Hammer

Several years passed. They must have passed, thinks Snowman: he can’t actually remember much about them except that his voice cracked and he began to sprout body hair. Not a big thrill at the time except that it would have been worse not to. He got some muscles too. He started having sexy dreams and suffering from lassitude. He thought about girls a lot in the abstract, as it were – girls without heads – and about Wakulla Price with her head on, though she wouldn’t hang out with him. Did he have zits, was that it? He can’t remember having any; though, as he recalls, the faces of his rivals were covered in them.

Cork-nut, he’d say to anyone who pissed him off. Anyone who wasn’t a girl. No one but him and Alex the parrot knew exactly what cork-nut meant, so it was pretty demolishing. It became a fad, among the kids at the HelthWyzer Compound, so Jimmy was considered medium-cool. Hey, cork-nut!

His secret best friend was Killer. Pathetic, that the only person he could really talk to was a rakunk. He avoided his parents as much as possible. His dad was a cork-nut and his mother was a drone. He was no longer frightened by their negative electrical field, he simply found them tedious, or so he told himself.

At school, he enacted a major piece of treachery against them. He’d draw eyes on each of his index-finger knuckles and tuck his thumbs inside his fists. Then, by moving the thumbs up and down to show the mouths opening and closing, he could make these two hand-puppets argue together. His right hand was Evil Dad, his left hand was Righteous Mom. Evil Dad blustered and theorized and dished out pompous bullshit, Righteous Mom complained and accused. In Righteous Mom’s cosmology, Evil Dad was the sole source of hemorrhoids, kleptomania, global conflict, bad breath, tectonic-plate fault lines, and clogged drains, as well as every migraine headache and menstrual cramp Righteous Mom had ever suffered. This lunchroom show of his was a hit; a crowd would collect, with requests. Jimmy, Jimmy – do Evil Dad! The other kids had lots of variations and routines to suggest, filched from the private lives of their own parental units. Some of them tried drawing eyes on their own knuckles, but they weren’t as good at the dialogue.

Jimmy felt guilty sometimes, afterwards, when he’d gone too far. He shouldn’t have had Righteous Mom weeping in the kitchen because her ovaries had burst; he shouldn’t have done that sex scene with the Monday Special Fish Finger, 20% Real Fish – Evil Dad falling upon it and tearing it apart with lust because Righteous Mom was sulking inside an empty Twinkies package and wouldn’t come out. Those skits were undignified, though that alone wouldn’t have stopped him. They were also too close to an uncomfortable truth Jimmy didn’t want to examine. But the other kids egged him on, and he couldn’t resist the applause.

“Was that out of line, Killer?” he would ask. “Was that too vile?” Vile was a word he’d recently discovered: Righteous Mom was using it a lot these days.

Killer would lick his nose. She always forgave him.

One day Jimmy came home from school and there was a note on the kitchen table. It was from his mother. He knew as soon as he saw the writing on the outside – For Jimmy, underlined twice in black – what sort of note it would be.

Dear Jimmy, it said. Blah blah blah, suffered with conscience long enough, blah blah, no longer participate in a lifestyle that is not only meaningless in itself but blah blah. She knew that when Jimmy was old enough to consider the implications of blah blah, he would agree with her and understand. She would be in contact with him later, if there was any possibility. Blah blah search will be conducted, inevitably; thus necessary to go into hiding. A decision not taken without much soul-searching and thought and anguish, but blah. She would always love him very much.

Maybe she had loved Jimmy, thinks Snowman. In her own manner. Though he hadn’t believed it at the time. Maybe, on the other hand, she hadn’t loved him. She must have had some sort of positive emotion about him though. Wasn’t there supposed to be a maternal bond?

P.S., she’d said. I have taken Killer with me to liberate her, as I know she will be happier living a wild, free life in the forest.

Jimmy hadn’t believed that either. He was enraged by it. How dare she? Killer was his! And Killer was a tame animal, she’d be helpless on her own, she wouldn’t know how to fend for herself, everything hungry would tear her into furry black and white pieces. But Jimmy’s mother and her ilk must have been right, thinks Snowman, and Killer and the other liberated rakunks must have been able to cope just fine, or how else to account for the annoyingly large population of them now infesting this neck of the woods?

Jimmy had mourned for weeks. No, for months. Which one of them was he mourning the most? His mother, or an altered skunk?

His mother had left another note. Not a note – a wordless message. She’d trashed Jimmy’s father’s home computer, and not only the contents: she’d taken the hammer to it. Actually she’d employed just about every single tool in Jimmy’s father’s neatly arranged and seldom-used Mr. Home Handyman tool box, but the hammer seemed to have been her main weapon of choice. She’d done her own computer too, if anything more thoroughly. Thus neither Jimmy’s father nor the CorpSeCorps men who were soon all over the place had any idea of what coded messages she might have been sending, what information she may or may not have downloaded and taken out with her.

As for how she’d got through the checkpoints and the gates, she’d said she was going for a root canal procedure, to a dentist in one of the Modules. She’d had the paperwork, all the necessary clearances, and the backstory was real: the root canal specialist at the HelthWyzer dental clinic had toppled over with a heart attack and his replacement hadn’t arrived, so they were contracting out. She’d even made a genuine appointment with the Module dentist, who’d billed Jimmy’s dad for the time when she hadn’t shown up. (Jimmy’s dad refused to pay, because it wasn’t his missed appointment; he and the dentist had a shouting match about it later, over the phone.) She hadn’t packed any luggage, she’d been smarter than that. She’d booked a CorpSeCorps man as protection in the taxi ride from the sealed bullet-train station through the short stretch of pleebland that had to be crossed before reaching the perimeter wall of the Module, which was the usual thing to do. No one questioned her, she was a familiar sight and she had the requisition and the pass and everything. No one at the Compound gate had looked inside her mouth, though there wouldn’t have been much to see: nerve pain wouldn’t have shown.

The CorpSeCorps man must have been in cahoots with her, or else he’d been done away with; in any case he didn’t come back and he was never found. Or so it was said. That really stirred things up. It meant there had been others involved. But what others, and what were their goals? It was urgent that these matters be clarified, said the Corps guys who grilled Jimmy. Had Jimmy’s mother ever said anything to him, the Corpsmen asked?

Like, what did they mean by anything? said Jimmy. There were the conversations he’d overheard on his mini-mikes, but he didn’t want to talk about those. There were the things his mother rambled on about sometimes, about how everything was being ruined and would never be the same again, like the beach house her family had owned when she was little, the one that got washed away with the rest of the beaches and quite a few of the eastern coastal cities when the sea-level rose so quickly, and then there was that huge tidal wave, from the Canary Islands volcano. (They’d taken it in school, in the Geolonomics unit. Jimmy had found the video simulation pretty exciting.) And she used to snivel about her grandfather’s Florida grapefruit orchard that had dried up like a giant raisin when the rains had stopped coming, the same year Lake Okeechobee had shrunk to a reeking mud puddle and the Everglades had burned for three weeks straight.

But everyone’s parents moaned on about stuff like that. Remember when you could drive anywhere? Remember when everyone lived in the pleeblands? Remember when you could fly anywhere in the world, without fear? Remember hamburger chains, always real beef, remember hot-dog stands? Remember before New York was New New York? Remember when voting mattered? It was all standard lunchtime hand-puppet stuff. Oh it was all so great once. Boohoo. Now I’m going into the Twinkies package. No sex tonight!

His mother was just a mother, Jimmy told the CorpSeCorps man. She did what mothers did. She smoked a lot.

“She belong to any, like, organizations? Any strange folk come to the house? She spend a lot of time on the cellphone?”

“Anything you could help us out with, we’d appreciate it, son,” said the other Corpsman. It was the son that clinched it. Jimmy said he didn’t think so.

Jimmy’s mother had left some new clothes for him, in the sizes she said he would soon grow into. They were sucky, like the clothes she always bought. Also they were too small. He put them away in a drawer.

His father was rattled, you could tell; he was scared. His wife had broken every rule in the book, she must’ve had a whole other life and he’d had no idea. That sort of thing reflected badly on a man. He said he hadn’t kept any crucial information on the home computer she’d wrecked, but of course he would have said that, and there was no way of proving otherwise. Then he’d been debriefed, elsewhere, for quite a long time. Maybe he was being tortured, as in old movies or on some of the nastier Web sites, with electrodes and truncheons and red-hot nails, and Jimmy worried about that and felt bad. Why hadn’t he seen it all coming and headed it off, instead of playing at mean ventriloquism?

Two cast-iron CorpSeCorps women had stayed in the house while Jimmy’s father was away, looking after Jimmy, or so it was called. A smiling one and a flat-faced one. They made a lot of phone calls on their ether cells; they went through the photo albums and Jimmy’s mother’s closets, and tried to get Jimmy to talk. She looks really pretty. You think she had a boyfriend? Did she go to the pleeblands much? Why would she go there, said Jimmy, and they said some people liked to. Why, said Jimmy again, and the flat-faced one said some people were twisted, and the smiling one laughed and blushed, and said you could get things out there you couldn’t get in here. What sorts of things, Jimmy wanted to ask, but he didn’t because the answer might entangle him in more questions, about what his mother liked or might want to get. He’d done all of his betrayal of her in the HelthWyzer High lunchroom, he wasn’t going to do any more.

The two of them cooked terrible leathery omelettes in an attempt to throw Jimmy off guard by feeding him. After that didn’t work, they microwaved frozen dinners and ordered in pizza. So, your mother go to the mall a lot? Did she go dancing? I bet she did. Jimmy wanted to slug them. If he’d been a girl he could have burst into tears and got them to feel sorry for him, and shut them up that way.

After Jimmy’s dad came back from wherever he’d been taken, he’d had counselling. He looked like he needed it, his face was green and his eyes were red and puffy. Jimmy had counselling too, but it was a waste of time.

You must be unhappy that your mother’s gone.

Yeah, right.

You mustn’t blame yourself, son. It’s not your fault she left.

How do you mean?

It’s okay, you can express your emotions.

Which ones would you like me to express?

No need to be hostile, Jimmy, I know how you feel.

So, if you already know how I feel, why are you asking me, and so on.

Jimmy’s dad told Jimmy that they two fellows would just have to forge ahead the best way they could. So they did forge ahead. They forged and they forged, they poured out their own orange juice in the morning and put the dishes in the dishwasher when they remembered, and after a few weeks of forging Jimmy’s dad lost his greenish tint and started playing golf again.

Underneath you could tell he wasn’t feeling too shabby, now that the worst was over. He began whistling while he shaved. He shaved more. After a decent interval Ramona moved in. Life took on a different pattern, which involved bouts of giggly, growly sex going on behind doors that were closed but not soundproof, while Jimmy turned his music up high and tried not to listen. He could have put a bug in their room, taken in the whole show, but he had a strong aversion to that. Truth to tell, he found it embarrassing. Once there was a difficult encounter in the upstairs hall, Jimmy’s father in a bath towel, ears standing out from the sides of his head, jowls flushed with the energy of his latest erotic tussle, Jimmy red with shame and pretending not to notice. The two hormone-sodden love bunnies might have had the decency to do it in the garage, instead of rubbing Jimmy’s nose in it all the time. They made him feel invisible. Not that he wanted to feel anything else.

How long had they been going at it? Snowman wonders now. Had the two of them been having it off behind the pigoon pens in their biosuits and germ-filtering face masks? He doesn’t think so: his father was a nerd, not a shit. Of course you could be both: a nerdy shit, a shitty nerd. But his father (or so he believes) was too awkward and bad at lying to have become involved in full-fledged treachery and betrayal without Jimmy’s mother noticing.

Though maybe she had noticed. Maybe that was why she’d fled, or part of the reason. You don’t take a hammer – not to mention an electric screwdriver and a pipe wrench – to a guy’s computer without being quite angry.

Not that she hadn’t been angry in general: her anger had gone way beyond any one motive.

The more Snowman thinks about it, the more he’s convinced that Ramona and his father had refrained. They’d waited till Jimmy’s mother had buggered off in a splatter of pixels before toppling into each other’s arms. Otherwise they wouldn’t have done so much earnest, blameless gazing at each other in André’s Bistro at OrganInc. If they’d been having a thing already they’d have been brusque and businesslike in public, they’d have avoided each other if anything; they’d have had quick and dirty trysts in grungy corners, weltering around in their own popped buttons and stuck zippers on the office carpet, chewing each other’s ears in car parks. They wouldn’t have bothered with those antiseptic lunches, with his father staring at the tabletop while Ramona liquefied the raw carrots. They wouldn’t have salivated on each other over the greenery and pork pies while using young Jimmy as a human shield.

Not that Snowman passes judgment. He knows how these things go, or used to go. He’s a grown-up now, with much worse things on his conscience. So who is he to blame them?

(He blames them.)

Ramona sat Jimmy down and gazed at him with her big black-fringed smudgy sincere eyes, and told him that she knew this was very hard on him and it was a trauma for them all, it was hard on her too, though maybe he, you know, might not think so, and she was aware that she couldn’t replace his real mother but she hoped, maybe they could be buddies? Jimmy said, Sure, why not, because apart from her connection with his father he liked her well enough and wanted to please her.

She did try. She laughed at his jokes, a little late sometimes – she was not a word person, he reminded himself – and sometimes when Jimmy’s father was away she microwaved dinner for just herself and Jimmy; lasagna and Caesar salad were her staples. Sometimes she would watch DVD movies with him, sitting beside him on the couch, making them a bowl of popcorn first, pouring melted butter substitute onto it, dipping into it with greasy fingers she’d lick during the scary parts while Jimmy tried not to look at her breasts. She asked him if there was anything he wanted to ask her about, like, you know. Her and his dad, and what had happened to the marriage. He said there wasn’t.

In secret, in the night, he yearned for Killer. Also – in some corner of himself he could not quite acknowledge – for his real, strange, insufficient, miserable mother. Where had she gone, what danger was she in? That she was in danger of some sort was a given. They’d be looking for her, he knew that, and if he were her he wouldn’t want to be found.

But she’d said she would contact him, so why wasn’t she doing it? After a while he did get a couple of postcards, with stamps from England, then Argentina. They were signed Aunt Monica, but he knew they were from her. Hope you’re well, was all they said. She must have known they’d be read by about a hundred snoops before ever getting to Jimmy, and that was right, because along came the Corpsmen after each one, asking who Aunt Monica was. Jimmy said he didn’t know. He didn’t think his mother was in any of the countries the stamps were from, because she was way smarter than that. She must have got other people to mail them for her.

Didn’t she trust him? Evidently not. He felt he’d disappointed her, he’d failed her in some crucial way. He’d never understood what was required of him. If only he could have one more chance to make her happy.

“I am not my childhood,” Snowman says out loud. He hates these replays. He can’t turn them off, he can’t change the subject, he can’t leave the room. What he needs is more inner discipline, or a mystic syllable he could repeat over and over to tune himself out. What were those things called? Mantras. They’d had that in grade school. Religion of the Week. All right, class, now quiet as mice, that means you, Jimmy. Today we’re going to pretend we live in India, and we’re going to do a mantra. Won’t that be fun? Now let’s all choose a word, a different word, so we can each have our own special mantra.

“Hang on to the words,” he tells himself. The odd words, the old words, the rare ones. Valance. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they’re gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.