Thanks for the Trouble, Page 2

  ONCE UPON A TIME, IN the land of agerasia, there lived a young cooper and his wife. They’d only been married a few months, but the cooper’s wife was already pregnant. The cooper hoped for a boy, who would be his apprentice and one day inherit the workshop. But when the happy day arrived, his wife gave birth to a bouncing baby girl with hair the color of sunlight. They called her Gilda.

  “Well, anyone can make a mistake,” the cooper said.

  Soon after that, a second child was on the way. This time, the cooper was more insistent: “Woman, you absolutely must produce a boy for me.” But his disobliging wife churned out yet another girl. This one had hair the color of copper in candlelight, and so she was called Cypria.

  “Come now,” the cooper said. “To give birth to one girl may be regarded as a misfortune. To give birth to two looks like carelessness.” As punishment, he beat his wife around the belly with a bent piece of barrel wood.

  Soon after that, she became pregnant for a third time. The cooper, though not a particularly devout man, spent all his free time at the village temple, begging the gods to finally grant him a son. But after only six months, his wife went into labor. For three days and three nights, she lay abed, panting like a bellows, only to produce a creature as tiny, wrinkly, and purple as a raisin, with a head of silver hair so fine it looked like a layer of dust. The cooper’s wife took one look at the child, said simply “I’m sorry,” and died.

  The midwife was certain the baby girl wouldn’t survive the night, so the cooper neglected to name her. Only the baby did survive the night, and the one after that, and the one after that, and then she began to put on weight and the midwife said the danger was past.

  But the cooper still refused to give the girl a name. The truth was, he hated her, because she had survived where his wife had not, and now he would never have a son.

  Years passed. Cypria and Gilda were happy, gregarious children, but their silver-haired sister, constantly beaten and berated by her father, forced to do all the most arduous household chores, grew cold and aloof. She didn’t speak until she was five, and then it was only to ask her sisters to please shut up, because she was trying to think. Her hair grew long and lustrous, but it remained the same stubborn shade of silver. Behind her back, the townsfolk said that a demon had slipped into her body because her father hadn’t given her a name. They would spit into the dirt after she walked past, a practice that was said to ward off evil spirits.

  On the silver-haired girl’s fourteenth birthday, the king of Agerasia died suddenly. Rumors had it that his son, the crown prince, was responsible. The prince had always hated his father for marrying him off to the princess of a nearby kingdom, a girl so fat that special thrones had to be built to accommodate her girth.

  Not long after the prince became king, a book of humorous limericks began to circulate around Agerasia. It was called “The Spherical Monarch,” and its sole subject was the queen’s prodigious size (a sample verse: “There once was a lady so chubby/she couldn’t fit into the tubby/she then became queen/but the wedding night scene/was a bloodbath, she crushed her poor hubby!”). When the king heard about the book, he was so angry that he immediately ordered his army to sweep the country for every girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen.

  “If she be comely, cut her down where she stands,” he said, “until my queen is the most beautiful girl in the kingdom.”

  The soldiers did as they were told, driving beauty before them like so much cattle to the slaughter. Before long, one of these soldiers came to the village where lived the cooper and his three daughters.

  Hurriedly, the cooper dressed Gilda and Cypria in the clothes of his late wife and used a coal pencil to draw fine wrinkles on their faces. Then he sent them to their tiny rooms, which were windowless and dank and would hopefully mask their true ages.

  The silver-haired girl didn’t have her own room—she spent her nights on a straw-filled pallet in her father’s workshop—so there was nowhere for her to hide. Nor did her father make the slightest effort to disguise her.

  “Put on a pot of tea for the king’s man,” he said. “And be quick about it.”

  The girl did as she was told. A few minutes later, a young soldier burst into the house.

  “Who lives here?” he asked.

  “Just me and my elderly aunties,” the cooper said.

  “Is that so?”

  The soldier threw open the door to Gilda’s room. The girl sat in a rocking chair, darning a pair of socks, quivering with fear.

  “Who are you?” the soldier barked.

  “Just an old woman,” Gilda said. But the soldier could hear the brightness of youth in her voice.

  “Off with your bonnet,” he said.

  Gilda knew she’d be finished if the soldier saw her honeycomb of golden locks, so she leaped out of the chair, brandishing a knitting needle like a dagger. The soldier was ready, however, and he separated her head from her body with one clean swing.

  He entered Cypria’s room next.

  “Who’s there?” Cypria asked, pretending to have just awoken from a dotard’s midday nap.

  “A representative of your king,” the soldier barked. “Who are you?”

  “Just an old woman,” Cypria said. But the soldier could hear the brightness of youth in her voice.

  “Off with your bonnet!”

  Cypria was a clever girl, and before going into her room, she’d dusted her whole head with flour. Unfortunately, she’d forgotten about her eyebrows, which glimmered like a couple of bronze ingots. A cloud of flour billowed up into the air when her severed head struck the floor.

  The soldier returned to the kitchen, where he noticed the silver-haired girl, who was just then pouring the hot water for tea.

  “And who are you?” he asked.

  The girl didn’t answer.

  “She doesn’t have a name,” the cooper explained.

  “Oh no? Take off your bonnet, woman.”

  The silver-haired girl did as she was told, unleashing the coruscant cascade of her platinum tresses. The soldier leaned in closer, checking her eyebrows and eyelashes, which were both appropriately hoary. Finally he looked into her eyes, and the sorrow he found there was as depthless and ancient as the sea.

  Satisfied, he drew his sword and put it through the cooper’s stomach. “You lied to me,” he said. “You only have one elderly auntie.”

  “A cup of tea before you go?” the silver-haired girl asked. She wasn’t afraid that the soldier would hear the brightness of youth in her voice, because she had never really been young.

  “No thank you, ma’am,” the soldier said, and left.

  The silver-haired girl buried her sisters and her father in the garden. She lived out the rest of her long life alone, as the most beautiful girl in the kingdom.

  SIMPLE QUESTIONS

  I’D GOTTEN ONE THING RIGHT in my story. Up close, I could see the startling color of the silver-haired girl’s eyes: greenish-gray, oceanic. Her heart-shaped mouth was pursed in a frown so compact it was almost a pucker. She looked up when she’d finished reading and didn’t seem in the least surprised to see me sitting across from her.

  “Platinum and silver aren’t the same color,” she said. “Platinum is whiter.”

  I placed the wad of bills on the table between us, then gestured for my journal.

  “Are you suggesting a trade?” she asked, and there was something playful in her tone, almost as if she didn’t care that I’d just robbed her. I nodded. She closed my journal and held it to her chest. “Thank you, but I’d rather have the story. I’ve always believed in supporting the arts.”

  Just then the waiter came back to the table.

  “Sir, you left without paying for your coffee.”

  I smiled, because there was something ridiculous about getting in trouble for stealing five bucks’ worth of coffee when I’d nearly walked off with a good five grand.

  “Is that funny to you?” the waiter said.

  Another great t
hing about hotels is that it’s almost impossible to get in trouble inside one. Everyone assumes you’re a guest, which means you’re a tourist, which means you’re probably an idiot. If someone catches you hanging around somewhere you’re not supposed to be, all you have to do is put a look of utter confusion on your face, as if you just woke up in someone else’s body. It’s a little bit harder for me, given my condition, but I’ve learned how to roll with it. I get out the old notebook and write something like: I am looking to the bathroom or Can you explain me how is the Golden Gate Bridge? or that old classic No hablo ingles. I bet I could get caught in some rando’s hotel room in the middle of the night, standing over the bed, wearing nothing but a Speedo and sharpening a butcher’s knife, and probably get away with it.

  The waiter, true to his profession, was still waiting for my answer.

  As nonchalantly as I could, I peeled one of the bills off the stack, just like the girl had done a few minutes earlier, and offered it up. The waiter was momentarily torn between his desire to be pissed off and his desire to have another hundred bucks. He made the right call.

  “This has been an expensive breakfast,” the girl said, after the waiter had gone. I nudged the wad of cash toward her, but she nudged it right back.

  “Not yet. I’ve got some questions for you. Was this story written about me?”

  I shrugged.

  “Yes or no?”

  I shrugged again, finally earning a little scowl, which somehow made the girl even more pretty. It brought a bloom to her pale cheeks and made sharp shelves of her cheekbones. Shit but she was pretty.

  “It’s very rude not to answer simple questions,” she said.

  I gestured for my journal, but she still wouldn’t give it to me, so I took out my pen and wrote I can’t on my palm.

  Then, in tiny letters just below it, I finished the thought: Now don’t you feel like a jerk?

  MY FIRST DATE WITH DR. MILTON

  DR. MILTON HAD A LARGE PHOTOGRAPH of a banana above his desk. He caught me staring at it when I first sat down in his office. I was twelve years old.

  “That was already there when I moved in,” he said. “Maybe the last person who worked here was a gorilla.”

  I liked him. He had a beard that went all the way around his face, like a lion’s mane, and he wore the same kind of glasses my dad used to wear when he was working—thin black frames, squared off at the corners.

  “Parker, do you know what germs are?” he asked.

  He had me write my answer on a wide yellow notepad with a chunky red marker that smelled sweetly toxic. I still have that pad somewhere in my room.

  They make you sick, I wrote.

  “That’s right. Germs are little tiny things that get in your body and make you sick. But there are ways to be sick that don’t involve germs because they don’t involve your body. Your mind can get sick.”

  Like when you’re crazy.

  Dr. Milton laughed a genuine laugh (by my estimation, about 80 percent of all laughs are fake), which I appreciated. “Well, nobody’s calling anyone crazy, Parker. But you do understand why your mom is worried, don’t you?”

  I did. It was because I’d refused to go to school ever since the accident six months before. Because I threw a silent tantrum anytime she suggested I leave the house, as if going outside were one and the same with the end of the world. Oh, right, and the whole “not speaking” thing.

  Because I can’t talk, I wrote.

  “I’m not convinced yet that you can’t talk. In fact, I’m going to try and convince you that you can. Would you like to play a game?”

  Okay.

  Dr. Milton took out a bunch of white cards with weird blobs on them; I learned later this was called a Rorschach test.

  “What do you see here?” he asked.

  I looked hard, trying to figure out what he wanted me to see. I was old enough to understand that this wasn’t a game at all, but a test. A teenage mutant ninja turtle standing on top of a bat, I wrote; then, seeing the expectant look on Dr. Milton’s face, added, And a panda bear. With some sheep.

  “Do any of these animals scare you?”

  No.

  “Do they look like they’re moving?”

  No.

  “What about this one?”

  He held up a different card.

  It’s scary.

  “It scares you?”

  It looks like a sea monster.

  He showed me more cards—another sea monster (this time with octopus arms), a bowlegged cowboy riding a donkey made of metal, a field of flowers—and then he went through the cards all over again. Then I had to arrange them in order of clearest image to least clear image.

  “You like this, don’t you?” Dr. Milton asked.

  It’s okay.

  “You like being creative.”

  I guess.

  “Do you want to write things, like your dad did?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?”

  Dad wasn’t happy.

  “How do you know that?”

  I thought about it for a while but couldn’t come up with a good answer. I just knew. I think kids have a knack for detecting happiness, but they lose it as they get older. They have to. Otherwise they’d notice how unhappy everybody else is, and they’d never be able to be happy themselves.

  I don’t know.

  “Are you happy, Parker?”

  That was a tough question too. I glanced up at the banana, which curved upward at both ends, like a big yellow smile. It made me want to cry. So I cried.

  Dr. Milton didn’t give me a diagnosis that day. It would be a few more months before we’d start discussing my problems by their Christian names—complicated grief disorder, trauma-induced psychogenic aphonia, social anxiety. What he did give me was a project. He said that he thought that the reason I didn’t want to leave the house was because I didn’t want my life to go on without my dad there. He said I should start writing a journal, to keep track of all the things that happened to me during the day, as if I were writing letters to my dad. It seemed like a pretty stupid idea to me, but it worked. Within a couple of months, I stopped being afraid to leave the house. Another couple of months after that, and I was willing to go back to school. Of course, the journaling thing wasn’t supposed to be a permanent fix—more like a brief stop on the transcontinental train ride back to mental health. Only my train never quite got moving again.

  Dr. Milton said the only way to fix my speech disorder would be to see a specialized therapist, so he set me up with Dr. Joondeph. Dr. Joondeph gave me this exercise to do, where I would try to hum my way into a word, because humming is supposed to relax the vocal cords. He told me I could get better, but I would have to apply myself. It could take months, maybe even years, to recover.

  I’ve kept seeing Dr. Milton—once a week for almost six years now—but I refused to go back to Dr. Joondeph after that first session, and I only tried his exercise a handful of times.

  Mom says that when I was a little kid, I liked to pick these red berries off a big bush in Golden Gate Park. Apparently, I could spend whole afternoons out there without talking to anyone, filling up a bucket with berries, carrying it over to the ivy to dump it out, and then starting all over again. She says my dad found the whole thing hilarious. “Our son’s going to grow up to be a migrant worker!” he would say.

  This was long before the accident, long before “psychogenic aphonia” became a part of my vocabulary, but I still preferred activities that didn’t require a lot of conversation. They say that God gave us two ears and one mouth because listening is twice as important as talking. That makes a lot of sense to me. Of course, God also gave us two nostrils, one butthole, thirty-two teeth, and ten toes. So I’m not sure where that leaves us. All I know is that I’ve never really minded my disorder. Dr. Milton says I might even like it now, because it’s become such a big part of who I am. And it is pretty great not to be expected to answer every idiotic question a teacher asks me, or lau
gh at every idiotic joke a classmate makes, or sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at sporting events. Besides, it’s not like I’m the only one with problems. Sometimes it seems like half the kids at school have some kind of ADD or ADHD or Asperger’s or whatever. I think most of them are just a little stupid. I’m not stupid; I’m just dumb.

  (That’s a joke.)

  COMPUTER GAMES AND INTERNET PORNOGRAPHY

  “YOU CAN’T SPEAK?” THE SILVER-HAIRED girl asked.

  I shook my head.

  “So you just write in this, I suppose.” She flipped my journal open to the first page: Journal #105. Return to Parker Santé, [email protected]. Do not read. And yes, I realize that probably only makes you want to read it more, but don’t. Seriously.

  “Does this mean you’ve filled out a hundred and four other journals?”

  I nodded, and I wondered if she could tell that I was proud of that fact. Sure, I was a freak, but at least I was a super-freak. And I loved the way they looked, all those journals lined up on a single bookshelf in my room, carving a path through time that you could follow, like a trail of bread crumbs, from that first day in Dr. Milton’s office right up to the present. It was as if I’d archived myself inside them—my own private horcruxes.

  “I suppose you don’t have much of a choice, do you?” the girl said. “We all have things we need to get off our chests. Most people just talk and talk until there’s no one left to listen. You talk to your journals. It’s practically poetic.”

  I have “Practically a Poet” printed on all my business cards, I wrote.

  The girl smiled. It was the first time she’d done that, and for some reason it made me think of that smile-shaped banana painting in Dr. Milton’s office, the one that had made me cry. “How old are you, Parker Santé?”

  I held up ten fingers, then seven.

  “Seventeen? What a horrible age. I bet you spend most of your free time playing computer games and watching pornography on the Internet.”

  People who can speak don’t know this, but it’s much harder to lie when you don’t have access to words. The mind might be treacherous, but the body is a Boy Scout—it’s always trying to give away your secrets. I put on an expression that I hoped conveyed offense and denial simultaneously. The girl didn’t buy it for a second.