What he had wanted to ask the nice lady in the yellow shirt was: Why didn’t anyone come to get me?
His eleven-year-old self had gotten sick—this was a long time before social services and the nice lady in the yellow shirt—his insides turning to water, the basement floor wet with it, and his father had taken him to the doctor. The ladies in the candy-colored clothes had weighed him. They had stood him on a silver pedestal and marked the notch where the top of his head ended. They had stabbed a tube into his arm, and the blue vein sucked the warm liquid into his body. They had stared at him, shaken their heads, and whispered. They had given his father a slip of paper and let the two of them walk back out into the spotlight-sunny day. And they didn’t come for him, not yet.
But later, after they did come for him, when the nice lady in the yellow shirt asked him why he didn’t call out, asked him why he didn’t tell the nurses and the doctor-man at the clinic, his twelve-year-old self had still been a bird with a hood over his head. And the twelve-year-old-self words in his brain didn’t sound like the words coming out of her mouth, and a bubble of silence expanded between them. He wanted to tell her that the sun had been too bright that day, that his father’s car, hurtling down the road, had felt like the world exploding, that the office noises—the rings and beeps and child cries, the TV box with the people locked inside—pounded like fists against his skull. And he had wanted to get out of there—to rest his eyes, to let the noises crawl out of his ears.
If he could see that nice lady in the yellow shirt now, he would tell her that he didn’t know he could free himself. He didn’t know that the words in his head could be arranged to say, “There’s a deadbolt on a door that is always locked.”
But after his father was locked behind a deadbolt in a prison, with a barbed-wire fence cutting the sky, he had sat at a dinner table with a foster family and learned to speak like them; he had gone to school and learned to think like them; he had ridden bikes and made forts and taken pictures that people put in scrapbooks; but he was never really there with them: In his mind he was still in a room with a deadbolt that was always locked. He played tag and dangled from monkey bars, but the old self watched this new self and whispered things in that other language that made him itch inside.
In foster care he discovered that doors could remain unlocked. Once he found them unlocked, the doors, he couldn’t stop walking through them—their handles turning so easily, sweeping open as though he was invited inside. He walked through neighbors’ unlocked doors—when they were gone away at the office or off at the shopping center, when they were praying at their church. Once a boy came home from school when he was inside, and his thirteen-year-old self had to hide in a closet until the boy turned on the hi-fi in his bedroom. The door to the boy’s room was cracked, and for a few moments he stood at the top of the stairs, just two feet from the open door, and listened to the music. It was the first time he’d heard the song. It was loud and angry, the singer’s voice like an animal growl, and he felt the electricity for the first time, too. He could see the boy’s bare feet on his bed, crossed at the ankles, his toes keeping beat with the drums. He felt the electricity first in his fingertips, then up his arms. (Like now, like it was moving in his body now.) Then it went supernova in his chest, and his hands felt like metal clamps. Standing at the top of those steps, he felt his body grow, felt his spine elongate, the bones of his legs lengthen, the sinew of his muscles bulge to superhuman size. But then, through the open window, he heard his foster mother call him for dinner. He was thirteen and he had been hungry.
But the itch inside grew, like animal nails clawing the cavity of his chest, like teeth gnawing the ridges of his skull; it grew until he felt raw inside and the itch made him smash a lamp against his foster mother’s head. Then they sent him to another place with deadbolts on the doors. Not like the basement, but with beds and painted walls and time in a courtyard with cooing doves in the trees. Here he learned to act like them, learned the right answers to the right questions, learned to smile and say things like “It’s nice to see you” and “I feel fine” and “Please don’t do that,” and on the outside he seemed like them, but he wasn’t. You are me, but I’m not you. He said this in his mind when talking to them. You are me, but I’m not you. There’s a black hole in me; he could feel it, gravity turned inside out, an ever-expanding implosion.
Now he swerved into the sky, a huge cement half circle sweeping above the low-slung houses. The on-ramp slipped the Toyota into the stream of cars riding the Santa Ana Freeway, the red taillights like rushing capillaries of blood. For a quarter of a mile, the freeway was raised on cement columns, the basin twinkling below him, the sky so clear the L.A. high-rises shimmered in the distance. Sometimes he drove all night, listening to the music on the cassette player—“Find a little strip, find a little stranger”—the Santa Ana Freeway looping into the 110, the downtown skyscrapers like things earthquaked into the air. The 110 carving a tunnel through the broken-glass sparkle of the Carson refineries, the highway system like the arteries of a huge heart, the whole basin falling toward the ocean, gridded with streetlights and back-porch spotlights, millions of people sitting in their little homes, watching television. From here you could feel their insignificance, parasites on a larger organism.
He had slept in the car yesterday morning, curled up like a rabbit in the back of the Toyota, the car parked on the edge of a construction site, the skeletons of half-framed houses casting shadows across the ground. Someone had rapped his knuckles against his window. He had jumped and his heart beat like grenade explosions, his eleven-year-old-self heart again, curled in a corner, his chest thumping with fear. But it was a plainclothes policeman, his hand gesturing for him to roll down the window.
Girlfriend kicked him out, he’d told the cop.
He was a broad-shouldered Rancho Santa Elena detective with nothing to do, a coffee in his hand as though meeting a friend for breakfast.
“Well, you can’t sleep here,” the cop said. And then he gave him the coffee, fresh and warm in his hands, and let him go. “YMCA in Tustin,” the cop said. “They’ll take you in for a night or two if you’ve got nowhere to go.”