THE TALK | Chapter 5
The day before he discovers himself in the basement...
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This is the fifth section of an excerpt from one of my pipeline novels, THE TALK, sometimes described (by me) as “Coraline meets Interior Chinatown.” THE TALK explores the implications of willful blindness—to color, to history, to many things—through a kid in a mysterious suburb who notices the seams in his off-kilter world, gradually coming to realize just how carefully they’ve controlled his perception of it, and how carefully they’ve controlled his perception of himself.
The excerpt starts here.
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The day before he discovers himself in the basement, the colorless boy wakes more slowly. The alarm goes off a few more times than usual, chastising him as he stares at the ceiling. “Stealing time is a crime! Stealing time is a crime!” He’s worried that when the light turns on, something will be revealed. He is trying to convince himself that last night was just a dream.
In the bathroom, he doesn’t pause to question the absence of a mirror, or why he’s never had one, or who might’ve taken it. He’s too grateful that he can’t see himself. Mint green looks real nice right now, real… safe, compared to certain other colors, on certain other surfaces. He brushes his teeth furiously and rolls out.
He does not look at that door beneath the stairs as he walks by. But that doesn’t save him from thinking about it the whole way to school. On Monday, even though it was the first time he ever saw it, it was no biggie, kind of like when you look closely at some wallpaper you always took for granted, and notice a million new things, and ask your sister, Has that always been there? and she laughs and says, Yes, dummy.
But now he has basements on the brain. Now he looks at all the bright beautiful houses zooming by and wonders what they’ve got going on below ground level. He wonders who else might be harboring history, preserving it in the present like pickled veggies. There could be anything in the basements of Everywhere-Nowhere, given that he’s never even seen his own.
“Huuuuuuuuuhhh,” he says in a long whisper that might be more of a groan, which does nothing to drown out his weird new thoughts.
“What’s that?” his mom asks.
“Nothing.”
Walking into the building is a little difficult. Whether or not last night was a dream, the feeling of relatively rich dad’s gaze is real, and he imagines those eyeballs hovering inches from his body, inviting him to take their perspective, to look at himself in a new way. He refuses to. Mostly successfully. Mostly. But for the first time in his life, the colorless boy is uncomfortable in his own skin.
As he approaches his crew in the hall, he realizes this is the moment he’s been dreading. Will it be awkward? Will everything have changed? Will relatively rich kid’s gaze reinforce his dad’s, marking thug-life and the colorless boy as somehow different from man-bun and four eyes and snapback guy?
“Hey dude.”
“Morning!”
“Sup.”
“Hi.”
“Yo!”
Phew! They’re all together and smiling like normal, and it’s clear that last night really was a dream, or that they’re going to act as if it were a dream, same difference.
Thug-life tries to meet his eyes, and then gives him this nod that they’ve never done before. Unsure how to react, the colorless boy gives him a thumbs up and a smile. The homeroom bell rings. Thug-life turns away.
Everywhere! Nowhere! Oh, the vibrant color of the colorblind town!
White lines on green fields! Yellow lines on black asphalt! Colors so perfect you’d think they’re straight out of a storybook. Red bricks and beige sidewalks! Golden sun and blue sky! Colors so pristine you’d think they’re from someone’s dream. Black and white cop cars with red and blue lights! Silver full-sized sedans and dark blue SUV’s! Colors so bright you’d think they’re compensating for something underneath.
And parents. And children. And policemen. And professionals. And students. And faculty.
It’s not that the people don’t have any color. There’s some fraction of melanin in just about everyone’s skin. It’s just that it’s been decided—not by anyone in particular, but just, you know, decided—that those colors don’t matter. Color used to matter a great deal. It used to be everything. This caused major problems, so at some point—not any particular moment, just, you know, a while ago—good people like the folks in Everywhere-Nowhere decided that it was nothing. Less than nothing, even. And since color is less than nothing, the polite thing—the right thing—is to see nothing when you look at it. Or to unsee it as you look at it. Or forget it right after you see it. Or not look at it at all. It being the skin on a human body. Unless you’re an historian studying dead people from the time when these things mattered. That’s your only pass. If any of this is difficult for you, you’re a ------. Excuse me, I said you’re a Racist, and should keep it to yourself.
The kids in the colorless boy’s grade know this by now, in most cases without ever having to be told (barring the occasional slow learner, like tanned/oblivious girl who, in seeing clearly, reveals her ignorance). There are many ways of describing them: the popular guy, the big-boobs girl, the bowl-cut kid who picks his nose. They don’t need an additional set of adjectives that they already beat to death in the color wheel unit of art class. And it wouldn’t really help differentiate them anyway, because although there is a range of shades from pasty white to copper tone, if pushed to summarize the student body, if you’re really twisting my arm about putting it in these outdated terms, gun to my head, with the caveat that you didn’t hear it from me, one could say that 99.9% of these people happen to be -----. Sorry, they happen to be White.
And the colorless boy? No, he isn’t invisible, or transparent, or albino. It’s just that he identifies with his color even less than the average kid does. So much so that instead of calling him point guard, or chicken legs, or the only jock who reads assigned novels, it made sense to call him colorless. He identifies with not identifying with his color. And everyone in Everywhere-Nowhere makes sure not to identify him by color either. You’re not supposed to notice anybody’s color, but it’s with the colorless boy that you really show off your colorblind chops. With him the stakes are real.
The school day is like one big sigh of relief as the colorless boy realizes that nothing has changed. He does not have to be haunted by rich dad’s gaze, doesn’t have to think about it ever again. After all, that stuff was locked away in a vault for a reason! It can’t hurt anybody down there.
After practice, Thug-life bruh invites him and man-bun over to study (for real this time, big test tomorrow). During a break they’re gathered around the kitchen island eating snacks with Thug-life’s parents, who are pretty chill. The colorless boy has eaten a Jolly Rancher that turned his tongue purple, and some cheese puffs that coated his fingers orange, which is hilarious because those are colors.
Then man-bun snatches the last cheese puff just as thug-life is reaching for it. “Too slow!” He chews it loudly in kind of a taunting way. Thug-life gets that mean-mug look on his face that sometimes precedes the outbursts that gave him his nickname, like when he goes off on somebody on the basketball court, gets a technical foul.
“Uh-oh,” says the colorless boy. “Don’t make Thug-life mad. Might awaken the inner thug.” He makes guns with his hands, like a gangsta about to bust a cap in that TV show, you know the one.
This turns out to be the worst possible thing the colorless boy could have said. Thug-life seems to completely forget about man-bun. He freezes and looks over at his dad with the same anticipatory dread that kids look at thug-life with, when they know they’ve crossed a line. But times ten. His dad, on the other hand, is staring at the colorless boy.
“What did you just say, boy?”
“Um, I said don’t make… uh, I was just saying… cause you know how when he gets mad…” The colorless boy looks at thug-life and thug-life’s mom for help.
“Let it be, Dad. It's just a dumb nickname. They don't know what they're saying.”
“I know they don't know,” he says with a nod toward man-bun, “but I'm disappointed in him.”
“Just leave it. He doesn't know what he's doing.”
“Oh yeah? ‘Father, forgive them. For they know not what they do.’ We know how that one ends. But you ain't Jesus, son, and if you was, I wouldn't let you be. I ain't got God's patience. I’m out of patience entirely.” He may be talking to his family, but he hasn’t once stopped staring at the colorless boy, who is caught by that gaze like a deer in the headlights. He dry swallows. His skin is tingling again. It’s like last night, where an invisible wall suddenly separates him from man-bun, except this time the gaze seems to expect more from him, rather than less. Somehow tonight feels worse.
“I think you’re scaring the poor kid, babe.” Thug-life’s mom rests a gentle hand on her husband's forearm.
“Maybe I’m scared every goddamn second in this -----ass neighborhood! Maybe I’m scared for you!” He points at his son. Now the colorless boy knows where thug life gets his anger from. He's tempted to say the man started talking like a thug there for a minute, but he's catching on that that wouldn't go over well. “That woman needs to teach her boy some goddamn truth, ‘fore he learn it the hard way. I need some air.” He abruptly storms off.
Before he quite reaches the door to the back porch, his wife catches up to him and grabs his arm. Her voice is low, but the colorless boy catches it. “You know if you can’t reign it in, she might not let you stay.”
“Maybe it’s for the best. I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired. I don’t know why I ever considered making a deal with the devil.” He walks outside and slides the door shut behind him.
Thug-life’s mom returns to the kitchen island and addresses the colorless boy with much softer eyes. “Honey,” she says, “it might not be my place. I married in, so to speak, and I’m still learning about the ----- experience. But I have to ask, did your parents ever talk to you about… did they give you The Talk?”
The colorless boy is embarrassed. “You don’t mean, like, the talk about doing it, and stuff?”
She chuckles. “No, I don’t. And I think that answers my question.” Then she seems unsure what to say next. “Well, okay. Okay then… I need to go check on my hubby. I’ll leave you boys to study.”
“Wooooooow your parents are crazy,” says man-bun once she’s outside. They kind of go back to studying, but no one can focus.
This time the colorless boy doesn’t even try to hide his unease on the ride home.
“Let me guess,” his mom says. “There’s no test, you weren’t actually studying, you were just hanging out. Is this a new pattern? Do I need to ground you?”
“Mom, how come you never gave me The Talk?”
His mother is completely still for a few moments, looking straight ahead at the road. To his alarm, the colorless boy thinks he sees her smile shrink until her lips nearly close, but then it expands to its usual pearly-white grin. “I thought your father already explained where babies come from, Sport. Should I go over it again?”
“No! Sorry, I mean… isn’t there another talk?”
She shrugs innocently. “If you’d like me to talk about sex from a woman’s perspective-”
“Ew! Stop! It’s fine, forget I asked.”
It takes the colorless boy a long time to fall asleep. His skin is on fire. He feels like the trophies and the white books on the brown shelves are all staring at him through the darkness, trying to tell him something. He feels like the door beneath the stairs is calling out to him, pulsing a message through the walls like the heartbeat of the house.
Other than that, a normal day in Everywhere-Nowhere. In Social Studies they learned about how the Civil War ended Slavery, and how Martin Luther King Junior ended Racism, and how, having ended Racism, he set us up to end Race.