Theo E-Book

Ed Taylor

• Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Ten-year-old Theo lives with his grandfather and a minder in a vast, decrepit Long Island mansion said to have inspired The Great Gatsby. His English father, a world famous rock musician, spends most of the year away on tour. His mother, beautiful and fragile, drifts in and out of his life amid bouts of rehab. Alone for much of the time, Theo takes refuge in his attic bedroom, among his collection of live butterfly pupas and the tales of piratical adventure that fire his imagination. Then, a fax arrives: 'Reef the mainsail.' It seems Theo's father is coming home to record a new album, and he's planning to stay the whole summer. Along with the rest of the band, managers, PR people, agents, and countless hangers-on good, bad and downright ugly . . . Over two life-changing days, Theo captures the mind and voice of a ten-year-old boy at the far edge of innocence. At once a tender coming-of-age story and an exploration of the radioactive effects of the rich and famous on those who love them, it peels away the image to look into the dark heart of fame and fortune.

Leseprobe

Theo

Ed Taylor

Dedicated to Steve Street, dikiy muzhchina

the music, it was

the onliest thing.

– Sidney Bechet

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraphone.two.three.four.Copyright

one.

what sticks to memory, often,

are those odd little fragments

that have no beginning

and no end.

– Tim O’Brien

Theo surfaces on his back and sits up, netted in white sheets cool and slightly ocean-damp, the dream before him, a scrim he sees through as behind it are the things in his room: the wall, the window, his stuff, all behind his father in a hotel room, with an eyepatch, and a model train track on the bed in a figure eight, and a knock on the door and a man in a blue uniform in a weird hat and Theo asking him, are you the conductor and now Theo awake in one place that’s two.

He flops back down, the mattress bouncing a little, not sure of anything for a minute, then is asleep again, and his teeth are falling out. He is sitting at a table in a place like a bar, he’s been to bars before with adults, there is music, and adults stare at him, and he wiggles his front tooth with his tongue. He reaches in and pulls and the tooth comes loose and others cascade onto his tongue, just fall out. They clack like plastic, but the teeth are small and sandy looking, or sugary, grainy, and a little yellow. They look like candy. He looks up to tell someone, there is a man next to him. But words won’t come out, just sounds, like an animal. He gets up from the table and tries to talk, but no words come out, just noises, and the people turn away from him: and then he wakes up again, remembering his dad’s on tour.

Australia is so far away they have different days there. He wants to go: Australia has interesting animals. His dad said, we’ll go mate, last time he came. Theo isn’t sure when that was; before the tour, so it was months ago.

Everything else is waiting for his dad. Theo waits. He’s getting better at it since he turned ten. Sometimes he forgets what he’s waiting for.

He looks out the window and it’s just blue. He hears nothing but birds; he knows robins, wrens, sparrows, thrushes, gulls, some wind. He’s got a good ear, his dad says. Down past the terrace and the gazebo and the old pool and the rectangle that was a tennis court and the slanting back lawn is the beach. He thinks he can hear it, the ocean; he’s on a ship. In a cabin. He has to go to the bathroom.

He untangles himself from bed and shuffles to the window, yawning so hard his eyes water. The sun’s low and big, white bright, everything else gold early. Past the trees the white on the ocean is stairs. Waves. People surf on them, but not here. Is riding a wave like riding an animal. He doesn’t think it would be like riding a horse, he’s ridden a horse. If you watch the waves you can see how each one’s different, and alive.

He takes off his pajama bottoms, stands at the window looking down and out, no wind, it’s quiet, only the birds. The tiny ones he knows are called tits. Tits.

He thrusts himself out the opened window, and lets loose. He watches his stream, a thin glass braid that frays and turns into little beads by the time it gets to the second floor, then it’s like rain. He’s at the very top of the house. On a mountain. If he jumped he’d get hurt. His head feels clean and empty.

No people sounds. The air’s warm. Standing there he remembers the winter, when they didn’t go downstairs for a while.

All the warm rooms were on the third floor, the living room with the fireplace and Gus’s room and Colin’s room. So they just stayed up there and burned things and opened cans, wrapped in blankets to go to one of the bathrooms. Then a morning he was bored Theo wrestled his arms into his overcoat and went out in the hall and down the freezing wide back stairs, carpet chewed, and there were crystals on the kitchen floor, white and shiny, blowing in, and down the hall toward the front door, the drifts curling and curving and Gus or Colin, probably Colin, had forgotten to close the front door and the white was inside, the white sky and the paired front doors’ opening was rounded with snow at the bottom, snow blown in and everywhere, the whole first floor, snow on floors and walls, piled on paneling, everything, and tracks in a place the wind hadn’t gotten – maybe a fox. Walking from room to room the windows were thick and you couldn’t see through them, and snow everywhere, blown and dusted, lucky the rooms were so empty, and Theo started running and kicking through the white dunes, until he couldn’t feel his feet in his sneakers and his bare hands. He knew he had gloves, somewhere. Maybe Gus could tell him.

In the sunny window now, Theo tugs on his pajama bottoms and laboriously ties the drawstring in a bow, concentrating. Then he turns from the window and toward the door, across the attic. The space is huge, and he’s put his mattress against a wall so he won’t feel lost. He walks past the nicked piano bench on which he arranged old photographs and letters and programs and postcards from the corrugated boxes and rusty trunks up there, left by previous residents of the house. It was an old house, like the last two.

The black and white photos are of people at the house a long time ago, around the pool when it worked, and at the gazebo; pictures of parties, of people in the rooms. He showed Gus and Colin the stuff he’d found after he moved into the attic, and they went crazy.

Gus, would you look at this. Holy fecking Jesus, that’s Frank Sinatra. It’s the bleeding Rat Pack, Dean Martin, and there’s Peter Lawford. He married a Kennedy, for God’s sake. Look at these other mokes – Colin flicked at the photograph with a painted nail. That was one of the days when he painted his nails and wore things that girls wore, like hairbands and make-up.

Those other fellows look like they might have some Sicilian blood.

It is the bleeding Gatsby mansion, after all.

I’m sure the agents say that about every house here.

No, I feel it, man, there be dragons. There’s ghosts walking. There’s blood, too, I’m telling you, matey.

That’s enough. Gus snorted and frowned – you need a tighter leash.

Gus had frowned at Colin and cut his eyes toward Theo, made that face. The don’t-forget-about-Theo face. Gus was Theo’s grandfather. But sometimes Theo was glad Colin forgot. He wasn’t a baby, he was ten years old.

Theo’s favorite photograph, scalloped around the edges, showed a band playing in the gazebo, and people dancing, men and women together, on what looked like a nice day, but black and white. The band was all men and they wore white jackets, and one man had a baton, like an orchestra conductor, and all the men looked alike, the band and the dancers, their hair was short and dark and slicked back, and the women all had short hair but not slicked back, and everyone not in the band was wearing white too, white suits and shoes, and there were a boy and a girl dancing too, at the lower corner of the photograph, both dressed like the grownups. A lady sat on the steps of the gazebo, watching everyone, and petting a white dog that had its tongue out. Even in the middle of everything, the dog was just a dog, with a dog expression on its face, kind of hopeful looking, Theo thought. Just enjoying the woman petting him, and maybe even though this was a big important party and maybe the lady would have to get up and help run the party or talk to strangers and make them feel welcome, or just get bored and leave, and maybe the dog would fret a little among so many strangers, it still wasn’t worried. Everything will be okay, it seemed to believe.

Theo’s round stomach pokes out as he navigates the wide plain of the attic. The dresser’s looking at him, a long drawer open with a tongue of shirt hanging out. He walks the cool wood to the round rug island, which he dragged like a big pancake all the way up from the first floor. Now there are moths, tiny ones that dissolve when touched; they are made of dust. Theo felt bad the first time he touched one and it became just a smudge. He likes having them up there.

He has also moved his butterflies from his previous room, and stuck the branches in the spaces between the ceiling boards.

His dad had sent the butterflies in the spring. One day eleven boxes addressed to him from London arrived at the house. Colin was gone, Gus was asleep.

Each box was full of leafy branches with pupas on them like fruit, packed in Styrofoam and wet white padding. Theo knew his father had an office in London because things would come from there, and phone calls sometimes. There was a heavy envelope in one box, from Hotel La Mamounia, Marrakech.

hey pal alright – you & me both like to watch things grow & we both like SURPRISES/ see what pops out of these/like xmas crackers except MUCH better – be SURE & WRITE me/anything you send to office in ny or londontown will get to me ok ok

love & kisses on ya beautiful head

ps/take care of yourself love

There were drawings and doodles around the edges, a flower and something that looked like an antelope or gazelle, and big zigzags. His dad had turned the paper sideways to write on it, in green ink.

Theo had a book about insects so he read and decided to stick the branches up in his room. Then when he changed rooms he moved the forest with him. It has been thirty-seven days. He counted. The pupas look like the skate purses washing up on the beach, leathery and dead. He knows egg, larva, pupa, adult. He knows imago is another name for adult and means ready to lay eggs, to reproduce. Sexual maturity it is called.

Theo has to be careful – sometimes walking around thinking about something he gets poked by a branch. He also knows the pupas should be in enclosed containers but the attic could be a big jar and he hopes that is good enough.

Theo walks around, closely looking at them now, skirting obstacles on the floor, his own and the stored things from previous owners. He pushes his hair out of his eyes to see better. Colin cut it last month so that it’s not too much in the way; just trimming back the undergrowth, he called it, squinting from behind a cigarette, scissors shaking in his hand. Sometimes Theo gets nervous, but Colin hasn’t yet cut him. So Theo sits quiet and motionless while it happens. His hair is over his shoulders and down his back, and he’s had it pulled at school and had gum thumbed into it and glue poured into it.

It’s beautiful, his mother says, always running her fingers through it. She likes it long. To Theo it’s hot and in the way. And his face flushes when he thinks about school and the boys in his class. He thinks about the walk to class, in Manhattan, and his heart pounds still. He thinks about the wall where boys scribbled stuff at the hard playground, like a road with swing sets on it, the wall near the street and how words would get written and then the next day they’d be gone under new paint not quite the same color. The writing spread elsewhere too, under the slides and swing seats, Sharpies and pens, Mike sucks dicks Kings rule Peter pussy eater Theo is a pussy Stackpole is a fucking faggot, students and teachers. Adrian K fucks boys. He didn’t want to go, and his mother said it was okay, so he stopped. Then he didn’t live with his mother anymore, or in the city. He lived with Colin and Gus, out here, but not in the same house. Different houses. They’ve been in this one a while now, longer than the others.

He tries not to think about school but can’t stop. Sometimes it wakes him up. Dreams. When he lived with his mom in the city and stopped going they visited people, slept late. He slept in lots of different beds, drifting off to the sounds of music and voices. He wants safe hair, hair no one notices. But his mom notices, smiles.

Theo unlocks the attic door and walks out, closing the door behind him. His hand slides on the warm darkwood rail as he walks down the top stairs, being quiet, because it’s early and he wants to get outside before anyone notices him. It’s a long way down, there are 113 stairs to the first floor – he likes to count them. Numbers feel good, it feels good to say them, and they fill the spaces in his head and keep other things out. So he counts, passing down out of the gabled peak of the sprawling house, moving down through the fourth floor landing and the tricycles and mannequins that Colin dressed up in old-time clothes, ratty gold and crimson with tassels and braid, and the long halls called wings on each side, rows of rooms; probably no one up here, Theo thinks, but stays quiet anyway. He’s a prisoner escaping. If he makes it out, he’ll save the world.

Going down a monster’s throat, must find a way out – light slashes in through the windows at the end of each hall; eyes letting in the light, inside a giant. Down the curving stair, watching for splinters under his right hand. Forty treads on the left staircase, wide enough that he has to stretch to take each in a single step and the risers high enough that he hops to keep to single steps.

He keeps going, past the ‘art is anything you can get away with’ painted on the third floor by somebody one weekend. They said he was a graffiti artist, but graffiti was supposed to be bad so how could you be an artist of it. Between the third and second floors each step is painted a different color, another project by one of his mother’s friends. As he makes the turn at the landing he passes a tiny city, or what looks like a city to Theo, little towers of clay built on the flat part in front of the big window over the front doors. Now Theo’s inside an oak, spiraling down. When he’s out and looks back he’ll be seeing a huge tree. That’s where he lives.

No sounds. Where are the dogs. Usually Paz curls outside his door, and the other two hear Theo descending in the morning, his thumps and sniffs and slaps at the railings, his sometimes muttering, and whistling sometimes. Not now, however: he is trying to avoid waking anything, including the sleeping giant. He slips down the last big set of stairs like walking in a movie, with faded red carpet that spills down starting at the second floor balcony and then runs in a stream of wine down and into the middle of the black and white tiles under the big chandelier: like antlers except it has ladies’ underwear, leis, fishing line, a shirt, a long beaded necklace, a scarf, a bicycle chain, a leathery banana peel, an orange paper kite, hanging. The bulbs don’t light anymore.

He’s down and onto the cool tiles.

Theo navigates among the tall things standing, Colin’s chessmen made of drift wood and suitcases and plastic junk. Theo moves toward the front doors, through dust floating in the gold sun from the leaded glass beside the front doors. He’s underwater, holds his breath. Gus usually puts a big piece of wood against the back of the doors to keep them shut at night, but he must have forgotten. Floor here is cooler, and grabbing a knob in each hand, Theo strains to open both doors at the same time. The heavy black slabs move, but slowly, and he has to keep pulling, backing up.

A silver car sits on the marble entrance steps. At the top of the steps the car’s silver hood and grill and fender come to a point in the middle and stick out more at the top than the bottom: to Theo it’s a shark.

That’s what he heard last night. His mother is here.

Other cars sleep on the grass and along the gravel drive at angles. He notices the blue edge of something under the silver car’s front bumper. Theo lowers himself to a knee and ducks sideways to look. Another cake box, with red ribbon. And a teddy bear. And a yellow plastic toy guitar neck sticking out from under the left front wheel. More offerings.

The last time, his mother fussed when he told her he’d eaten some of the cake that had been left – it could be poisoned, you just don’t know with these people. Promise me you won’t do that again.

Theo said yes, his face cupped in his mother’s hands, her face inches from his, her eyes starry and dark. It was hard to say no to her when she was close like that, her eyes so big. But later when she’d vanished again he’d eaten a bite of cake, because he was hungry. And nothing happened.

Colin had then found that cake, where Theo had set it in the scullery, and Colin grabbed fistfuls and tamped cake into his mouth until there was no room, then he found the dogs curled on a sofa and tried to make the dogs eat some. Uninterested, they patiently stayed and allowed Colin to try, but shyly kept turning their heads. Colin stuck fingers in the back of Alex’s jaw like pushing a button to open and managed to get a pink hunk onto Alex’s tongue, but Alex shook his head and the wet cake slumped into a mound now dried and gray on one of the sofas. Theo couldn’t remember which one.

At the silver car now Theo slides the box out from under, smelling the car smell of things he just knew as car, warming in the sun. He unties the ribbon, flips open the box, crouching. The cake is red, with icing piped in swirls and curves, and words Theo knows are French, and pictures. An icing guitar, and an icing skull.

He pushes the box out of the way and reaches under the car for the bear, on which a little greasy fluid dripped. It has a ribbon, pink, and a little T-shirt that says ‘rock n roll.’ He stares at the toy guitar fretboard, a small arm reaching out from under the fat black tire. When his mother leaves, he can collect the guitar and put it with the other things.

It has been a week since the last offering. Things appear in a variety of locations, occasionally on the back terrace, sometimes at the foot of a tree, but mostly on the front steps. Early one morning Theo had awoken and threaded his way down the long stairs and through the back hall toward the house’s rear and across the ballroom, the leaning motorbike’s bright lime-green against the far dark wall, Theo’s head swirling and light feeling and still mossy with sleep, and he saw a man in a tuxedo outside on the terrace laying a bunch of red roses in the middle of the tiles, alongside a black bottle with a cork. Theo walked to the French doors and stood, while the man carefully finished, then noticed Theo. He bowed, and turned, and walked toward the trees and the ocean. Theo walked out behind him, watching the man get smaller and disappear into the dense wiry low forest that stood up against the ocean and the storms and wind and salt just behind the dune line. The man had also left a book that said Les Fleurs du Mal. Theo yawned, and his eyes watered. He stood for a while until he began to sway, and wandered back in and up the stairs and back to bed. When he came down later, Colin sat cross-legged on the terrace drinking out of the black bottle and wearing a wide Mexican hat made out of straw.

He’s got the wrong celebrity map. He thinks he’s visiting Poe’s grave. But champagne cognac, he’s got excellent taste. It’s one of the side benefits of being a priest in this particular temple, eh.

What.

Nothing, my friend. Why don’t we go fishing today.

Sure.

Theo squinted up into the sun and down at Colin, the hat big as an umbrella. Then Colin had forgotten about fishing and gotten into a sword fight with somebody Theo’d never seen before who burst out of a room, and Theo then spent the day in the trees, reading and listening to the ocean.

Theo leaves the thick house doors open; the car looks like it wants in, and they are wide enough. He threads his way back through the chess field and then up the left staircase to the second floor, thumping on the carpet, a bleached color with an old design but still sponge-thick. Theo keeps his hand on the banister all the way, feeling the cool red-brown, not thinking much. He reaches the top and turns left, where his mom usually ends up.

His mother often came with gifts for him: animals, candy, things she thought were pretty like rocks or pictures, hats, clothes, toys from places like Peru or Thailand, puppets, and sometimes weird stuff. An ashtray, a napkin from a restaurant, hotel shampoo, a piece of pizza, a record, a fistful of guitar picks, a drawing of her by somebody else – once with no clothes on – a feather, a flower. He figured that was when she was high. He knew what high was, knew what drunk was. It was a way people were, just like happy or sad. He also knew about bail, hearings, possession, depression, institutionalization.

His mother never brought anything for Gus or Colin: she didn’t like them, although she’d never said this to Theo. He just knew.

Are you mad at Gus and Colin.

No darling, why.

You act like it all the time.

No, my love, I like them. Gus is your grandfather and a man deserving of respect. A respectable and upright man, just as Colin is.

His mother’s accent was different than his dad’s. He knew she’d been born in Hungary but she said she grew up all over Europe and so, she said, she sounded like everywhere and nowhere. She called herself a pirate, said she and his father were part of the pirate nation. Theo didn’t know what that meant, really.

People at school made fun of Theo’s accent, which they said was faggy. Fag. Faggot. Which his dad said was a cigarette. Theo had lived in England, Jamaica, and America so far. And other people’s houses and hotels.

God help me, I’m starting to sound American, his mother said.

Is that bad.

His mother had laughed out a cloud of cigarette smoke. For your sake, I tolerate the place, my love. But there are better places to be.

Like where.

She exhaled again. That is a good question. If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go.

He couldn’t really think of a place: what were the choices. He didn’t know. Every place seemed mostly the same so far.

I’d like to go to the bottom of the ocean.

She squinted at him, stubbing out the cigarette. That’s an interesting choice. Could I come too.

He shrugged. Sure. Maybe Gus and Colin could come. And his dad maybe, in a big glass ball.

Why do you want to go there.

I wouldn’t have to go to school.

He sort of knew what would happen if he said that, but he did anyway. She started crying. Oh baby. She pulled him into a hug, jangling with bracelets. She always wore a lot of things and he couldn’t separate her from the sounds she made when she moved.

She had the smell. Sometimes he didn’t know, she might seem okay, whether she was okay or not, until he smelled the smell. Then he would know. Colin and Gus had the smell a lot, and many of the people who came to the house. There were different smells but they all meant pretty much the same thing.

She cried a lot, and laughed a lot, and screamed, and punched and kicked, and danced, and staggered, and snored, and fell, and jumped – once from an upper hall landing and broke her ankle. He hadn’t seen that, only heard the sounds and cried. He wondered what had made her jump, and whether he had anything to do with it, or with the way she acted. He didn’t know, and he wasn’t sure who to ask.

Now this morning Theo walks the long secondfloor hall, strewn with clothes and shoes, a bowling ball like Jupiter, swirly and pink, stopped against a door – he hasn’t seen that before. At the distant end of the hall, in front of the big curved windows that remind Theo of churches from movies, pokes the silhouette of a big stuffed bird that he knows is an emu. His mother usually stays on this wing, but not always in the same room, and Theo doesn’t like opening doors unless he knows who is in the room. So he walks, and listens. He hears something and turns: Alex has dragged himself up the stairs and, panting, follows Theo. Theo stops to scratch Alex’s wiry head, bumpy with warts, but keeps listening. He hears ahead the sex noise. He knows what sex is, and he knows what it sounds like. He keeps walking down the hall, Alex tottering behind, to where the noise is. Noises. Two rooms. He stands outside, between the rooms, listening. He feels funny, and kind of hollow. He also gets stiff, and knows about that. He doesn’t want the noise to be his mother, but he doesn’t want to find out. He listens longer, then scuffs back down the hall making more noise, hitting his hand along the wall as he walks, holding his hand on his pajamas. Alex pants behind him.

Someone may wake up, but Theo hopes not yet. Behind him down the hall a voice now sings, somewhere; muffled, hard to tell if it is a man or woman. Something in it makes Theo think: Mom. And he makes a face and runs, getting to the stairs and thumping down them, running down the stairs. The last time she smiled and flicked it with a finger, kissed him on the cheek and said it’s okay, love, a beautiful natural thing. That was awful.

Colin, somewhere below, is yodeling.

Gazebo, Theo thinks.

Theo keeps flapping down on the carpet, to the cool tiles of the entry hall, feet now slapping like fish, he likes the sound, and toward the swung-open tall slab doors and over the car hood, scrambling and out and down the stone steps and onto the gravel bit ouchouchouch like on hot pavement and onto the grass, moist because the sun hasn’t reached this side yet, but everything is light, and he runs to the right down the line of windows and the wild bushes crazy with flowers and stems sticking out and untrimmed and reaches the edge of the wing and goes right again and past more windows, running, and the trees are getting bigger, and he dodges a rusty bike he had forgotten about and runs into the rear lawn and toward the gazebo and there’s a naked guy sitting in it, cross-legged. The man has long hair and a sharp face and something’s wrong with his arms. They stop at the elbows. And he’s naked, and his eyes are closed. Theo stops running.

New people always showed up: his mother brought them home or they followed her. Sometimes they were friends of Colin or, very occasionally, of his father. These he liked best; he liked them because they knew his father and being around them was a little like being around his father.

His mother attracted people, collected people, like pets. She called herself a broker, sometimes, said she should get a cut, she bridged worlds, that was her art, she said, a waving cigarette veiling her face as she talked to Theo sleepy in bed, him waking with her stroking his face, smiling lopsidedly at him, or crying. Sometimes, however, what she collected wasn’t nice like that; when they wanted things and took stuff or got loud or pushed and she let them. Sometimes she screamed at them, hit them, got other people to hit them: he’d heard it. He’d seen her point guns.

It wasn’t always clear what the rules were, what you had to do to make her mad. Theo believed it mostly depended on how long it had been since his dad’s last stopover. Sometimes it happened after drinks and amber bottles with medicine labels and small ceramic boxes with flip tops and the skull with the top cut off and the white powder, yellow powder, brown powder, on book covers or tables or glass-covered pictures laid flat. Sometimes there was blood on the glass after. One time one of the dogs had gotten really sick after licking something from a low leather-topped stool. Theo was really worried. After that it wasn’t hard to understand that it could do bad things to people.

He stayed away from all that as much as he could, but as much as he could wasn’t much. Theo had to figure out a way around it kind of all the time.

Theo was hoping to have the gazebo to himself. Even though the house and the land are big, like the last house, sometimes it is hard to be alone. A lot of the time adults think he needs babysitting, or that they need to do what they call ‘playing’ with him, because there aren’t other kids around. But it is the opposite of playing, and mostly he just wants not to be noticed. People fuss over him, rub his hair. Ladies hug him, make faces at him like they think he needs cheering up. Sometimes he finds someone looking at him oddly, their eyes half-closed, focusing, like they are thinking hard, seeing something else. Then they smile at him and act normal again.

The man in the gazebo opens his eyes, sees Theo and grins. He has glasses. Theo stares.

Come here.

Theo is unsure about whether to do it. The sun in his face makes him squint. Motion catches his eye – the heron flapping over its nest, in the big tree like a dead hand reaching out of the ground, gray-brown and smooth like driftwood near the dunes. Theo knows things about birds and thinks this one is lost – herons are freshwater birds that live on lakes. He hopes it’s finding what it needs. Maybe it’s not a heron.

It’s okay.

Theo notices the man again, and slowly walks at him. It seems to Theo the bird would want a little more privacy for a nest, like a tree with leaves to hide the babies. But apparently the big ones like that build in the open so they can see. One parent’s always there, for protection. Theo thinks about his parents, and then about teachers. Theo stops.

Why are you not wearing any clothes.

It feels better, man. Do you live here.

Yes.

Are you Frieda’s kid.

Yes. This is my house.

Listen to the birds.

Are you high.

The man laughs, and then he frowns and stands. Theo steps back. He’s seen this before and is glad there is plenty of room to run. He hears something: Alex and Paz and Baron sit behind him now, panting, looking at him, their dog eyebrows raised. He had forgotten about them and now feels better.

Standing, the man looks short, his penis like the nest with a dark purple baby bird Theo had found on the ground under one of the gnarled beach trees. His own penis is pale and wormy. What happens, Theo wonders, between now and then.

My mom asked if you could put some clothes on.

The man stares up and out and around. And down at Theo. Then he moves fast, his hair blowing, across the gazebo floor to the steps and jumps, landing and collapsing, then scrabbling up, grass sticking to him, and runs at Theo, his arms like flippers spinning at the air. Theo screams.

The dogs hop and jump, barking, Paz stumbling, Theo scooting sideways as the man gets closer, faster, saying something but Theo can’t figure it out. Theo runs without thinking, the dogs frantic and the man suddenly there and grabbing and the dogs barking and the man laughing.

Theo away, watching, now the dogs calming, licking, the man on his knees, sticking his face against theirs, his arms like penguin wings rubbing the dogs.

Theo isn’t sure what to do, so he looks at the brown ground, the grass like dirty hair, and then up toward a long-needled pine waving and shaking at him. There is a lot of wind early, making ocean noises. Theo feels himself moved a little by it as he decides to scuffle his way toward the cracked terrace that runs the width of the big house’s back side, facing the trees in front of the dunes, the naked man now squatting on his haunches and the dogs trotting after Theo.

‘Mansion.’ Theo had found the word in the big dictionary with the tissue pages smelling like an old coat. 1. A large stately house. 2. A manor house. 3. Archaic a. A dwelling; an abode. b. A separate dwelling in a large house or structure. 4.a. See house. b. Any one of the twenty-eight divisions of the moon’s monthly path. Middle English, a dwelling, from Old French, from Latin mansio, from mansus, past participle of manere, ‘to dwell, remain’; see men- in Indo-European roots.

It is a big house. He isn’t sure about stately, marked by lofty or imposing dignity. On the same page was Their swords are ruste, their bodys duste, Their souls are with the Saints, we truste, about something else. He passes the sundial at the side of the house.

Come, light! visit me!

I count time; dost thou?

Theo whispers the words to himself, walking.

Weeds poke up through the squares of the terrace, a hairy chess board. It would flinch and throw off all the pieces. You’d have to tame it to play. Pink and brown, faded and pale. He feels like stomping a puddle but everything is dry. The sun is a big flashlight in the sky, white in the white.

Then music. The music starts in the house, and flies out the open windows on the third floor and drifts down around him. Colin is definitely awake.

Theo turns back toward the trees for an instant, shading his eyes with a hand. Colin sometimes didn’t sleep for days. His mother, when she came, he wasn’t sure about, because her door was always locked. Is she asleep or awake. Mostly awake, he guessed because of all the noise and people when she came, which was always like a wave washing through. Things would be empty and quiet when Theo locked himself in, then in the morning people in the hall or on couches, sometimes looking dead, and different smells, and different things scattered around. Hello, my beautiful boy, she would yell at him from somewhere, above on the stairs or from an open door, or in from the outside, her standing outside naked one time staring up at something, her body broken into squares by the big iron and glass doors to the terrace. Theo remembers again he needs to find something to cover the broken panes with.

It is Wednesday, Theo guesses. He smells ocean. One of the dogs noses at him now, and Theo flicks his eyes down and smoothes Baron’s head and leans into the big yellow and black shepherd, nudges him for an instant, then turns and moves toward the doors, hungry, too, flanked now on his other side by Alex, the thickest animal on the planet, Gus calls him. Theo feels sorry for the dog, who has seizures and pants when he walks.

The faded coppery dog’s domed head makes him look like a human baby, although he is thirteen and totters. He needs something soft, his teeth going. Upstairs Colin yells now, and somewhere beyond the beach is the buzz and thump of speedboats, and the day is on its way. Theo slips through the French doors into the dark ballroom.

There is a Japanese magazine on the parquet floor, his father on the cover. His face very white, like a doll. Is that powder. Aidoru. Dog claws click and slide on the wood, the sounds loud. A piece of floor is missing since yesterday, Theo notes. He keeps moving.

Sand grains are scattered on the parquet, and Theo feels them under his feet. There are crumbs everywhere: sand, salt, food, because people like to walk everywhere in the house eating. The dogs lick at the floor a lot, and at spills everywhere.

There’s not much furniture but there are lots of pillows, and cloth. Blankets, tapestries, sheets, rugs, carpet in piles or folded or left limp and crumpled in the middle of a floor, as if the person wrapped in it vanished on the spot.

Theo skates across the ballroom, sliding his bare feet. A bird darts through the French doors he left open. It moves too fast for him to identify but he figures it is one of the little ones, sparrow or wren, always around outside, flocking to peck at grass or the terrace. All the people leave trails, or create them.

He skates over to a plant tipped sideways in a Chinese vase. It has deep green leaves with wine-colored hearts and big veins and reaches toward the light. The shoots are arms extending, ending in brushes of little purple flowers. Theo sweeps the dirt back in with his hand and tips it up, pets it, and drags it over into a rectangle of sun. Then he skates the other way, toward the kitchen.

The dogs stare up as he yanks on the heavy pantry door and goes in to rummage for something to feed them. Dog food ran out but no one has bought more, so Theo gives them peanut butter and things from cans, some of which they eat and some of which sits until someone else eats it: usually Colin or a guest.

That’s what Theo’s mother called them. Make our guests feel at home, or friends. Theo wasn’t sure about the difference, except the guests came less often.

There is a gunshot, loud and echoing, close. The dogs startle, whimper. Theo’s ears dampen a little, sound gets slightly muffled.

Theo sighs, leaves the pantry and shuffles back to the ballroom as the dogs orbit him, jumping. The sound whirls as crazily as the bird, moving now like an insect, flitting and erratic: scared too, Theo imagines.

Colin stands across the ballroom, wearing boots and a towel wrapped around his waist, his ropy arm up and pointing with a silver pistol at the bird. He points the gun at the floor and does something clicking with his other hand: chambering, he’d called it before.

Colin now has an eye closed and follows the bird with the gun, letting off another shot. Theo’s ears hurt.

Colin, can you stop please.

Birds makes me nervous. Too undisciplined. Or maybe it’s just jealousy. One more for luck and then we’re done.

Colin fires out through the opened glass door toward the ocean – clears out the sinuses, that’s for certain. Prevents constriction of the bowels, too, man. Nothing like a little cordite in the morning to remind you why you’re alive.

He clomps across the ballroom, smiling with big square yellow teeth in the sunlight, as Theo turns and moves back toward the kitchen. He wonders what happens to bullets if they don’t hit anything.

I am starving, Colin says. He walks past Theo with a pat on the back and goes straight toward the refrigerator that still works and yanks it open hard, the silver doors big as room doors, and he bends to dig around. His towel falls, exposing his buttocks. Theo turns back to the pantry, and the cans: will the dogs eat canned peaches. Tinned is what Gus and Colin call them. Colin begins to sing something without words.

Theo scans the pantry shelves: there is food, and there are other things. A very old teddy bear with spots of furless fabric showing, but with both button eyes; a long piece of brown bamboo with a hunting knife roped to one end; caramels, bags and bags of caramels; some clothes, stacked T-shirts with things printed on the front from concerts; a small television, and silver-gray round flat metal containers in which are coils of film, a stack of them; a rake with teeth missing; a stuffed woodchuck and several antlers, like branches locked in a pile; oatmeal, a lot of it, because Gus likes oatmeal; a crate of canned smoked baby oysters; a stack of masks, all the same, of a bear face; an ottoman on its side; a box full of jars of honey, a box half-full of jars of jelly, and several five-pound bags of sugar, one that still hissed and shifted when picked up, and the others, hard blocks wrapped in paper; a tower of cans of Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie; a mummified gray mouse on a round piece of polished wood under a glass bell with a knob on top, which once held an Italian cheese Colin liked; a burlap sack filled with macadamia nuts, one corner of which has been gnawed open but Theo doesn’t know by what, because he’s seen people in here tearing at packages with their teeth; a row of boxes of Sugar Pops, like a shelf of books; scattered packages with Japanese writing, and different things inside, that look like candy but are the wrong colors, small round things and noodles and one he knows is rice crackers; cans without labels; an old green and red cradle made out of tin with writing on the side that Theo can’t read; Colin’s ray gun collection, a pile of plastic and tin toy ray guns and a pile of other things like branches and things Colin has found that he thinks are shaped like ray guns – he keeps saying he needs to move it to a more suitable location; a sled; rows and stacks of coffee cans, some of which hold coffee and some of which hold nails, foreign coins, rubber bands, washers, salt, marbles – and one holds glass eyes.

Theo marveled over the eyes, because no one knows how the can got there, and when he is in the gloomy pantry he likes to hold the can and look down at them looking back at him, but in a kindly way. The eyes seem patient and wise, and all clear and white with the irises blue or gray mostly, like Theo’s eyes. Sometimes he carries one around in a pocket, and he likes it there. He hasn’t carried one in a while; he considers it a solemnity, like a ritual, although he isn’t sure what a ritual really is besides something heavier than it looks.

Colin stops singing. Theo picks one of the few brown eyes up and carefully slips it into a front pocket of his pajamas, then on tiptoes pulls down one of the Fray Bentos cans, although Colin and Gus fuss at him when he ‘wastes’ them on the dogs. Seems it is time to shop. He is sick of smoked baby oysters.

Colin lies on his back on the kitchen floor, his towel crumpled under him, the soles of his cowboy boots have round holes: like eyes, but not wise ones. Colin is hairless and brown all over, his chest peaking in the middle like a bird’s; ribby but with a little pad of fat on his stomach, where there is a long pucker like a mouth curving alongside his navel. He is sweating, even though it’s cool now. He’s patched with tattoos, lots of places, which Theo used to enjoy seeing revealed as Colin rolled up a sleeve or pant leg or took off something. His penis is tattooed with a series of dots and lines, which Colin said happened in New Zealand. Theo knows New Zealand; he likes knowing where things are. Colin also has a long set of wavy curves like lips tattooed in red and blue around his penis, starting on his abdomen. Theo felt funny saying the word, and funny thinking it. Colin said the lip things were the gates of paradise. Gus exploded when Theo first asked him about it.

Where did you see Colin’s penis.

He was walking around with no pants.

He didn’t do anything funny did he.

Besides walk around with no pants.

Yes, he didn’t –

He was getting the brandy out of the green bathroom and I saw him. I asked him what that was. He said, that’s the man monster, son. No, I said, what’s around it. He said that’s the gates of paradise.

Gus rubbed his face up and down with his thick hand: you tell me immediately if he does anything funny. Gus’s words were a little slurred, blurry.

Besides the funny stuff he does, like, every day.

Like. Messes with you. Or tells you to mess with his.

His what.

Just tell me, son, okay. There’s too many pervs in this circus.

Oh.

Theo remembered his mother’s friend at the Chelsea Hotel. The one who wanted to help Theo go to the bathroom while his mom slept on the couch in the room with aluminum foil over the windows. Day outside and night in there. The bearded man at the party who rubbed against him. And being stuck in a soft loft sofa next to a weird man who put his hand on the back of Theo’s neck and tried to hug Theo down onto his lap. But he was supposed to be famous and Theo’s mom said the guy didn’t mean anything, he was just affectionate. Was that true.

They never went back to his house, and Theo’s mom sort of snarled every time someone else mentioned him, and she called him a name. The man was strong. He stopped because somebody needed a knife and Theo struggled up out of the big hand of the sofa and away.

Some grownups looked at Theo in a funny way different than the funny ways other grownups looked at him. But there were always so many around; he couldn’t watch everybody. And they’d just be there, breathing, smiling. How do you tell which smiles are bad.

Okay, Theo said to Gus. I’ll tell you.

You do that. Then Gus smiled, and winked, slapped Theo’s leg.

Was it a joke. Theo didn’t get it.

That was the way things began, when they were all first together in the house. Now his birthday is just past, his tenth. And another school year begins in the fall, and he missed a lot of the last one: most of it. And he doesn’t want to think about it. He steps over Colin, whose arms jut out from his shoulders; Colin’s doing what he says are his exercises: what he calls it when he lies down somewhere and doesn’t move.

A drawer hung already open, offering a spiky array of long silverware and kitchen things, and nails, stamps, brittle rubber bands, old bottle caps, and a blade of cracked mirror, like a hole in the drawer. Theo finds the heavy knife they open cans with and steps back over Colin to carry knife and can to the thick scarred table sitting in front of the skinny stained glass window that stretches from floor to ceiling. Colin said if money ever became an issue, that window was Tiffany and he’d have it on the auction block sooner than you could say reserve price. Through the window, outside is bright and tan and red and green and blue, and the bird in the ballroom can be heard as it still whirls, the calls from everywhere. Theo decides after feeding the dogs he’ll help the bird escape.

Theo wraps both hands around the hunting knife’s handle, raises it to eye level, and stabs down hard. He’s gotten good, or stronger, and it takes fewer stabs to open cans now, especially as the Fray Bentos sit flat and low. Some of the skinny tall ones cause trouble.

Upwind.