Now that I was losing my only ally, all I wanted to do was hide, but the fucked thing is that in a small town, there is no such thing as anonymity. Obscurity, yes. Anonymity, no. It’s really rotten the way you can’t walk down the street without someone saying hello and smiling at you. The best thing you can do is find places everyone hates and go there. And yes, even in a small town there are areas that people avoid en masse- make a mental list, and there you can live your life undisturbed without having to wall yourself into your bedroom. There was a place in our town that Lionel Potts had opened. Nobody ever set foot inside because Lionel was the most despised man in the district. Everyone had it in for him, but I didn’t understand why. They said it was because he was a “rich bastard.” They thought, “Who does he think he is, not struggling over the rent? What cheek!”
I thought there must be something secret and sinister about Lionel Potts. I couldn’t believe people hated him for being rich, because I’d noticed most people were aching to be rich too; otherwise they wouldn’t buy lottery tickets and plan get-rich-quick schemes and play the horses. It made no sense to me that people would hate the very thing they aspired to become.
His café was dimly lit, and its dark wooden tables and long wooden benches made it look like a Spanish tavern or a stable for people. There were indoor ferns, paintings of overdressed men on horseback, and a series of black-and-white photographs of a cluster of ancient, majestic trees where the pharmacy now stood. The place was empty from morning to night; I was the only customer. Lionel would complain to his daughter that it wouldn’t be long before he’d have to close up and go out of business, while peering at me curiously, obviously wondering why I was the only one in town not adhering to the boycott. Sometimes his daughter stared at me too.
Caroline was eleven years old and tall and thin, and she always stood leaning against the counter with her mouth half open as if in surprise. She had green eyes and hair the color of a golden delicious apple. She was flat-chested and her arms and shoulders were muscular; I remember thinking she could probably beat me in a fight and that would be very embarrassing if it ever came to pass. At eleven, she had that thing that was eventually perfected on Parisian catwalks- a pout. I didn’t know it then, but pouts operate like this: they suggest a temporary dissatisfaction that entices you to satisfy it. You think: If only I could satisfy that pout, I would be happy. It’s only a recent blip in evolution, the pout. Paleolithic man never heard of it.
I sat in the darkest corner of the café and watched her carry crates of bottles up from the cellar. Neither she nor her father fussed over me or treated me that nicely, considering I was their only client, but I drank milk shakes and Coca-Cola and read books and thought my thoughts, and with an empty notebook in front of me struggled to make sense in words of the visions that had come to me in the coma. Every day she brought me drinks, but I was too shy to talk to her. When she said “Hello,” I said “OK.”
One day she sat down opposite me with a face that seemed about to burst into cruel laughter. “Everyone thinks your brother is hot shit,” she said.
I almost fell over, I was so unused to being talked to. I regained my composure and said wisely, “Well, you know how people are.”
“I think he’s a show-off.”
“Well, you know how people are.”
“And up himself.”
“Well,” I said.
That was it. The one person in town who didn’t fall all over my brother was the girl I chose to love. Why not? Even the Kennedys must have had some sibling rivalry. Caroline went to the games like everyone else, but I could see she really did hate him, because whenever the crowd jumped and clapped for Terry, she sat as still as a library shelf and only moved to put her hand over her mouth as if stunned by bad news. And the time Terry rushed into the café to take me home for dinner, you should’ve seen her! She wouldn’t talk to him or even look at him, and I’m ashamed to say I found that scene delicious, because for five minutes Terry was getting a little taste of the slimy frog I was forced to swallow day after miserable day.
This is why Caroline Potts goes down in history as my first friend. We talked in that dark café every day, and I was finally able to unleash many of my banked-up thoughts, so I felt a tangible improvement in my mental state. I met her with sweaty palms and prepubescent lechery, and even when I walked slowly toward her, the sight of her smiling, slightly androgynous face was as visceral a shock as if she’d sneaked up on me. Of course I knew she had befriended me because she was friendless too, but I think she really appreciated my snide observations, and we were in total agreement when we compulsively discussed the boundless stupidity of our town’s sappy devotion to my brother. I volunteered her the one secret I knew about him: his spooky, religious reverence for sport. It felt good that I wasn’t the only one who knew there was something not quite right with Terry Dean, but soon after Caroline and I met, something terrible happened, and then everyone knew.
It was at a birthday party. The host was turning five, a big occasion. I’d missed my own because of the coma, but I wasn’t looking forward to it because I anticipated a somber affair, you know, when a child’s innocence shows signs of strain and the five-year-old begins, with sadness and alarm, to question why he’s suddenly torn between ambition and the desire to sleep longer. Depressing! But I was now off the crutches and could no longer use my illness as an excuse for avoiding life. Terry, on the other hand, was so excited, at dawn he was already standing by the front door in his party clothes. By now you should know the answer to that irritating question, what was Terry Dean like as a child? Was he an outcast? An antiauthoritarian stubborn prick? No, that was me.
When we arrived at the party, the sound of laughter led us through the cool, bright house to the back, where all the children were seated in the large fenceless garden, in front of a magician in an ostentatious black-and-gold cape. He was doing all sorts of cheap tricks. When he exhausted his doves, he went around the crowd and read palms. Trust me, if you haven’t experienced it, there’s nothing more stupid than a fortune-teller at a children’s party. “You will grow up big and strong,” I heard him say at one point, “but only if you eat all your vegetables.” It was obvious the fraud was taking cues from the parents and scamming the kids with phony futures. It’s disheartening to see lies and corruption at a kid’s birthday, but it’s nothing surprising.
Then we played pass the parcel, in which everyone sits in a circle and passes around some shoddy gift wrapped in newspaper like a dead fish, and each time the music stops, whoever is holding the parcel removes a layer. It’s a game of greed and impatience. I caused a stir when I stopped the game to read the newspaper. There was a headline about an earthquake in Somalia: seven hundred dead. The children were screaming at me to pass it on, their bitter recriminations ringing in my ears. I tell you, children’s games are no joke. You can’t fool around. I passed the parcel to the next boy, but every time another layer was shed, I picked it up hoping to find out more about the earthquake. The other children didn’t care about the lives of seven hundred fellow human beings; they just wanted the gift. Finally it was revealed: a fluorescent green water pistol. The winner cheered. The losers cheered through clenched teeth.
The November sun was making us all sweat, so some children leapt into the clear blue swimming pool for a game of Marco Polo, wherein one child with eyes closed swims around trying to catch the children with eyes open. He shouts “Marco!” and they shout “Polo!” and if he says “Fish out of water!” and opens his eyes to see a child out of the pool that child becomes the poor sap who has to swim around with his eyes shut. I don’t know how it relates to the life and times of Marco Polo, but there seems to be a criticism in there somewhere.