So one day, toward the end of that spring, he ushered Helen into his bedroom. He was going to do it. He really was going to do it.
"Helen," he said. "May I introduce the Oz people." He pointed to each one of them in turn. "The Lion. The Tin Man…"
He couldn't finish. Panic overcame him. Helen gasped and covered her mouth. He looked at her arms and the very fine, pale down on them. Helen stared at him, grinning, eyes wide. She knew what was happening. She knew that Jonathan thought the Oz people were really there. Jonathan tried to say something else, but the words stuck.
Helen squealed, hand over her mouth, and turned and ran. Disturbance seemed to follow her, swept in a spiral like a dust storm. It spun out of the doorway of Jonathan's bedroom, taking something with it.
Jonathan turned back to the corner of the room. There was no one there. He saw that there was no one there, that there never had been anyone there.
Shame covered him like darkness. Helen would know. Helen would tell. "Sissy," her brother called him. And he was a sissy, to make up people who were not there.
His room had been stripped bare of magic. It consisted now only of his parents' cast-off chest of drawers, the trampolined bed, some toys in which he had no interest. His room was devoid of interest. So were the grass and the trees beyond. It was this stark world from which he had been trying to hide.
He wanted to break every single toy, wrench off their heads, their butterflies on wires; he wanted to tear up all his books and rip to shreds all his drawings, everything he loved that was so thin and frail, and which could not defend him. The rage seemed to rise up into his eyes as an ache. He was blinded by anger, rising up in his gorge to choke him, overwhelming and complete. There was nothing that could satisfy it, but himself. He broke himself. He took the self he had been and broke it again and again. He called himself all the names he could think of: stupid idiot dope nincompoop sissy crybaby brat. Worm. He called himself a worm and seemed to see himself crushing himself underfoot. He stood absolutely still, with his elbow wrapped around his eyes. Then, very suddenly, he flung it away from his face and glared.
The world was diminished. It was smaller, duller, and he was unutterably bored by it. He didn't want to play with his crayons, his coloring book, his papers, his toys, his stupid plasticine. He prowled the field of his vision like a caged beast, restless, made aged and jaded and grim. He was five years old.
Helen's family moved away shortly afterward, to Brampton. In those days, there was a vast expanse of farmland between Corndale and Brampton. It seemed a long way away.
Jonathan was relieved. He and Helen had stopped playing together and her older brother was even more of a menace. Jonathan knew now that he would have to learn how to fight. He would have to learn how to throw a ball and to win at games. He was not a little boy any longer.
But one afternoon, just before they moved, Helen came running to Jonathan's house, calling his name over and over. It was an act of unexpected kindness. She wanted him to come out and look at the rainbow.
She rushed up the path, her pageboy bob flapping into her eyes and stains around her mouth. Jonathan sat disconsolately on his front steps.
"Jonny, Jonny, there's a rainbow!"
Jonathan had once yearned to see rainbows. He had seen them in storybooks, where they were short and thick and made of the brightest colors. Sitting there on the front steps, Jonathan was surprised by a tearful yearning for color, as bright as books.
He leapt up from the steps and ran down the artificial hill to meet her. "Where? Where?" he called.
They were suddenly friends, real friends, united in mutual excitement. "Up there! Up there!" Helen jumped up and down, over and over, pointing to the sky.
"I can't see it! I can't see it!" Jonathan cried.
As if infected by him, the rainbow disappeared for Helen as well. She walked backward, scowling. "Maybe you can't see it from here," she said. She led him running back to her house, back to the place where she had seen it. They ran up her drive and around the back and up the wobbly, unpainted wooden steps that led to the back door. The steps formed a kind of landing, high off the ground, above the deep foundations.
"There it is," said Helen, her arm pointing over Jonathan's shoulder. She jabbed her finger at it over and over. "There! There! There!"
Jonathan was being stupid again. How stupid could he get? He scanned the sky, trying to see something very short, an arch made of paint-set reds and greens and blues, all in sharply defined bands, as he remembered them.
"Cantcha see it, Jonny?" asked Helen's mother, Mrs. Quicke. She came out of her kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. She leaned on the railings, a thin, worn woman with long hair pulled back in the fashion of ten years before. She wore glasses and had bad teeth.
"It's there, just keep lookin'," Mrs. Quicke said, with the rough, kind foreignness of someone else's mother.
"I can't see it," whispered Jonathan, as if in exile. Later, he would recall seeing dimly a wispy yellowish trail across the sky, like smoke.
Jonathan couldn't see the red or the orange; he couldn't see the green or the mauve. He could only see a brownish streak of mist and the blue beyond it.
Jonathan had become color-blind.
For him, green and red were muddled into a grayish brown. He no longer played with his box of fifty-two Crayola crayons. Color no longer sang to him. He could see no difference between blue and purple, between pink and gray. The world had become as dim for him as Oz on TV.
Jonathan became a good little boy. He did everything he was told. He called people "Sir" and said "please" and "thank you." Old ladies were enchanted. He went to school for the first time in autumn and was badly beaten up the first day by a gang of older boys. They had been waiting for him. It was the price of feeling superior.
In the photographs taken after that, Jonathan looked watchful and wary, suspicious and very adult. The good little boy only looked good in photographs in which he was scowling. His smiles were twisted, cheesy and false.
In life, he was timid and silent around others, embarrassed and awkward if made the center of attention. He was always ashamed of himself-of his clumsiness, of his many fears, of his fantasies, of all the things that made him inadequate. The things he enjoyed, he did in secret. He rocked surreptitiously at night. He dreamed surreptitiously, after memorizing his homework. He earned straight A's. His teachers wrote in his reports that he was socially backward.
Jonathan became a fan of horror movies. He watched them on TV every Saturday afternoon with another boy who eventually grew up to be a sadomasochist. The other boy would beat Jonathan, even at age eight, across the bottom, and Jonathan would bear it, for the same reason that he would bear the horror movies.