It was strange; where once the pen had flown over the paper, seeming to cover each sheet from top to bottom by a process of benign magic, the words now straggled and draggled, the letters large and tottery, as if he was regressing back to early grammar school days in his own private time machine.
In those days, his mother and father had still had some love left over for him. Amy had not yet blossomed, and his own future as The Amazing Ogunquit Fat Boy and Possible Hommasexshul was not yet decided. He could remember sitting at the sun-washed kitchen table, slowly copying one of the Tom Swift books word for word in a Blue Horse tablet - pulp stock, blue lines - with a glass of Coke beside him. He could hear his mother's words drifting out of the living room. Sometimes she was talking on the phone, sometimes to a neighbor.
It's just baby fat, the doctor says so. There's nothing wrong with his glands, thank God. And he's so bright!
Watching the words grow, letter by letter. Watching the sentences grow, word by word. Watching the paragraphs grow, each one a brick in the great walled bulwark that was language.
"It's to be my greatest invention," Tom said forcefully. "Watch what happens when I pull out the plate, but for gosh sakes, don't forget to shield your eyes! "
The bricks of language. A stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Words. Worlds. Magic. Life and immortality. Power.
I don't know where he gets it, Rita. Maybe from his grandfather. He was an ordained minister and they say he gave the most wonderful sermons...
Watching the letters improve as time passed. Watching them connect with each other, printing left behind, writing now. Assembling thoughts and plots. That was the whole world, after all, nothing but thoughts and plots. He had gotten a typewriter finally (and by then there wasn't much else left over for him; Amy was in high school, National Honor Society, cheerleader, dramatics club, debate society, straight A's, the braces had come off her teeth and her very best friend in the world was Frannie Goldsmith... and her brother's baby fat had not yet departed although he was thirteen years old, and he had begun to use big words as a defense, and with a slowly blooming horror he had begun to realize what life was, what it really was: one big heathen cooking pot, and he was the missionary alone inside, being slowly boiled). The typewriter unlocked the rest of it for him. At first it was slow, so slow, and the constant typos were frustrating beyond belief. It was as if the machine was actively - but slyly - opposing his will. But when he got better at it, he began to understand what the machine really was - a kind of magic conduit between his brain and the blank page he strove to conquer. By the time of the superflu epidemic he was able to type better than a hundred words a minute, and he was at last able to keep up with his racing thoughts and snare them all. But he had never stopped his longhand entirely, remembering that Moby Dick had been written longhand, and The Scarlet Letter, and Paradise Lost.
He had developed the writing Frannie had seen in his ledger over years of practice - no paragraphs, no line breaks, no pause for the eye. It was work - terrible, hand-cramping work - but it was a labor of love. He had used the typewriter willingly and gratefully, but thought he had always saved the best of himself for longhand.
And now he would transcribe the last of himself that same way.
He looked up and saw buzzards circling slowly in the sky, like something from a Saturday matinee movie with Randolph Scott, or from a novel by Max Brand. He thought of it written in a novel: Harold saw the buzzards circling in the sky, waiting. He looked at them calmly for a moment, and then bent to his journal again.
He bent to his journal again.
At the end, he had been forced to return to the straggling letters which had been the best his shaky motor control could produce at the beginning. He was reminded achingly of the sunny kitchen, the cold glass of Coke, the old and mildewy Tom Swift books. And now, at last, he thought (and wrote), he might have been able to make his mother and father happy. He had lost his baby fat. And although still technically a virgin, he was morally sure that he was not a hommasexshul.
He opened his mouth and croaked, "Top of the world, Ma."
He was halfway down the page. He looked at what he had written, then looked at his leg, which was twisted and broken. Broken? That was too kind a word. It was shattered. He had been sitting in the shade of this rock for five days now. The last of his food was gone. He would have died of thirst yesterday or the day before except for two hard showers. His leg was putrefying. It had a green and gassy smell and the flesh had swelled tight against his pants, stretching the khaki fabric until it resembled a sausage casing.
Nadine was long gone.