With Other Small Spaces, I had moved past the trauma of reading my mother’s work, but on the verge of stepping forward into Fictional Family Life, I admit that had the sun been shining that second day of the holiday weekend, I might have interpreted it as a sign to limit my penance, to decide I had fulfilled it to the best of my ability. Instead, the rain was punishing, a testament to my mother’s power.
I drank my coffee at the great-room windows and imagined the concrete squares of the sidewalk buckling, the street surrendering, the tar peeling back to reveal the shoring asphalt, sinkholes ripping open and caving in, my wall of windows shattering, submerging me right where I stood. I suddenly remembered my dream from the night before. It wasn’t the old nightmare I was used to, death of a mother by a child wielding a two-by-four. Instead, I was wearing goggles and swimming through my neighborhood. The teenager who lives with his single father across the street was balanced on a yellow surfboard, paddling upstream, and tugging a drowning old couple behind him. I was treading water, looking up at the people gathered on rooftops digging for the courage to dive into the cascading surge. Someone yelled out, Who’s got the coordinate for Noah’s ark? and in the dream I had thought that figuring out the coordinates would be a good task for my squirrel.
I wondered for a moment what it might mean, but then I turned away from the outside world, refilled my cup, and assumed my position on the couch. It was time to begin.
I paged forward to the first section, “The Travels of Boys,” and then to the first story, “Simon Tabor Introduces Himself.”
When I was eleven, I believed I invented masturbation. Since then, in the early morning hours, I follow an exact routine: I briefly wake, pull my pud, traipse into my bathroom, turn the light on low, and pee. When I return, I push my dog back over to his side. Hercules snores a lot and sometimes I have to squeeze the wet black pad of his nose until he takes a big gulp and goes quiet. Then I crawl back onto my side of the bed and am gone, dreaming my fantastic lives. In these dreams, I am never who I am, a boy who lives a scrubbed truth, the subject of a medical file that reduces me to:
Patient Name: Simon Tabor
DOB: 1/28/1973
Hair/Eyes: Dark Brown/Dark Brown
Height/Weight: Short/Light
Diagnosis: Factor XI deficiency
In my dreams, I am ageless in a way that makes me understand that although I will soon be sixteen, I am not quite yet a man. In those other lives, I am called Deo or Abel or Icarus or Zed, and I speak Spanish, Russian, Turkish, and the watery babble of the great old tortoises. My chronology is all over the place: I live in this century or in the last, or in one way before that, raised exotically in Medellín, Moscow, Istanbul, or the Galápagos Islands. Depending on which dream I dream, my father is the former top lieutenant to the reigning drug lord of Medellín, or a fur-trapping Russian foreign minister, or a Turkish Ottoman pasha, or the man who discovered the Galápagos. My mothers are always tall and thin and beautiful and remind me of different kinds of full-blossomed flowers with tantalizing aromas. Whoever I may be in sleep, that boy wanders the globe and is intent on daring adventures.
To be clear, I know that I did not invent masturbation, a surprising fact I discovered when I read a book whose title currently escapes me, but in which the main character is so engaged. Regardless that human instinct guided me in a practice as old as the eons, the result left me unshakeable in my belief that I could invent, create, and manifest other realms, which has been a godsend, given the basic facts of my restricted life.
I felt excitement shoot through me: there would be stories wrapped inside other stories, wrapped inside other stories, wrapped inside other stories, an archaeological dig that would reveal new treasures as one dove deeper and deeper. I wondered what I would find at each level, what the beating center would look like.
The next story, “Simon Tabor Explains All,” started like this:
I am diseased. I always do like saying it that way, as if I were a doctor in some West African village in a paint-peeled hospital curing some awful virus and have been inflicted after saving thousands with my amazing medical skills and ministrations, or as if I were patient zero who contracted some never-before-seen deadly flu, or, well, you understand what I’m doing here. But the truth is one false move can spell the end of my life. A splinter gone uncaught or deliberate tearings of the flesh. From the inconsequential to the major, nearly anything might set my blood free, and that is my disease. Everyone these days wants to be set free, and so do I, but not with my scarlet blood pooled around my cooling, bluing body.
Still unclear? Well, people today are sort of stupid, so I will spell it out: I am a hemophiliac. And I am the rarest kind, because not only isn’t there any cure in general, no one has yet come up with a concentrate I could take, that would provide my body with what it’s missing: factor XI. Apparently, XI is sneaky and wily, eluding the medical researchers. They have developed concentrates for hemophiliacs deficient in other factors, but if you’re an XI, like me, you’re out of luck. So I must guard my body’s eight or so pints of blood that keep me alive, as one pinprick would cause spillage until I die. And until I have attained my own transcendence, I do not want that to happen.
Here are other basic facts of my life. I have been confined to my room since I was brought home from the hospital. Photographs show me as a handsome infant with almond-shaped eyes and a full head of black, corkscrewed curls. I had many visitors in those early days, as evidenced in Polaroids snapped by Judah, my father. I was two when pictures of people kissing and hugging me ceased to be recorded because the visitors had fallen away, something that still greatly disturbs my mother, Pearl, all these years later. What disturbs me more: there is not a single picture of me taking first steps out on the grass, or swinging on a swing at a park, or playing a game of dodgeball with neighborhood kids. Except for the trip from hospital to home, I have never been outside, and that has made my life simultaneously horrendous and incredible.