<<< Back Table of Contents Next >>> 3 Magic Boy Anton was four years old when he first met Timmins, and they recognized each other immediately. They were in a room with a rose-colored curtain. From behind the curtain sunlight crept gently into the room, which was furnished with family heirlooms. The infant Timmins was in his crib. A mild breeze agitated the curtain, changing the patterns of light. This delighted Timmins. Anton stood by the crib, light shifting on his hair and face. He had a large forehead and a serene, steady gaze. He watched Timmins for a long time in silence, smiling in an abstracted way as if he'd gone off somewhere, leaving behind only his smile as a token of goodwill. "Timmins," he said finally. "Your name is Timmins." Timmins looked up. It was the first time anyone had called him that. Delighted by the apparition, he laughed and reached out to touch Anton's face. Anton backed off a step, out of reach. "You laugh now, but wait and see." He turned and went away. Timmins was alone now in his crib, and it seemed the room had darkened slightly. • • • Anton was the first person in Timmins' life to walk up and introduce himself, to step out of the background murmur of voices and gestures and present himself as an individual. Few people would have thought of doing this with an infant in the cradle, but Anton was different. Having been an infant himself not so long ago, he had a rapport. It occurred to him that Timmins was lonely with no one to talk to but his parents, who were nothing special to him, because an infant has the right to take his parents for granted, like the air. From the moment he first named Timmins, a natural complicity arose between them. They had an understanding. They were each, to the other, the most real thing in the world. This was obvious to both of them, though they never spoke about it. They lived in a town where two rivers met. On the high ground between the rivers, Indian nations had gathered to plan their defense against the U.S. Army. The Army was victorious, driving them from the spot and building a fort there. Later, the land pacified, a town was laid out. Stores and mills sprang up along the riverbanks, a courthouse was built of granite pulled from local quarries, a railway was laid. Steel bridges rose on stone pilings. A cemetery appeared. As the generations came and went, the town simmered slowly in the mists of eternal summer, infused with the perpetual sound of crickets. Corn and bean stalks bathed in the heavy air, flourishing so much that the roads were nearly choked off. The town didn't notice its isolation. Men in cotton shorts trimmed their lawns with clippers. Shirtless boys on tricycles played in gravel driveways. Women in summer dresses labored in kitchens, canning the harvest, laying up stock for dark times to come. Chickens pecked and scrabbled their way to the slaughter. Worms surfaced after heavy rains. Timmins' family lived in the old part of town, in a two-story house shaded by huge elms. Anton's family was less traditional, living in a modern ranch house on the edge of town. His father had participated in the design, which featured rooms set at odd angles, dramatically sloped roofs and skylights. They liked to visit each other on bicycles and ride out along the river, into the fields that surrounded the town. There, they would let the wind sift through their hair, watch the sunlight moving on the leaves, and smile as ants crawled on their skin. Time passed slowly for them, like dust suspended in a sunbeam. They realized that they could communicate without words. To an outsider, listening to them would be like hearing rain, or white noise, or anything else that leaves no impression. When they did speak, it was usually something innocuous—"That's nice," or "Can I have one?"—though it might come abruptly after a long silence, startling anyone who wasn't part of their unspoken conversation. What they loved most about those endless afternoons of childhood, those summer seances, was the way their personalities blended into each other so it no longer mattered who was doing what. It almost seemed as if they could switch bodies and live out each other's lives as a kind of game, to see if anyone would notice. • • • They came to a creek that ran thick and muddy under fallen trees. Timmins brushed the hair from his eyes and pointed to a stone. Anton stood at his elbow, flushed and vibrant. "What's that?" Anton said. "A salamander." "That's disgusting, let's get out of here." He didn't like dark places. They followed the stream as it bent and widened, spilling into a grassy meadow. They lay in the grass against a tree and listened to the rippling water. "How can we be sure of what we know together?" one of them said. "Oh, come on!" said the other. "I mean, the overwhelming weight of opinion is against us." "It's true. Their definition of the real and the unreal, the solid and the imaginary, is pretty much the opposite of ours." "And we'll never persuade them to switch the polarity of their thinking." "No, that's unrealistic. An immense magnetic pressure keeps their particles in line." "They want to bend us to that pressure." "And it's our nature to resist." "But what makes us right?" "It's not a question of being right. I think you know that. It's a question of natural alignment. The way the world works is that ninety-nine percent of the human race—call them sheep—are aligned one way, and the other one percent—call them wolves in sheep's clothing—are aligned the other way. Only, because the world is balanced and fair, we have a much stronger charge." "Do you think there are others like us?" "That's easy to imagine, isn't it?" "Then why haven't we met any?" "You mean, face to face? Physical contact is no big deal. Maybe the rest of them are in India—I don't know, it's possible. Anyway, we're constantly running into them at night in dreams, aren't we? Haven't you ever found yourself in someone else's dream, along the banks of a strange river, somewhere you couldn't possibly have been? Even now, perhaps, someone is listening. I'm convinced that we have our own communications network, an invisible web stretched in the sky, a tissue of thoughts saturating the atmosphere—" "All those satellites interfere with transmissions." "True. Passing data back and forth at high speed, shooting death rays at each other—we live in difficult times. Someday, we'll have to confront all this. For now, let's just enjoy catching tadpoles here in this pond." They dipped their arms into a hollow where the water stilled. A breeze passed, rearranging the patterns of sunlight on their hair. • • • Anton soon realized that everyone, including Timmins' parents, thought of Timmins as "simple." Moreover, he accepted this as readily as he'd accepted Anton's friendship. "They're being cheap to you," Anton said, "and you let them. They should be bringing you gifts. Instead, they put you in a corner like they're ashamed." "That's natural. It's like we're two different species, almost. They're not Timmins. Why should they understand Timmins, when Timmins is something they are not?" "I understand you." "You're Anton. Being Anton is almost as good as being Timmins, for understanding Timmins. But communicating Timmins to the larger world is impossible." "They think you're an imbecile!" "If they thought I was a genius, they'd be different people, don't you agree? And this would be a different world as a result. I didn't make the world, Anton. I only live here." Anton felt like a sharp chisel had struck his head with an immense but calibrated force, penetrating just enough to score the bone. It dislodged a few things, others fell into place. The basic difference between them, he realized, was that he'd never been able to accept the world as he found it. He kept trying to make it over. He had a permanent grudge against the world, and he carried this resentment around with him like a burning coal in his chest. He was always impatient to get out, to go places, to leave on imaginary treks. Though his parents offered him every comfort and he'd been popular at every age, he brushed all this off with indifference, even hostility, as he went about his real business, his adventures and explorations. He was a voyager in multiple dimensions who liked to slip away, unnoticed and alone. Timmins was the only one he told about these journeys. Timmins, on the other hand, accepted his fate, even when it revealed itself to him with frightful clarity. He'd been having visions for as long as he'd been having memories, and he made no distinction between the two. What to others was unknowable, for him was as real as the objects around him. It never occurred to him to try to see things as other people did. He was too "simple" for that. Rather, he sat still and saw things as they were. For example, Anton loathed and even feared TV because of its ability to eat up the space around it, but Timmins was able to ignore TV completely. It just didn't register for him. If someone had asked him, "What's on TV?" he might say, "Colored patterns moving on a piece of glass. Sound from a vibrating box. That thing's radioactive, I think." They agreed that their time together was no mere accident. "We're lucky to be with each other now, when time seems endless. Soon there will no longer be time for anything. From then on, we'll be forced continuously to act." They had a sense of childhood as a luxurious sweet on which they could easily sicken, yet they were resolved to taste it fully, in all its narcotic qualities. "Once we awaken, we can never return inside the dream. We must carry its evidence within us." They knew that change was coming. They had to be ready for a world that would deny them any memory of their dreamtime together. They had to resist any effort to divide them from each other, to break in and destroy their treasure. Childhood was a training ground for future battle. • • • "I'm a victim of reincarnation!" Anton blurted out one day, astonished at the thought. He'd always felt out of place in the world, but he'd never expressed it in quite this way. It soon became a mantra, and he lived by it consciously. Sometimes he felt cheated to be in the world at all. At other times, he felt like he should have been born a different person, or "better positioned" as he put it. In either case, he was sure that the conditions into which he'd been born were hideously wrong. "This can't be happening," he told Timmins, his arm sweeping the horizon. "I mean, of course it's happening, but it can't be real! The simplest thing to do would be to cut the game short, get out of here now, and start over. But if this is supposed to be a joke on me, I can't let them win so easily. The honorable thing to do is to see it through to the end, even if I know it will end badly." They both sensed that they'd been born in an unlucky time, but since the past was constantly being plowed under to make way for the present, it was impossible for them to tell if their era was unluckier than most. In any event, Anton had known from an early age that he was living in a world that was indifferent, even hostile, to the things it was natural for him to cherish. It was hard for him to find anything in the world he truly loved, and as he grew older he saw even those disappear, one by one. "Everything that matters is being removed from the scene," he told Timmins. "It's no accident, either. Someone is organizing it. They're being selective. Only the best things disappear. Meanwhile, the world is filling up with garbage." He picked up a clock radio as if to throw it, then decided not to, as if the gesture was too obvious. "I'm sorry, Timmins, but existence is more than this. Where do your visions come from, not from this!" He spoke precisely now, and with venom. "There's a transcendent state that we were meant to feel, that it's normal and necessary for us to feel. The world tries to make us forget that, but it's why we came here!" He fell silent abruptly, because he was saying things that Timmins already knew. He hated to repeat himself, either in words or in actions. "I'm in too much of a hurry," was his explanation. "Besides, we've got to learn to see the world with a little discipline. If you were looking the other way when the angel passed, handing out the keys to Heaven, would you expect him to come back just for you? He'd probably laugh in your face and say, 'Next time, pay attention!' And if Heaven isn't merciful, why should I be?" Most people thought that for Anton to compare himself to angels was pretentious, or perhaps even an abomination in the eyes of God. "You're human like the rest of us. Sooner or later, fate will catch up to you and cut you down to size." Such criticisms didn't bother Anton. He was indifferent to criticism, to the point of not hearing it at all. He didn't just shrug it off. Rather, it spilled off him without his having to move his shoulders. Timmins liked to picture Anton standing in a doorway under a torrent of heavy rain, wearing a garment so smooth and water repellent that he couldn't even feel the water as it fell. He was looking across the sky to a spot where the sun had managed to appear through a gap in the dark, turbulent clouds. The light fell on his face as he smiled, radiant for an instant, standing in the midst of all that rain. "To live in this world and leave nothing behind" was Anton's ambition. Impatience was one of the constants of his being, and this attitude extended to the world itself, which he saw as a mortal adversary. He wanted nothing to implicate him, nothing to show that he'd collaborated in any way. No snapshots, no testimonials, no memory in some girl's heart. He didn't want the world to get a piece of him, he wanted a clean break. "Coming here in the first place was a mistake. I realize that now. I have nothing to accomplish here." His paradox was that since he excelled in everything he did, he couldn't help but draw attention to himself. And he enjoyed the attention, despite his protests. His ability to stir controversy was proof that he was on the right road. • • • When Timmins was thirteen, his parents and little sister went off to Nebraska to visit relatives. Even before the journey, Timmins knew what would happen. On their way back, their car would be hit by a train and they would all be killed. When the moment came, he tried to talk them out of it, but it was impossible to persuade them not to meet their fate. The best he could do was to get out of it himself. Having been the one to receive the vision, he knew it wasn't his time, so he arranged to stay home. His grandmother, who lived in town, agreed to look after him while the family was away. When the phone call came, he knew what they would say. His grandmother carried on—"It can't be! Tell me it's not so!"—while he sat calmly in a chair in the corner. After all, he'd been mourning for some time, and had in fact been present when the accident took place. The whole thing had presented itself to him in pictures he'd drawn without thinking, right up to the day of the tragedy. Anton had seen them. His comment—"It looks like you've found your vocation. It's rare to find an artist whose drawings come true"—was, however cruel, a determining force in Timmins' life. Anton was right. He'd found his special gift. Anton was the only one who ever saw those sketches. They were too dangerous, too incriminating. They were evidence of Timmins' involvement, his guilt. He mourned his sister's death the most. His parents were old enough, he reasoned, to be guilty of something deserving of death. However decent they may have been, however hard they'd worked to do good, perhaps their very decency had condemned them. But who could say the same thing of a nine-year-old girl, sweet-natured and trusting, who loved to sing? He felt that she'd been dragged into this tragedy by some blind, impatient force, too fixed on its own version of justice to worry about bystanders. For her sake, he saw the incident as a kind of crime, a sinister violation of principles. He'd been removed from reality before, but now he retreated actively from it. The house he'd grown up in was sold, and the proceeds were put in a trust fund. He moved in with his grandmother for good, and she devoted herself to taking care of him. He was a difficult burden, perhaps, for an elderly woman. He went into a kind of shell and didn't speak. She had to remind him to eat. He stayed in his room to paint, obsessively, all his visions that had grown dark. He became quite good at painting, but there was no one to whom he could show his work, no one who saw it as anything but a sickness, except Anton. Anton knew. There in his room, Timmins was creating the future of their world. The future was looking bleak. They would have to be prepared. One night at the dinner table, with the heavy ticking of the old clock thickening the atmosphere, Timmins was faced with tuna casserole. He asked for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and his grandmother brought him bread and jam. He spread the jam on a slice of bread and then, seized by a demon, smeared the sticky mess all over his face. He said loudly, to be heard above the clock, "May I be excused?" She let him go to his room. The tragedy marked him in the eyes of the townspeople. The freakish horror of it threw him into relief, reminding them that he was different from them. Women his grandmother's age, veterans of quilting bees and church potlucks, stopped him on the street to exclaim, "My! You poor boy." Gripping his arm, they would lean toward him, searching his eyes for some sign of recognition. "Trust in the Lord," they would say. "He's looking out for you. Your family is with Him, and someday, you will be too. But He wants you to stay with us a while longer, as proof of His mercy in the world." The warmth of their crinkly smiles brought a rash to his face and neck. He stood there, frozen in place, wishing he could scratch himself and run away. Leathery old men in tractor caps would shake their heads and shift the tobacco from one side of their mouths to the other when they saw him coming down the sidewalk. "What a shame about his family. Good Christian people. His poor sister wasn't but nine years old." They would pause to scratch their necks or backsides. "He's an odd one though, that boy. Always did need special attention. Looks like he's taking it pretty hard." Timmins' walk was a shambles, as if he was struggling to control a system of pulleys and wires he didn't understand. His eyes tracked independently of each other, focusing on two different things. The old-timers would feel an urge to call out, "Pull yourself together, boy!" but they would settle for squirting a stream of tobacco juice into the dirt. As a teenager Timmins grew moody and distant, with long, greasy hair and a ghostlike complexion. He rarely spoke, shutting himself away in his grandmother's house with its teacups and little glass horses. Even Anton wasn't sure how to talk to him any more, as if he'd been replaced by a stranger with the same face and gestures. Who was this new boy, this impostor? Often his encounters with Timmins were like a visit to an empty house. The shower was running, a record was spinning on the turntable, but Timmins was off somewhere, wandering in a field. He couldn't help feeling betrayed by this. To him it was a sign of weakness, of surrender. Yet his loyalties were clear. When people at school asked him, "Why do you waste your time with that freak, Timmins?" his answer was furious and sudden. "Why do I waste my time with you, is the question." One afternoon, as they sat in Timmins' room with the curtains drawn, Timmins pushed a pile of sketches across the floor for him to see. Anton leafed through them in the dim light. "I've been drawing faces," Timmins told him. "Faces screaming. There's a man, and a woman, and another one, I'm not sure if it's a woman or a man. Oh, it's a woman with the head of a frog, but I'm not sure how to draw a frog screaming." The sketches formed a series, and their story was not pleasant. The first panel showed several figures, human but without faces, scattered over a featureless yellow plain. The plain was lit from all directions by a bright light, so there were no shadows. In the second panel, the light had gathered itself into a ball about a third of the way from the horizon, and each figure had its corresponding shadow. In the third panel, most of the figures had shifted as if stretching toward this new sun. The next several panels were closeups of faces screaming, alone or in groups. In some, the flesh was melting from their bones as they screamed. As the sun sickened and died, it cast a dark light that caused the figures to shrivel and collapse into ash. In the final panel, the formerly yellow plain was transformed into a mottled gray mass, puckered and spitting like rotting flesh. Anton shuddered. He knew that Timmins' art had the power to make things happen. Like an assassin's bullet or a deadly virus, once it was released, it couldn't be undone. Timmins' visions were dangerous, and turning them into art was like calling down the storm. The thought thrilled and disturbed him. He had no doubt that the future would be like this, a wasteland of gray fungus flecked with blood. Yet he refused to believe that he was helpless in the face of such a fate. He would fight it, even if he knew he would be proven wrong. He would become a whirlwind, an explosion. • • • Anton decided to take up music, because it seemed like the best way to express the turbulence within him. Besides, the life of a musician appealed to him. Musicians had intricate costumes, slept with everyone, and traveled in groups that were always splitting up and recombining. When they needed money, they played a few gigs. They spent their money on drugs, costumes, and equipment, like a new amp to replace the one busted by an angry crowd in Memphis. Anton saved his money and bought a bass, rounded up a few friends and formed a band. One of them had a four-track recorder, and they made some tapes. He began to dream of a musical career, but he had no idea how to accomplish this, since they lived far from the centers of rebellion and fame. Those his own age saw him as a natural leader, someone ahead of the pack. He knew this, and he was smart enough to know that his influence would last longer if he rationed it. So he held himself apart from the others, until out of boredom or desperation, they turned to him for advice. Then he would drop an idea on them that was daring and new. That was how the parties at the river got started, all-night bonfire parties where he and his friends played frenzied rhythms. He was also the inspiration for pranks against the local establishment, like painting "THANK YOU JESUS" on their cars, but he was never blamed for this. He was the town's magic boy who never got caught. With his elders he was polite, a model of good manners. Why let them know they had an enemy in their midst? He was discreet, and in return he expected to be left alone. His reckless nature, far from getting him in trouble, only added to his charm. He was held up as a role model, not because he deserved to be, but out of wishful thinking. This gave him a certain freedom without his having to rebel openly. His feelings were expressed by the poet Rimbaud. "I've never been one of you, I've never been a Christian. My ancestors are the sort that sang under torture. I don't understand your laws, and I have no sense of morality." One night he was driving in the country, drinking whiskey and speeding in a friend's car. The siren came on behind him, but the cop was a mile back and it was already dark. "I'll lose him," he thought. "I can't let him catch me, I'm driving without a license." He turned off the main road, drove a bit more, pulled into a parking lot and cut the lights. It was a restaurant. As the cop sped past, he was already inside. A few minutes later, he watched from the window as the cop returned to cruise the lot, finding nothing. Timmins worried that these triumphs would go to Anton's head, making him forget everything that mattered to them both. The cruel adolescent games of rivalry and betrayal, how could he follow Anton there? What had happened to their days of riding bicycles by the river, of chasing grasshoppers in the corn? But he soon learned to forgive Anton his popularity, because he could see the depth of Anton's contempt for it. Anton had the game figured out, and he had the advantage of sincerity, of truly not caring. Even girls left Anton indifferent. They'd been throwing themselves at him for some time now, and he was tired of it. None of them had found a way to win his heart. He would let them touch his body like he was doing them a favor, take what he wanted, and keep his cool. It was a tease. He did it because it flattered him to be desired, but they had little to offer him. "Their bodies are telling them they want babies. I don't want babies!" Becky was the exception to all this. She was the closest thing he had to a high school sweetheart. A shy but intense farm girl in overalls and braids, her eyebrows came together in the form of a bird in flight. She cried in math class when she couldn't solve a problem, wrote poetry, and had strong, secret opinions about witchcraft and pagan rites. She had an animal quality that was attractive, at least to him. He liked her because she was so difficult, so much his opposite. She didn't care much for the music he wrote, thought his ambitions were vain, and saw no value in his idols, the Punks and the Beats. She was tenacious and stubborn, with her own way of thinking. On a romantic level, she never let him get away with anything. Her sensibilities wouldn't allow it. He was her noble experiment, the monkey she was turning into a gentleman. Any caresses would be out of line, damaging their fragile truce. When he went to see her in her sprawling farmhouse out in the country, he would speed along the narrow roads on his bike, taking the hills like waves, feeling the wind dry the sweat from his skin. After kicking up gravel in her driveway, everything would be still, and he could hear the birds again. Patting down the hair on his head, he would wait at the screen door while Becky's mother went upstairs to get her. He would be invited into the kitchen, where they would take leftovers and homemade jam to make a picnic basket. They would go to the duck pond behind the house and spread a blanket on the grass, tossing bits of bread onto the water. Becky kept him alert. She would ask his point of view on the Romantic poets versus Shakespeare, or what part of Christianity was worth holding onto, or whether humanity was ready for democracy. In the end, they always returned to the running debate between them, his chaotic, amoral view of the world versus her Apollonian ideal, which favored the light of reason. For Anton, reason was just another form of tyranny. "The world is too complex for rules," he insisted. "Why force it into a pattern? We're always making rules for ourselves, but we don't need them. We're free beings, that's the point." "We have to live with the consequences of our acts," she reminded him. "That's a rule." They discussed their plans for the future. Becky was preparing for college, but the idea made Anton restless. He was ready to skip the whole ordeal. "Four years is too long to be cut off from life. What can they teach me that I can't find out for myself?" "It will give you specialized skills." "To do what, exactly?" "If you keep doing a bit of everything like you are now, none of it will be useful." "What's useful? Like knowing what fertilizer to use, or how many bricks it takes to build a Wal-Mart?" "If you want to put it that way." "Why do I care if I'm useful or not?" "To society. To others. As usual, you're only thinking of yourself." He didn't have the patience for college, but he wasn't sure what to do next. Music was his only passion, the rest just a way to kill time. Whatever happened, he knew he had to leave his small town. In a place like this, there wasn't much to do but kill himself in a hurry, racing the freight trains out on Siler Road. If he didn't die now, he would end up like the trains himself, tired, ugly, barely moving. He wished he could bring Timmins along with him, but Timmins was too young, and he couldn't wait. At least they would be ready for the separation when it came. Circumstances had pulled them apart, and they'd evolved their distinct roles. Timmins was the dreamer, Anton the one who would act. Timmins was the sedentary one, Anton the one who would go out and engage himself in the world. They could no longer trade places like they had in the past, but they still relied completely on each other. Without Timmins to keep the dream going and offer him its safe zone, its refuge, Anton felt he would fly off the handle. Without Anton to act out the terms of the dream in time and space, Timmins would be nothing but a mute, ineffective spectator, the boy in the corner. The dream would dry up, and Timmins along with it. They still had an understanding no one else could penetrate. Whatever the world might throw at them, their bond would endure. Their lives would bring schemes and tactics, rivalries and adventure, all of which would pass between them in an invisible stream as if they shared the same blood. Yet they would remain the most real thing in the world to each other, the only real thing. That was their pact. <<< Back Table of Contents Next >>>