The Candy House(11)
“What were you doing in there?” she asked, the very question thrilling Alfred. Most people would have said he’d been screaming, but Kristen had seen beyond that.
Over latkes and hot apple tea at Veselka, Alfred explained his screaming project. Kristen’s enormous pale blue eyes blinked at him like the wide-open beaks of baby birds as she listened. She was twenty-four, still in the adventure phase of her move to New York City to work for a graphic design firm. Alfred was almost twenty-nine.
“How often does it happen?” she asked. “The yelling. On average.”
“I prefer ‘screaming,’?” Alfred said. “Sometimes twice in a week. Sometimes not for a couple of months. Overall… maybe twenty times a year?”
“Do you do it with friends?”
“Most people can’t tolerate it.”
“Family?”
“Zero tolerance. That’s a direct quote.”
“As in, someone used the phrase ‘zero tolerance’ to address the issue of your screaming?”
“As in, they used it all together in an intervention to address the issue of my screaming.”
“Wow. What happened?”
“I see less of them.”
“Because you can’t scream?”
“Because it depresses me to know they’re using phrases like ‘craves negative attention’ to explain my project.”
“Families,” Kristen said with a roll of her beautiful eyes. Then she asked, “Do you? Crave negative attention?”
The café had mostly emptied and the apple tea had gone cold. Alfred sensed that his answer was important. He was vaguely aware of having left out the need he felt to scream at times, like an urge to yawn or sneeze. He hoped this went without saying.
“Actually, it’s the opposite,” he said. “I put up with negative attention in exchange for something else that matters more.”
Kristen watched him alertly.
“Authenticity,” he said, unfurling the word like an ancient, holy scroll. He almost never uttered it, lest overuse diminish its power. “Genuine human responses rather than the made-up crap we serve each other all day long. I’ve sacrificed everything for that. I think it’s worth it.”
He was encouraged by Kristen’s look of fascination. “Do you do it during sex?” she asked.
“Never,” he said, then added, with heady boldness, “That’s a promise.”
* * *
Eight months later, Alfred and Kristen were passengers on an Avis bus at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, en route to pick up their rental car. The bus was jammed with people trying not to topple against each other as it pitched around curls of highway and swerved to yet another stop to take on more passengers. Alfred and Kristen stood near the back.
A familiar tickle rose in Alfred. He tried to suppress it; after all, he was bringing his possibly (hopefully) serious girlfriend to a gathering at Miles’s home to celebrate the christening of his second child. Their mother was flying in, and the plan was for Alfred and Kristen to stay at Miles’s house and sightsee in Chicago for the weekend, including an exhibit of Japanese anime at the Art Institute that Kristen was dying to see. But invoking Miles made the ticklish urge impossible to repress.
Alfred released a short, ambiguous spurt of sound somewhere between a moan and a bark. Even Kristen, attuned by now to his screaming and well past the point of finding it charming, wasn’t entirely sure he’d been the source. Only when she saw his face—the single face devoid of curiosity—did her blue eyes contract into a threat. But Alfred was already savoring the two opposing forces at work in his fellow passengers: a collective wish to shrug off the unaccountable sound, and a contrary intimation of dread. Thus the Suspension Phase, when everyone floated together on a tide of mystery whose solution Alfred alone possessed. He could have stopped there—had, on rare occasions when mystery and power alone had felt like enough. But not today. When mystery deliquesced into renewed bitching over the cramped ride, Alfred issued a second moan-bark: longer, louder, and impossible to ignore.
Now came the Questioning Phase, when everyone within range (except Kristen, who stared fixedly ahead) tried, discreetly, to assess the nature of his complaint. Had the sound been inadvertent, best met with polite oblivion? Or was it a cry of distress? Thus preoccupied, his fellow passengers fell into a childlike state of reception that was breathtaking to behold. They forgot that they could be seen. Alfred basked in their unselfconscious wonderment while also sucking in breath to the brink of explosion; then he disgorged the contents of his lungs in an earsplitting emission that was part roar, part shriek, which he drove like a stake into the unguarded faces around him. He howled like a wolf howling at the moon, except he wasn’t looking up, he was looking out at his fellow travelers, whose panic, horror, and attempts to escape evoked the hysterics of passengers on an airplane plunging nose-first into the sea.
To observe such extremes in the absence of any real threat was not a delight. It was not a pleasure. It was a revelation. And once a person had had that revelation, he returned to daily life awakened to the fact that beneath its bland surface there gushed a hidden tumult. And no sooner had that awareness begun to fade than the seeker longed, with mounting urgency, to witness again that coursing cataract. Why else did Renaissance painters keep painting Christ on the cross (to use an example of Alfred’s) and only in the distant background add diminutive folk hunched under loads of rocks and hay? Because transcendent death is what people want to see—not the hauling of heavy loads! And Alfred had found a way to achieve that revelation whenever he wanted without having to die, or kill anyone else!