His Illegal Self Read Free

in water.
    It was always summer, always chilled by fall, the mother’s absence everywhere in the air, in the maple leaves, for instance, lifting their silver undersides in the breeze which corrugated the surface of Kenoza Lake as his grandmother swam to and fro between the dock and a point in the middle of the lake where she could line up the middle chimney with the blinking amber light up on 52. Later he would wonder more about his missing grandfather and the Poison Dwarf who had once been Grandma’s friend, but that would be a different person who would ask those questions, all the old cells having died, been sloughed off, become dust in the New York City air.
    He could swim too. He had the shoulders even then, but the lake water was slimy and viscous and it left a clammy feeling on his skin which the sun would not burn off. He never did ask but he was certain it was millions of little dead things and he thought of the wailing signals on the radio and lay on his stomach on the dock and his back became black and his stomach was pale and ghostly as a fish.
    Small black ants were almost everywhere. Some he killed for no good reason.
    He looked up at Dial. She had huge dark eyes, like an actress on a billboard in Times Square. He would have swum with her any day he could.
    Would you like to go to a beach? she asked him now.
    But this wasn’t what he wanted.
    Will we stay in a motel?
    She looked at him with wonder. You outrageous little creature, she said. We’re just going to a sort of scuzzy house. We’ll probably be sleeping on the floor.
    Maybe there’s TV, he said. None of this was what he really meant. It was his upbringing, to “not say.”
    A lot better than TV, she said.
    That’s where the surprise is, Dial? In the scuzzy house?
    Yes, Jay.
    He was so happy he thought he might be sick. He snuggled into her then, his head resting against her generous breasts, and she stroked his head, the part low on the neck where all the short hairs are.
    Maybe I can guess what the surprise is, he said after a while. In the scuzzy house.
    You know I won’t tell you if you do.
    He did not need to say. He knew what it was exactly. Just as Cameron had foretold. His real life was just starting. He was going to see his dad.

3
    Except for one single photograph, the boy had never seen his dad, not even on TV. There had been no television permitted in Grandma’s house on Kenoza Lake, so after he had helped light the fires in fall the boy picked among the high musty shelves of paperbacks—some words as plain as pebbles, many more that held their secrets like the crunchy bodies of wasps or grasshoppers. He could read some, as he liked to say. Upstairs there was a proper library with a sliding ladder and heavy books containing engravings of fish and elk and small flowers with German names which made him sad. On the big torn sofas where he peered into these treasures, there was likely to be an abandoned Kipling or Rider Haggard or Robert Louis Stevenson which his grandma would continue with at dusk. In this silky water-stained room with its slatted squinting views across the lake, there was a big glowing valve radio which played only static and a wailing oscillating electric cry, some deep and secret sadness he imagined coming from beneath the choppy water slapping at the dock below.
    Down in the city, at the Belvedere, there was a pink GE portable TV which always sat on the marble kitchen countertop; once, when he thought his grandma was napping, he plugged it in. This was the only time she hurt him, twisting his arm and holding his chin so he could not escape her eyes. She spit, she was so crazy—he must not watch TV.
    Not ever.
    Her given reason was as tangled as old nylon line, snagged with hooks and spinners and white oxidized lead weights, but the true reason he was not allowed to watch was straight and short and he learned it from Gladys the Haitian maid—you don’t be getting yourself upset seeing your mommy and daddy in the