The tall people surrounded the snacks, talking to keep others from talking. The boy sat beside the birdcage with a blanket over it and waited for a gap in the many khakied thighs to appear. What he wanted was to grab a handful of M&Ms to juggle in the pockets of his team-neutral baseball sweater, crush flat, and stick between bricks of the big wall behind school where they’d remain unnoticed for centuries, like secret messages for him only. He felt terribly bored, waiting.
They were gathered in the sort of Washington Heights cliffside condo his mother would see listed in the windows of real estate offices and sigh at. This is what the homes of administrators looked like, she’d told him on the bus, with their coverless velvet sofas and snack pantries and TVs with no backside and no fuzzy hum when you got too close to the screen.
His sister was in the other room putting dirty words in the Mad Libs with the vice-principal’s stepson who spoke like his jaws were glued shut. The boy didn’t like how they laughed at things that weren’t funny, so he’d left them alone.
Three people called him “big man,” and he memorized their faces so he could hate them in private later on.
The tall people had many opinions. They traded them and flung them about like yo-yos while his mother watched and hmmed in the gaps. They said things like, “the real war is in the classroom,” and, “I’ve met more than a few children better off left behind.” It seemed like a lot to keep in one’s head, all those opinions. The boy was always forgetting things: the difference between 7’s and S’s, the right way to say “library,” the time it took to get from synagogue to McDonald’s, the face you’re supposed to make when someone tells you their grandma’s house has burned down.
His father sat with the old ladies watching the news. He nodded at the things he agreed with and sipped his red wine when he disagreed.
“I wish I’d made more money,” said one of them when Jim Cramer came on. “More money, less kids. Just a hundred thou a year or so – a little something for a rainy day, that’s all.”
“But then you can’t unbake a cake,” said another. “Can you?”
“I remember the stickiness of hands. Children’s hands. Hands sticky like bees in spring. From the honey, I suppose. I can’t imagine anything so sticky the way the hands of kids could stick. You could never go anywhere with them with their hands like that, all sticky all the time. They don’t stick like that anymore, I should hope. But some things never change…”
“Speaking of cake.”
“Cake?”
“The stickiness of cake. Apple cake, to name just one example.”
“Cake… Do you smell cake?”
“And I remember men, real men… Once they wore no hats and now they wear too many. Have you noticed? And hardly ever a tie. Who could stand to look at them? Not to mention the children. With their pants all… you know, and their shirts… and whatnot. Don’t get me started on the– hold your horses, I smell burning.”
“Any more than usual?”
“No.”
“Then what’s the use in worrying?”
“You can’t unbake a cake, I say.”
“But who knows these days…”
Then something changed. A countdown clock appeared on the bottom of the screen and someone announced that the big show had begun. The tall people noticed and moved their conversation to the sofa.
The boy saw his opening. He crossed the room to the snack table. There, he found the table too wide for reaching the M&M bowl even with his arm stretched so far that the elbow crackled, so he went back for the stool.
On the screen, two hooded figures paraded a man in pajamas around a ring of green scaffolding. Round and round they went, like a game of Monopoly.
All noise had vanished but for the mournful screech of the budgie in its blanket tomb and the faint giggles down the hall. No one would look at anyone else. Together, they watched alone.
Back across the room, the boy placed the stool ever so delicately against the table’s edge. He climbed it rung by rung then balanced his knees on the hard top disk. It wobbled beneath him but he knew it would hold steady enough for his purpose.
The pajama man had risen too. The figures were gone and he stood alone on an altar fit just for him, roped to a pole at its center. He was like a puppet with one string.
The boy grabbed M&Ms by the fistful and pocketed them as quickly and quietly as his fingers would allow. He counted them until he lost the number and started again at eight, his favorite.
The pajama man remained still for minutes, yet this didn’t seem to bother the tall people. It made the boy think of how his mother looked at those poem posters on the subway, like she’d gone somewhere unseen where he dared not follow. It made him lonely to be with her then, though he couldn’t say it out loud.
His pockets were nearly full, but there was room enough for a few macadamia nuts with which to test the crushing power of his newish light-up sneakers. If he could only reach that last bowl, just a little bit further…
The pajama man began to speak.
It was then the stool slid out from under the boy and he landed belly first onto the table. He could feel the heat of angry eyes flashing upon him. He knew he had to find a way down without making a mess, but it was no use. He kicked his legs over the side to break his fall and in seconds the thing which had once seemed so solid groaned and shimmied and flipped him over into a miserable heap of crudités and sauces, chips and cured meats, candies and cookies, dozens upon dozens of deviled eggs and ants on logs. For a moment, he was what they couldn’t look away from.
“Goddamn kid’s a terror, Liz.”
Then the moment ended and he was slumped on his father’s shoulder and halfway to the bathroom, noiselessly sobbing.
His father sat him in the bath and removed his sweater, shirt, and shoes. He wet a monogrammed hand towel in the sink and cleaned the mess from his yellow curls and his puffy red face. His father’s motions were silent and methodical. When he looked at the boy it was fleeting, without intention. Shame had taken him from his body. There was nothing the boy could say to bring him back. He wanted his father to turn the faucet until the water became so hot it would melt him to drops which would flow down the drain and twist and babble underneath the city many long years before at last he found his true home in the great green ocean.
There was a knock at the door and his father left for a while. It was his mother on the other side, the boy was certain.
Sitting alone, he saw a future where all this was far behind him. He would be nobody’s spectacle. He would deny all urges and desires until there were none left to deny. His life would become mere performance, a lie told to gain the favor of those taller and more important than him. No one would ever know him too much. He saw himself alone in a windowless studio apartment somewhere, comparing one list of numbers to another while music played from the room above. He heard the music grow so loud it rattled the leaves of the plastic plant gone a fuzzy gray from years of dust undusted. He saw himself with his eyes on the broomstick in the corner, too scared to get up and use it. He watched regrets suffuse his heart like rust upon a bell, never to ring again.
When his father returned, his glasses were gone and his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow. He sat on the floor with his back to the tub, head level with the boy’s.
“When we go back in there, I’ll have to say I hit you. Do you understand?”
“You’re gonna hit me? Where?”
His father turned around. In the widening shadows of his eyes the boy sensed a fear entirely unlike his own.
“No, I’m not going to hit you. But we need the others to think I did. If anybody asks.”
“How come?”
He paused.
“Because this isn’t our home, son. These are… the things that are done, here.”
He took the boy’s head in his hands and put his lips to his wet forehead. The boy recoiled from him. His father looked away. He’d never done that before. He’d never do it again.
Then he dressed his son and led him by the hand out of the bathroom and into the parlor. All was as it had been before: the tall people around the wreck of the table and the old ladies by the TV. One was crying, or maybe yawning. A cake had been put out with the face of the pajama man on it, two scooped holes where eyes should’ve been. The same ugly giggling and chittering the boy could no longer bear. They all looked so small to him now, so pale and hollow.
The boy sat by the window and laid his head on the cool glass. He watched the waves roll past, tiny and gray and sharp like knives in the distance. He saw gulls circle down towards oblivion.
“So?” asked his father.
“They killed him. What’d you expect?”
“And that’s that.”
“That’s that.”