid up?” he whispered, as we entered the kitchen.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Why’d you do it?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “There was this girl there and…”
“He did something to this girl?”
“No,” I said.
“You wanted to impress the girl, kicking this kid’s ass.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Stop making that face. You’re not in trouble. The guy called—Manx. Said you could come back if you want to. Said he’d put you in a different group or something, with some older kids, meets four in the afternoon til seven thirty. Or else you could also just not come back. They’ll still cover the treatment either way, so. You don’t have to decide right now, okay? He said you show up, you show up: good. You don’t, you don’t, please give you his regards. Nice guy, in the end. I wouldn’t’ve guessed. I don’t know why. Scientists. Shrinks. I don’t know. And he seemed to think the kid you hit must’ve deserved it, or at least he didn’t argue when I said that was probably what it was, so I’m gonna go ahead and say, ‘Good job.’ You stood up for yourself, or else for some girl, or it was boys being boys or whatever, so good. If it was any of those things, especially the first two, I’m proud. But just listen, okay? This is what’s important: I haven’t told your mom, and you’re not gonna either. She doesn’t need the aggravation. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“Cause she had a lot of pain today, even more than usual. I guess it keeps getting worse.”
“I won’t tell her,” I said.
“I think I might have caused her to have a seizure.”
“I’m sure you didn’t,” I said. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“I think I stressed her out too much and set it off. She wanted me to leave the room for a while and I didn’t want to because—you know. So I wanted to stay, and that’s what I told her, and she got upset, and then, so.”
“I think probably she wanted you to leave the room because she knew something was about to happen to her, and she didn’t want you to see it, and you stayed, and then you saw it happen.”
“What, you think she can feel when that kind of thing is about to come on?”
“Why not?” I said.
“Right,” he said. “Okay. That makes…I guess maybe, but…what? She’s embarrassed for me to see her in pain? She thinks I’ll be ashamed of her or something? Or that I’ll think…what? That’s almost worse than I caused it. No, it is worse. I’m her husband. It’s worse. She shouldn’t…” He’d started to cry.
I went to my room.
* * *
I was cold when I got into bed that night, and I took an extra blanket from the closet in the hall—the afghan that, half a year or so earlier, had parried my questions about its knowledge of German—and just as I’d started to fall asleep, I had this strange sense, a unique sense really, that the afghan, presumably because it wanted to make up for being short with me that last time, was somehow teaching me, while I hovered in the space between un- and consciousness, to control my own gate. For the very first time, I seemed to be able to sense my gate. It was located somewhere just behind and above my right eye, and what I came to understand was that it didn’t, as I’d previously imagined, swing back and forth like a fence’s hinged portal; rather, it worked like an old garage door (the kind that, when lifted, didn’t fold up, but thrust outward into the air above the driveway before being dragged inside along its track), and all it would take to get it to open was to more accurately and vividly imagine it lifting, while tensing my body in a particular way.