Theo Read online

  Theo

  Ed Taylor

  Dedicated to Steve Street, dikiy muzhchina

  the music, it was

  the onliest thing.

  – Sidney Bechet

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  one.

  two.

  three.

  four.

  Copyright

  one.

  what sticks to memory, often,

  are those odd little fragments

  that have no beginning

  and no end.

  – Tim O’Brien

  Theo surfaces on his back and sits up, netted in white sheets cool and slightly ocean-damp, the dream before him, a scrim he sees through as behind it are the things in his room: the wall, the window, his stuff, all behind his father in a hotel room, with an eyepatch, and a model train track on the bed in a figure eight, and a knock on the door and a man in a blue uniform in a weird hat and Theo asking him, are you the conductor and now Theo awake in one place that’s two.

  He flops back down, the mattress bouncing a little, not sure of anything for a minute, then is asleep again, and his teeth are falling out. He is sitting at a table in a place like a bar, he’s been to bars before with adults, there is music, and adults stare at him, and he wiggles his front tooth with his tongue. He reaches in and pulls and the tooth comes loose and others cascade onto his tongue, just fall out. They clack like plastic, but the teeth are small and sandy looking, or sugary, grainy, and a little yellow. They look like candy. He looks up to tell someone, there is a man next to him. But words won’t come out, just sounds, like an animal. He gets up from the table and tries to talk, but no words come out, just noises, and the people turn away from him: and then he wakes up again, remembering his dad’s on tour.

  Australia is so far away they have different days there. He wants to go: Australia has interesting animals. His dad said, we’ll go mate, last time he came. Theo isn’t sure when that was; before the tour, so it was months ago.

  Everything else is waiting for his dad. Theo waits. He’s getting better at it since he turned ten. Sometimes he forgets what he’s waiting for.

  He looks out the window and it’s just blue. He hears nothing but birds; he knows robins, wrens, sparrows, thrushes, gulls, some wind. He’s got a good ear, his dad says. Down past the terrace and the gazebo and the old pool and the rectangle that was a tennis court and the slanting back lawn is the beach. He thinks he can hear it, the ocean; he’s on a ship. In a cabin. He has to go to the bathroom.

  He untangles himself from bed and shuffles to the window, yawning so hard his eyes water. The sun’s low and big, white bright, everything else gold early. Past the trees the white on the ocean is stairs. Waves. People surf on them, but not here. Is riding a wave like riding an animal. He doesn’t think it would be like riding a horse, he’s ridden a horse. If you watch the waves you can see how each one’s different, and alive.

  He takes off his pajama bottoms, stands at the window looking down and out, no wind, it’s quiet, only the birds. The tiny ones he knows are called tits. Tits.

  He thrusts himself out the opened window, and lets loose. He watches his stream, a thin glass braid that frays and turns into little beads by the time it gets to the second floor, then it’s like rain. He’s at the very top of the house. On a mountain. If he jumped he’d get hurt. His head feels clean and empty.

  No people sounds. The air’s warm. Standing there he remembers the winter, when they didn’t go downstairs for a while.

  All the warm rooms were on the third floor, the living room with the fireplace and Gus’s room and Colin’s room. So they just stayed up there and burned things and opened cans, wrapped in blankets to go to one of the bathrooms. Then a morning he was bored Theo wrestled his arms into his overcoat and went out in the hall and down the freezing wide back stairs, carpet chewed, and there were crystals on the kitchen floor, white and shiny, blowing in, and down the hall toward the front door, the drifts curling and curving and Gus or Colin, probably Colin, had forgotten to close the front door and the white was inside, the white sky and the paired front doors’ opening was rounded with snow at the bottom, snow blown in and everywhere, the whole first floor, snow on floors and walls, piled on paneling, everything, and tracks in a place the wind hadn’t gotten – maybe a fox. Walking from room to room the windows were thick and you couldn’t see through them, and snow everywhere, blown and dusted, lucky the rooms were so empty, and Theo started running and kicking through the white dunes, until he couldn’t feel his feet in his sneakers and his bare hands. He knew he had gloves, somewhere. Maybe Gus could tell him.

  In the sunny window now, Theo tugs on his pajama bottoms and laboriously ties the drawstring in a bow, concentrating. Then he turns from the window and toward the door, across the attic. The space is huge, and he’s put his mattress against a wall so he won’t feel lost. He walks past the nicked piano bench on which he arranged old photographs and letters and programs and postcards from the corrugated boxes and rusty trunks up there, left by previous residents of the house. It was an old house, like the last two.

  The black and white photos are of people at the house a long time ago, around the pool when it worked, and at the gazebo; pictures of parties, of people in the rooms. He showed Gus and Colin the stuff he’d found after he moved into the attic, and they went crazy.

  Gus, would you look at this. Holy fecking Jesus, that’s Frank Sinatra. It’s the bleeding Rat Pack, Dean Martin, and there’s Peter Lawford. He married a Kennedy, for God’s sake. Look at these other mokes – Colin flicked at the photograph with a painted nail. That was one of the days when he painted his nails and wore things that girls wore, like hairbands and make-up.

  Those other fellows look like they might have some Sicilian blood.

  It is the bleeding Gatsby mansion, after all.

  I’m sure the agents say that about every house here.

  No, I feel it, man, there be dragons. There’s ghosts walking. There’s blood, too, I’m telling you, matey.

  That’s enough. Gus snorted and frowned – you need a tighter leash.

  Gus had frowned at Colin and cut his eyes toward Theo, made that face. The don’t-forget-about-Theo face. Gus was Theo’s grandfather. But sometimes Theo was glad Colin forgot. He wasn’t a baby, he was ten years old.

  Theo’s favorite photograph, scalloped around the edges, showed a band playing in the gazebo, and people dancing, men and women together, on what looked like a nice day, but black and white. The band was all men and they wore white jackets, and one man had a baton, like an orchestra conductor, and all the men looked alike, the band and the dancers, their hair was short and dark and slicked back, and the women all had short hair but not slicked back, and everyone not in the band was wearing white too, white suits and shoes, and there were a boy and a girl dancing too, at the lower corner of the photograph, both dressed like the grownups. A lady sat on the steps of the gazebo, watching everyone, and petting a white dog that had its tongue out. Even in the middle of everything, the dog was just a dog, with a dog expression on its face, kind of hopeful looking, Theo thought. Just enjoying the woman petting him, and maybe even though this was a big important party and maybe the lady would have to get up and help run the party or talk to strangers and make them feel welcome, or just get bored and leave, and maybe the dog would fret a little among so many strangers, it still wasn’t worried. Everything will be okay, it seemed to believe.

  Theo’s round stomach pokes out as he navigates the wide plain of the attic. The dresser’s looking at him, a long drawer open with a tongue of shirt hanging out. He walks the cool wood to the round rug island, which he dragged like a big pancake all the way up from the first floor. Now there are moths, tiny ones
that dissolve when touched; they are made of dust. Theo felt bad the first time he touched one and it became just a smudge. He likes having them up there.

  He has also moved his butterflies from his previous room, and stuck the branches in the spaces between the ceiling boards.

  His dad had sent the butterflies in the spring. One day eleven boxes addressed to him from London arrived at the house. Colin was gone, Gus was asleep.

  Each box was full of leafy branches with pupas on them like fruit, packed in Styrofoam and wet white padding. Theo knew his father had an office in London because things would come from there, and phone calls sometimes. There was a heavy envelope in one box, from Hotel La Mamounia, Marrakech.

  hey pal alright – you & me both like to watch things grow & we both like SURPRISES/ see what pops out of these/like xmas crackers except MUCH better – be SURE & WRITE me/anything you send to office in ny or londontown will get to me ok ok

  love & kisses on ya beautiful head

  ps/take care of yourself love

  There were drawings and doodles around the edges, a flower and something that looked like an antelope or gazelle, and big zigzags. His dad had turned the paper sideways to write on it, in green ink.

  Theo had a book about insects so he read and decided to stick the branches up in his room. Then when he changed rooms he moved the forest with him. It has been thirty-seven days. He counted. The pupas look like the skate purses washing up on the beach, leathery and dead. He knows egg, larva, pupa, adult. He knows imago is another name for adult and means ready to lay eggs, to reproduce. Sexual maturity it is called.

  Theo has to be careful – sometimes walking around thinking about something he gets poked by a branch. He also knows the pupas should be in enclosed containers but the attic could be a big jar and he hopes that is good enough.

  Theo walks around, closely looking at them now, skirting obstacles on the floor, his own and the stored things from previous owners. He pushes his hair out of his eyes to see better. Colin cut it last month so that it’s not too much in the way; just trimming back the undergrowth, he called it, squinting from behind a cigarette, scissors shaking in his hand. Sometimes Theo gets nervous, but Colin hasn’t yet cut him. So Theo sits quiet and motionless while it happens. His hair is over his shoulders and down his back, and he’s had it pulled at school and had gum thumbed into it and glue poured into it.

  It’s beautiful, his mother says, always running her fingers through it. She likes it long. To Theo it’s hot and in the way. And his face flushes when he thinks about school and the boys in his class. He thinks about the walk to class, in Manhattan, and his heart pounds still. He thinks about the wall where boys scribbled stuff at the hard playground, like a road with swing sets on it, the wall near the street and how words would get written and then the next day they’d be gone under new paint not quite the same color. The writing spread elsewhere too, under the slides and swing seats, Sharpies and pens, Mike sucks dicks Kings rule Peter pussy eater Theo is a pussy Stackpole is a fucking faggot, students and teachers. Adrian K fucks boys. He didn’t want to go, and his mother said it was okay, so he stopped. Then he didn’t live with his mother anymore, or in the city. He lived with Colin and Gus, out here, but not in the same house. Different houses. They’ve been in this one a while now, longer than the others.

  He tries not to think about school but can’t stop. Sometimes it wakes him up. Dreams. When he lived with his mom in the city and stopped going they visited people, slept late. He slept in lots of different beds, drifting off to the sounds of music and voices. He wants safe hair, hair no one notices. But his mom notices, smiles.

  Theo unlocks the attic door and walks out, closing the door behind him. His hand slides on the warm darkwood rail as he walks down the top stairs, being quiet, because it’s early and he wants to get outside before anyone notices him. It’s a long way down, there are 113 stairs to the first floor – he likes to count them. Numbers feel good, it feels good to say them, and they fill the spaces in his head and keep other things out. So he counts, passing down out of the gabled peak of the sprawling house, moving down through the fourth floor landing and the tricycles and mannequins that Colin dressed up in old-time clothes, ratty gold and crimson with tassels and braid, and the long halls called wings on each side, rows of rooms; probably no one up here, Theo thinks, but stays quiet anyway. He’s a prisoner escaping. If he makes it out, he’ll save the world.

  Going down a monster’s throat, must find a way out – light slashes in through the windows at the end of each hall; eyes letting in the light, inside a giant. Down the curving stair, watching for splinters under his right hand. Forty treads on the left staircase, wide enough that he has to stretch to take each in a single step and the risers high enough that he hops to keep to single steps.

  He keeps going, past the ‘art is anything you can get away with’ painted on the third floor by somebody one weekend. They said he was a graffiti artist, but graffiti was supposed to be bad so how could you be an artist of it. Between the third and second floors each step is painted a different color, another project by one of his mother’s friends. As he makes the turn at the landing he passes a tiny city, or what looks like a city to Theo, little towers of clay built on the flat part in front of the big window over the front doors. Now Theo’s inside an oak, spiraling down. When he’s out and looks back he’ll be seeing a huge tree. That’s where he lives.

  No sounds. Where are the dogs. Usually Paz curls outside his door, and the other two hear Theo descending in the morning, his thumps and sniffs and slaps at the railings, his sometimes muttering, and whistling sometimes. Not now, however: he is trying to avoid waking anything, including the sleeping giant. He slips down the last big set of stairs like walking in a movie, with faded red carpet that spills down starting at the second floor balcony and then runs in a stream of wine down and into the middle of the black and white tiles under the big chandelier: like antlers except it has ladies’ underwear, leis, fishing line, a shirt, a long beaded necklace, a scarf, a bicycle chain, a leathery banana peel, an orange paper kite, hanging. The bulbs don’t light anymore.

  He’s down and onto the cool tiles.

  Theo navigates among the tall things standing, Colin’s chessmen made of drift wood and suitcases and plastic junk. Theo moves toward the front doors, through dust floating in the gold sun from the leaded glass beside the front doors. He’s underwater, holds his breath. Gus usually puts a big piece of wood against the back of the doors to keep them shut at night, but he must have forgotten. Floor here is cooler, and grabbing a knob in each hand, Theo strains to open both doors at the same time. The heavy black slabs move, but slowly, and he has to keep pulling, backing up.

  A silver car sits on the marble entrance steps. At the top of the steps the car’s silver hood and grill and fender come to a point in the middle and stick out more at the top than the bottom: to Theo it’s a shark.

  That’s what he heard last night. His mother is here.

  Other cars sleep on the grass and along the gravel drive at angles. He notices the blue edge of something under the silver car’s front bumper. Theo lowers himself to a knee and ducks sideways to look. Another cake box, with red ribbon. And a teddy bear. And a yellow plastic toy guitar neck sticking out from under the left front wheel. More offerings.

  The last time, his mother fussed when he told her he’d eaten some of the cake that had been left – it could be poisoned, you just don’t know with these people. Promise me you won’t do that again.

  Theo said yes, his face cupped in his mother’s hands, her face inches from his, her eyes starry and dark. It was hard to say no to her when she was close like that, her eyes so big. But later when she’d vanished again he’d eaten a bite of cake, because he was hungry. And nothing happened.

  Colin had then found that cake, where Theo had set it in the scullery, and Colin grabbed fistfuls and tamped cake into his mouth until there was no room, then he found the dogs curled on a sofa and tried to mak
e the dogs eat some. Uninterested, they patiently stayed and allowed Colin to try, but shyly kept turning their heads. Colin stuck fingers in the back of Alex’s jaw like pushing a button to open and managed to get a pink hunk onto Alex’s tongue, but Alex shook his head and the wet cake slumped into a mound now dried and gray on one of the sofas. Theo couldn’t remember which one.

  At the silver car now Theo slides the box out from under, smelling the car smell of things he just knew as car, warming in the sun. He unties the ribbon, flips open the box, crouching. The cake is red, with icing piped in swirls and curves, and words Theo knows are French, and pictures. An icing guitar, and an icing skull.

  He pushes the box out of the way and reaches under the car for the bear, on which a little greasy fluid dripped. It has a ribbon, pink, and a little T-shirt that says ‘rock n roll.’ He stares at the toy guitar fretboard, a small arm reaching out from under the fat black tire. When his mother leaves, he can collect the guitar and put it with the other things.

  It has been a week since the last offering. Things appear in a variety of locations, occasionally on the back terrace, sometimes at the foot of a tree, but mostly on the front steps. Early one morning Theo had awoken and threaded his way down the long stairs and through the back hall toward the house’s rear and across the ballroom, the leaning motorbike’s bright lime-green against the far dark wall, Theo’s head swirling and light feeling and still mossy with sleep, and he saw a man in a tuxedo outside on the terrace laying a bunch of red roses in the middle of the tiles, alongside a black bottle with a cork. Theo walked to the French doors and stood, while the man carefully finished, then noticed Theo. He bowed, and turned, and walked toward the trees and the ocean. Theo walked out behind him, watching the man get smaller and disappear into the dense wiry low forest that stood up against the ocean and the storms and wind and salt just behind the dune line. The man had also left a book that said Les Fleurs du Mal. Theo yawned, and his eyes watered. He stood for a while until he began to sway, and wandered back in and up the stairs and back to bed. When he came down later, Colin sat cross-legged on the terrace drinking out of the black bottle and wearing a wide Mexican hat made out of straw.