THE TALK | Chapter 8
The morning after...
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This is the eighth 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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EIGHT
The day after is a little awkward.
The colorless boy feels sunlight against his closed lids. He’s thankful that it’s Saturday, until he wakes enough to remember that it’s Friday, which means he shouldn’t feel sunlight before his alarm. He opens his eyes and his parents are sitting on either side of his bed.
“Morning, Sport.”
“Hey, buddy.”
The colorless boy sits up, feeling totally ambushed. He’s definitely in trouble for sleeping in, but he can at least play it cool about the basement.
“We know you went to the basement.” His mother’s perfect-circle eyes look bigger and shinier than ever. He had never thought of them as buttons, but that’s what they are. His own right eye throbs sympathetically. His skin is no longer on fire, but there’s a constant simmer that he thinks will probably never go away, like a younger sibling forever tapping him on the shoulder.
“Um, what basement?”
She bends down to grab something beside the bed and comes up holding the master key, which he forgot to put away.
“And,” his father says diplomatically, “we want you to know we’re not angry. But clearly we need to sync up on a few things.” Sync up is business talk, which dad only uses at home if things are serious, or awkward, or seriously awkward. “Mom has errands to run, so you and I will take a little drive and level-set as we go. Sound good?”
“No school?”
“No school.”
“No work?”
“No work.”
It’s surreal that the colorless boy is not excited by this at all.
“K, just give me some privacy so I can get ready.”
Alone, he tries not to panic as he gets dressed. He both does and does not want to talk about last night. How much of it was real and how much was a sleep-deprived nightmare? He grabs the two objects under his pillow—the lady’s donut-shaped stone and the fist-handled afro pick—and resolves to keep them secret.
“AH!” He shouts and turns around. He scans the room frantically, looking from his bed to his bookshelf to his dresser. He really thought he felt someone tap his shoulder. Guess not. Then he remembers Caroline’s last words. Look through it to see the ghosts. He looks through the hole in the stone but just sees his normal room, no ghosts. “Huh.” He pockets stone and pick and goes to join his dad in the sedan.
They drive south through a quiet Everywhere-Nowhere. For the most part they don't speak, though the sense that his dad has Something To Say feels louder than the radio.
"$$$$$," Dad says, trying to make some small talk about work. "...Risk, share price, bubble, losses..."
"Sure." He nods at the right moments while texting thug-life bruh. Still no response. He could call, but, really? Call? That would be like admitting the world is ending.
"...$$$$$$$. Accounts, clients, markets, analysis. Is this making sense?"
"Mm-hm."
As they approach the outskirts of the neighborhood, the colorless boy notices something he's never noticed before. The further they get from the center of Everywhere-Nowhere, the less real everything looks. The roads and cars are gradually losing their color. The trees and buildings are losing their detail. The colorless boy stares at a row of hedges that look like a playdough sculpture, a lazy mass of green where no one bothered to carve individual leaves. The one perfectly symmetrical cloud in the sky looks like a bad cartoon.
"... arbitrage, innovation pipeline, revenue, value proposition… it's so nice to have the kind of son I can talk to about this stuff."
Thirty minutes after leaving the house, they can see the world ending. His dad slows the car as they approach the river that cuts east-west along the southern border of Everywhere-Nowhere. Up ahead, the road they’re on becomes a bridge. One lonely cop is parked on the bridge, the rich detail of his car standing out against the blurred backdrop, looking too solid for the ground that holds it up. Instead of crossing the bridge his dad rolls carefully off-road down an incline toward the riverbank. Short grass gives way to pebbly gravel. He parks and gets out, gesturing for his son to do the same.
It's like they've entered a child's half-finished watercolor. The bank and the bridge and the grass are all smeared and indistinct, color bleeding away until it all vanishes into a hazy white nothingness in the middle of the water. The bridge ends abruptly in empty space. The river doesn't have a far bank. Its flat, grayscale motion repeats like a screensaver loop.
The Edge. Another part of Everywhere-Nowhere you don't really talk about, except by talking around it, to say that you're looking to buy a house further north, in a safer subdivision. The colorless boy stumbles backwards on shaky knees. Too many in-between, not-quite-finished places in less than 24 hours. How can he trust the washed-out pebbles beneath his feet?
"You alright?" His dad catches his arm. "That's perfectly normal when looking at it for the first time. Or any time."
"It's just like she said," he whispers.
"Who now?"
He shuts his mouth. Even if his dad knows all about what's in the basement, he's probably never met the weird girl with the cat. For some reason he feels protective of Caroline. Like she's his little secret. Maybe because his parents deserve a taste of their own secret-keeping medicine. Or because revealing Caroline is a slippery slope to revealing what's in his pockets, objects he wants to figure out for himself first.
"Where's my friend?"
"What?"
"Where's Jamal?"
"Oh, I think they took him to the station last night. I assume they took him home when they realized the mix up."
"You assume?" If it didn't include a swear word, he would say what they say about assumptions.
"I said assume," his dad's face softens, "but I should say I hope, because I don't know for sure. We'll check up on Jamal if we need to. But right now I'm only thinking about you. You're my son, my responsibility, my priority. And I've failed you."
That feels like the setup for whatever his dad dragged him out here to say. But he doesn't say it. Instead, he glances up at the cop parked on the bridge above them. Then he picks up a pebble and throws it, hard enough that it arcs over the faded water and vanishes into the white nothingness without a trace. And another. And again. The colorless boy scoops up his own handful—amazed at how precisely the same they all are, like no one had time to give them personality—and plop plop plop, throws pebbles that sink one by one into the river. They do that for a while, like it's just father/son bonding time, like they don't have an uncomfortable convo on the agenda.
"Is this about how you never gave me The Talk?"
For a second he thinks Dad didn't hear him, but as the man winds up again he whispers, "Keep throwing." As soon as he obeys, his dad continues, quietly, "Do you know what this place is?"
"The Edge?"
"Not this exact spot. I mean this whole place." Another pebble joins its twins in vanishing whiteness. "Your mother and I aren't from here. You know that, right?" The colorless boy shrugs. "She and I used to talk a lot about how we would raise our children. We wanted you to be proud of where you came from, but not trapped by where you came from. You know?"
How is he supposed to know things no one ever told him? His father continues:
"It was sort of a nice problem to have, I guess, to have options. After my MBA we could live where we wanted. We argued about it. She wanted to stay in the hood, connected to family and culture. I thought we should follow opportunity—the best schools, the safest areas—wherever it led. I said we owed it to our future kids. That her tune would change when we got pregnant, because it would all become real." He turns to look at his son. "Side note, never try to tell a woman what her future opinions will be. Doesn't go over well."
Dad's smile is weak and vulnerable and horrifying, definitely not helpful for the delivery of his joke. The colorless boy valiantly returns a lopsided smile in encouragement. "Haha, yeah, for sure."
"Anyway, I was way more correct than I ever wanted to be. Serves me right." Another pebble disappears. "When she got pregnant with you, that's when your mother, well," another pebble, "that's when she changed."
His father looks up at the cop again. Oddly enough, the cop car revs up at that same moment, its idling hum spilling out over the quiet bridge. The tinted front window rolls down a fraction of an inch. But it stays parked. Dad continues, a little quieter.
“Suddenly, she couldn’t get to the suburbs fast enough. I was confused by her 180. But I rolled with it. After all, it was my idea. I remember standing with her in the house right before we bought it. She was rubbing her growing belly, almost like she was hungry, with kind of a weird look in her eye. She said, ‘This is the one. He’ll be safe here.’ Sometimes I can’t remember her real eyes, it’s been so long. But I’ll never forget that look. I wish I’d known what it meant.”
The colorless boy doesn’t like where this is going, the way it’s echoing things Caroline said last night. About mothers. And eyes. His own begins to throb. But he wouldn’t dare interrupt the most interesting story his dad has ever shared.
“We settled in. I settled into long hours at work, she settled into… everything else. I feel like for your mom, nesting wasn’t just about preparing the home. That woman was preparing the entire neighborhood. She spent tons of time at the school, the precinct, and the clubhouse, getting to know teachers, parents, neighbors, and police officers. Especially police officers. I teased that she must be inoculating all these folks who had never seen a family like ours before. ‘There’s one other family,’ she said. I laughed and said, ‘I know, I know. I was just joking.’ But it was like she didn’t understand me. She just smiled and said, ‘They’re actually colorblind here.’ Then I thought—hoped—she was the one joking. I said, ‘Yeah, but, not completely. Not really. Not literally.’ And her smile grew, to the way it is now, which I guess isn’t even weird for you, since it’s all you’ve known. ‘Not yet,’ she said, ‘but they will be.’”
Dad's still throwing pebbles, if anything increasing his pace as his story gains momentum. But the colorless boy stops, frustrated by his burning shoulder and his failure to throw far enough to clear the water, reminding him why he hates baseball. Plus he’s distracted, trying to ignore the phrase a family like ours and the phrase there’s one other which reminds him of not all that long ago, you two wouldn’t have dreamed and I know THEY don’t know, but I’m disappointed in HIM and He fits the profile and I’ve never worked with a kid like you. And that’s not to mention all the stuff his other parents were saying. Anyway, he’s not thinking about those phrases. Not at all. His skin is hot enough to cook on.
“This must’ve been about six months along,” Dad says. “That's when she started spending all her time with The Mayor.”
“The Mayor?”
“Yes,” he looks up yet again, and the colorless boy can’t help but look up with him. “The Mayor of Everywhere-Nowhere, who few people talk about and even fewer have met.” Did the cop car window roll down another fraction of an inch? Did the engine change pitch as the officer put it in gear? The colorless boy isn’t sure why that should matter, except that his dad seems very concerned with this police car, and his paranoia is contagious. “Your mother—she always had a nose for power and influence—buddied up to him, started spending all her time at his office during her third trimester. She would even go there when she told me she was running other errands, and I would catch her in the lie later. Not that it would phase her. I’d ask, ‘Did you pick up any fruit?’ she’d say, ‘There’s no fruit at The Mayor’s office, silly.’ ‘When I called you said you were at the grocery store.’ ‘Did I? Must’ve misspoke.’”
Apparently Dad’s endurance for talking is almost as good as his endurance for throwing pebbles. The colorless boy is impressed watching him do both at the same time, a steady stream of rocks and words longer than any conversation they’ve ever had together. At least, longer than any conversation where Dad was using language his son could actually understand. The colorless boy is rapt but frightened. He doesn’t want to interrupt the flow, but he senses the flow headed off a waterfall.
“Why would she lie?” he asks. “Why would you let her get away with it?”
“At one point, I demanded to meet The Mayor. ‘You can’t spend any more time alone with him,’ I said. She said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ ‘I’ll go with you next time,’ I suggested. She shook her head, ‘He’s not ready to reveal himself.’ I laughed at that, probably more harshly than I meant to. ‘Reveal himself? To a mere mortal like me? Is he God? No, he sounds more like The Wizard of Oz to me. Is he afraid I’ll tear the curtain?’ Obviously that argument didn’t get me anywhere. We went to bed angry. But she whispered something to me, so quietly, so late at night, that for a long time I assumed I’d dreamt it:
‘Everything you asked for is close at hand. Our son will be free of the past. And so will we.’
“And in the morning I went back to work.” Dad sighs; he angry-sighs, forcing air out through his nose like a dragon-snort. “In hindsight, so much was happening right under my nose. Your mom was acting weird, but I just blamed it on hormones. Meanwhile, Everywhere-Nowhere was morphing all around me, becoming what it is today. I blinked, and suddenly there were certain things you couldn’t talk about, other things you weren’t even allowed to notice. And a complete ignorance of other parts of the city, and even the world. But I don’t have to tell you.”
Dad throws a few more pebbles. Probably his arm will fall off later. “You can’t understand this yet,” another sigh, this time kind of tired-sad, “but a man can get completely swallowed up by his work. When things were confusing at home, work made sense. The money was measurable. The paycheck came in every two weeks, the zeroes were satisfying, and I spent all my energy on earning a bigger bonus.
“Then your due date came.”