The Candy House(10)
“She’s really smart,” he said. “She just learns differently.”
“She doesn’t have language, but she understands everything.”
“She’ll sit quietly and listen as long as you throw her one of these treats every few minutes.”
The ladies, whose curved fingernails had been lavished with the nuanced paintwork normally reserved for museum-quality surfboards, listened with barely repressed hilarity. “You want to enroll your dog in school,” one intoned, her mouth twitching.
“What happens when the other children want to bring their pets to school?” the other rejoined.
“Is she potty-trained? We can’t have anyone weeing on the floor…”
“Does she know her letters or her numbers?”
Alfred noticed the ladies exchanging crafty glances and began to smell a performative rat. After surreptitiously applying lipstick, one said, “All right, honey, we’ve got a whole line of people waiting outside. Time to break through that fourth wall.”
“What are you talking about?” Alfred asked, clutching Maple Tree to his chest.
“Is it on you, the satchel, or the dog?”
“I hope it’s the dog,” said the first. “I’ve been giving that puppy my best side.”
At the discovery that Alfred had no hidden camera with him to record the absurd encounter—that they’d just wasted twenty minutes humoring a dolt, with no prospect of YouTube fame—the ladies tossed him out on his ass.
Thus Alfred’s awakening to our Self-Surveillance Era.
Back in his room on West Twenty-eighth, he gazed despairingly into Maple Tree’s amber eyes. In this new world, rascally tricks were no longer enough to produce authentic responses; authenticity required violent unmasking, like worms writhing at the hasty removal of their rock. He needed to push people past their breaking points. Even Mr. Quiet Supremacy had a breaking point, as Alfred learned when his oldest brother called him at SUNY New Paltz in a drunken, anguished state during Alfred’s senior year—the first time he’d ever heard Miles sound hammered.
At the time, Miles was in his second year of law school at the University of Chicago and living with Jack Stevens, who had a job in banking. Their mother visited often—dating someone in Chicago, she told Miles, who liked that she kept the refrigerator stocked with fresh fruit. But the person she was sleeping with, it turned out, was Jack Stevens.
“Are you sure?” Alfred asked when Miles hurled this thunderbolt over the phone from a Holiday Inn he’d decamped to immediately upon discovering the truth.
“I can never think about high school again,” Miles slurred. “Or home. Everything is ruined. It’s… finished. Because it was all leading up to this.”
“Look,” said Alfred, thrust into the uncharacteristic role of Calming Agent, “it’s not like anyone died.”
“It is… One. Hundred. Percent. Like someone died,” Miles said, tightroping the words. “It’s like all of us died. You. Me. Mom. Dad.”
“What about Ames?” Alfred asked, in an effort at levity. They all had a tendency to forget Ames.
Miles’s enraged yell made him hold the phone away. “You don’t get it, Alf! You’re too weird, you’re like Mom. Nothing means anything to you.” And Miles began to weep, the first time Alfred could remember hearing his older brother cry. “They ruined everything,” Miles sobbed. “There’s nothing left.”
The next day, Alfred received an email from Miles: “Hey Alf, sorry about the emotionalism on the phone. Who would’ve taken me for a nostalgic? Life goes on. Yours, Miles.”
Miles didn’t speak to their mother for over a year, at which point her relationship with Jack had ended. In the eight years since, Jack Stevens’s name had not been spoken in Alfred’s hearing. But he’d heard Miles cry in pain, and treasured the memory.
In some middle school science class there had been a unit on pain. Scientists studying pain had to inflict it without causing bodily harm, which they did using cold; hands thrust into frigid water hurt unbearably but are not damaged. This detail had so fascinated Alfred that he’d filled a bucket with water and ice cubes in the family basement and held his forearms under the surface until their acute aching almost made him puke. Yet none of it left so much as a mark.
Not long after the Maple Tree pre-K debacle, Alfred heard a scream outside his West Twenty-eighth Street window—not a yelp or a cry but a full-throated shriek that swamped him with shivery fear. He sprinted outdoors and found a woman cradling a brown Labrador puppy that had slipped its leash and run amid the wheels of a truck before managing to bumble free unscathed. Alfred stared at the puppy and its owner. There had been volume, emergency, terror. But not even the dog was hurt.
3
Alfred began, on occasion, to scream in public: on the L train; in Times Square; at Whole Foods; at the Whitney. He can recall, with remarkable clarity (for someone who was screaming), the tableaux of chaotic reaction that followed, although these descriptions are curiously inert for the listener, like hearing someone recount a dream. The exception is Duane Reade on Union Square, because of what happened after: Escorted brusquely from the store by two security guards, Alfred encountered a girl whose look of rapt curiosity had stood out among the panicked shoppers inside. Now she leaned against a wall, apparently waiting for him.