The day Kirima and I found the church, I had a really bad cold. My cold was the kind that's embarrassing because your nose is so stuffed up that your voice sounds weird and your whole face feels hot. Being an eighth-grader in general was the equivalent of that kind of cold, I guess, so actually having one on top of that is just kind of ridiculous and brutal. Vulnerability tastes bad, like someone forcing you to eat canned soup.
Kirima was Inuit. She had round cheeks and shiny hair the color of polished black wood. Her clothes were just embarrassing--awful, worn stuff like big tee-shirts with dancing cats in aprons hanging off of her, colored jeans that were tight around the ankles, dirty Keds. That was the shirt she had on that day, the dancing cat shirt, and I watched the shadows of the twigs and trees wash over it, the cotton worn and vaguely nubbly up, up close. The cats were faded and cracked, her light brown skin beneath them seeming as if something under the surface of it would smell like canned black olives. She pointed at the little, pointed old building with the stained glass, all swelling with organ and song. "I told you I heard singing", she said.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm walking inside."
"You can go, then, but I'm not. You have no idea, Ki, who they even are."
"Just come on, Parker."
Of course I'd have expected something so dilapidated and exquisite would have been home to likewise dwellers--a charming, robust and wholesome race of gnome people in felt clothes and pointed hats, sweet and pure as a cartoon. Not especially handsome, but they would be tender, elite. We would not be allowed; such inadvertently perfect beings would have no use for the irrefutably awkward, which was us, stuck simultaneously at the most awkward point in their lives. I felt sad, too, because I knew that Kirima's affliction was temporary and that someday she would be lovely to everyone. The guilty ache of being selfish like this stung the most, in my chest.
But when we went inside, the faces were not elfin at all, but almost disgustingly human, to the point where you wanted to turn away. Unwisely nourished, atrophied, aged. Possessing strong feelings and not the mental capacity or the social skills to hide them or let them out gracefully, which is the ugliest and most uncomfortable thing of all. If you've ever watched a retarded person cry, then you know what I'm talking about. Vulnerability is nauseating, it makes me want to fucking throw up.
By that point I was feeling pretty shitty about the human condition and even worse about myself, because I was some stupid blond kid in unfashionable clothes, too-tight thermals with planets and race-cars that the kids at school made fun of. That day, my tee-shirt had wolves on it. Given all of this, when we opened up the heavy wooden door and it creaked open just like you'd imagine it would, and every sad backwoods eye in the place, all twenty or so of them, turned and looked right at us, falling silent, I wanted to run for the doorway or fall to the floor. Kirima wasn't scared, though, and she walked down the short, shabby aisle like a bride in hand-me-downs and when she reached the front up there, I almost couldn't breath at all--not through my nose because of my cold and not through my mouth because I felt so awed and terrified.
It isn't that I don't remember what she talked about, because I do, but since it won't come to me word for word I'm not going to try, because that would be like trying to describe the inside of your sternum when you feel sad or a feeling you had when you were four. I could see her, though, as the queen of Alaska, riding a narwhal, cartoon-queen in a parka, the works. She was everything beautiful, then, about religious parents who made you eat dinner at their house. She was everything wholesome and kind about idealistic America, my pioneer in a coloring book. She was Disneyland, minus the mean parts, I guess, and if she hadn't been messed up or if she had grown up right, she wouldn't have had any chance of ever being that at all. And I wanted to say so, but my insides were nowhere near big or colored-in enough yet to know how, and so instead I just started feeling that hot-liquid in the chest feeling you get when you know that you'll probably cry.
But I didn't cry yet, and when I looked up, everyone in the building had stood and they were doing the weirdest thing ever, clapping in time as if she were singing, though she wasn't. Then I remember her ending and the preacher, who looked about ninety, with blinky half-crossed blue eyes and white hair, holding her hand up in his as if she'd become the champion of something.
Afterward, though, I couldn't find her, and when I did she was all the way around the back side of the building, her old shoes hidden in the overgrown brown of it all and her face on her arms up against the brick, crying. I'd never seen her cry before.
I should also mention that on this day, my cat was dying. My kind, wonderful cat who was a year older than me so that I had known him even in my mom's stomach, and now I was fourteen, was dying, and I wasn't even allowed to act sad about it because my brothers would make fun of me. My cat was at the animal hospital that day for about the tenth time in the past few weeks, and something inside of me knew that it would be the last time, the needle would stick and I would never see him again. I had sat on the couch at home that morning, trying really hard not to breath too loudly through my nose, my wonderful sweet cat in his carrying case, about to go. No one had told me anything definite about it, but I knew. I didn't pet him or say bye to him, because my brothers were watching. I acted as if nothing were happening at all.
I sat down next to where Kirima was standing and thought about my brothers. I thought about the time they told me I wouldn't be a nerd anymore if I burnt all my books, and I agreed to--just like that I agreed to, without even fighting it or thinking for a second. I remembered my books loaded into a wooden fruit crate, desecrated and ramshackle in the Radio Flyer wagon, pushed into the yard--Charlotte's Web and The Boxcar Children series and Bridge To Terebithia, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn and that old copy of Catcher In The Rye that I'd only ever skimmed and not quite gotten the jist of yet. I felt vaguely guilty in my stomach and not much else. The match was just about the strike when mom came outside screaming, grabbing my brothers by the wrists, telling them no. She took the rusted handle of the wagon and she wheeled my lovely books back inside.
Thinking about it then, around the backside of the church, I cried, too. I sat there and had a cry as horrible as my cold was. We didn't touch or hug each other. We just cried out there, together; Kirima standing up with her arms up against the building and her face on her arms and me sitting down a foot away from her, my back against the building and my face down on my knees.
I can’t know for sure, but I think Kirima did it because she knew that she’d be going soon. And it was true, two weeks later she would be placed in a different foster home and I wouldn’t see her again. I know she was sad at the prospect of not seeing me, but it was a lot more than that. The weird light in her chest had finally been recognized, and though she’d always known herself that it was there, having it acknowledged out loud so suddenly was jarring. She also knew that as with anything else, she would be ripped away from all of this before she had any real chance to explore or love it. Kirima’s chest was a layer of worn, nubbly cotton adorned with faded dancing apron-cats, then dirty white, and then finally when all of that was cleared away the green shone in a lovely, lovely light. All the other people in the places that we knew couldn’t see it because they were bitter and threatening; they were drown bodies in a lake of their own misguided self-worth and made cold and hard as corpses by tradition. I wanted to tell her that, but I was crying too hard to talk.
I don’t remember exactly, but I think I did it because I was thinking about my mom. Just then was the moment in which I first started to see people in terms of varying combinations of smart and kind. Stupid mean people make up the underbelly of what is, and maybe they like it there or maybe they don’t. Smart mean people run the world, for the most part, and they do the best, because really, who else could run the world and who else ever could do well in it? Stupid kind people suffer the most, quietly abused all their lives by an idealism that they go to bed with each night without the first clue that it’s their murderer, too, and smart kind people are something else entirely.
Smart kind people grow up early and they see exactly what is and they spit in its face--some more quietly than others, but they all do it--and then it all overwhelms them so much that they make mistakes and especially when they are born poor, they are made to live in the image of less than they really are. So the veterinarian at the animal hospital that day was saying “I’d put him to sleep if it were my cat” to a shabby, unfashionably dressed woman who hid her beauty with very short hair the cheapest glasses available, purchased so that my mean brothers and I could eat. He had no idea that the green eyes through those glasses read more and better books than he ever would, because libraries are free, or that she was wonderful. She knew but had given up on trying to make anyone else know, but I wondered once if she had been Kirima.
I told you it had something to do with my mom. The current setup of the world rewards the blindly accepting, the uniform, the quick. It didn’t seem to accommodate wonder at all--unstable childhoods, educational questioning, momentary breakdowns--punishing these feats instead with vague humiliation. I cried then, I guess, because Kirima reminded me of my mom in that way--doomed, at least for the moment, to be viewed as last when she was first by those who were actually last and had the horribly audacity to think the opposite. After we were finished crying, I had so much snot streaming down my face that I felt embarrassed to lift my head up from my knees.
Seven years later, I would show up early-early to see my favorite band play, earlier than the band itself, even. And when the band did show up, I would approach the lead singer, my hero, and ask him what he was reading. When he smiled and told me all about it, I finally felt the same honor that I felt on the day that I cried with Kirima, queen of Alaska. But that was the only other time.
And at home, when all the world beats and spins inside of me in the mornings and my nose bleeds, red into the bathroom sink, I think about her and I imagine her dressed crazy and leading a band, shaking a tambourine and beating a xylophone up onstage, and when she isn’t doing that I imagine her volunteering with sick kids in hospitals and voting in every election she can. She smiles when she does these things, the twenty-something Kirima in my mind, and when her slightly slanted black eyes crinkle and her round cheekbones rise, her teeth jut in front of one another in several spots, crowded and double-rowed in places like a low-income apartment building.
And when the front door of my apartment building shuts behind me, I squint into the sun reflecting off of the bay and the glass of big office buildings. I am still drowsy but the city busses are up, sliding by with their accordion middles, attached on top to the telephone wires by stiff long strings. And my kind, wonderful cat is among them; his face shines from the dips in the telephone wire, the swollen places in which they are pregnant with electricity, he plays the accordions that compose the busses’ midsections, hitting middle C when they go around corners, or perhaps he is someone on the bus itself now. His face is everywhere, feline in appearance but as human as mine in expression, saying I don’t forgive you because I was never upset in the first place, I always knew you loved me and there wasn’t even one thing to forgive. We live together forever as friends.
I imagine the inside of my chest as a small wooden stage. At intervals different creatures take the stage and introduced themselves. The world as a small sphere of blue and green paper mache does dizzy pirouettes, demonstrating how it lives inside of me, the newspaper clippings of which it is composed emanating sad and desperate, or maybe just interesting, through the bright and elementary paint. The world exits stage right and a mystery beast, regal and fierce, takes its spot proudly and tips its hat before becoming feral, but only for a second, bearing its teeth and utilizing its claws in a swift, singular reenactment of how it ripped the inside parts of me in half. It bows then, giving a small nod, and then it is gone. In its place now is a mob, people clamoring atop one another and screaming, gesturing wildly. It is every disapproving look that ever chilled me to the bone, blatant but not quite discernable, as a kid. How come, how come, their little voices cry. It crescendos and then the stage is still and silent, occupied solely by my dad, looking down and pulling on the chain of an old manual yard mower which in turn makes plaintive, lazy, half-mechanical sounds. My dad: what the hell ever happened to that guy, anyway?
Out on the street now, a man selling Real Change newspapers offers one to a girl in dirty canvas shoes. I’m sorry but I’ve barely got a dime myself, she says, before walking into Nordstrom. This man’s teeth are not like low-income apartment buildings, but like rain-soaked cardboard boxes, and his clothes are fished blindly from the donation bin at the Salvation Army. How’s that for a non-ironic wolf shirt?
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Kirima was Inuit. She had round cheeks and shiny hair the color of polished black wood. Her clothes were just embarrassing--awful, worn stuff like big tee-shirts with dancing cats in aprons hanging off of her, colored jeans that were tight around the ankles, dirty Keds. That was the shirt she had on that day, the dancing cat shirt, and I watched the shadows of the twigs and trees wash over it, the cotton worn and vaguely nubbly up, up close. The cats were faded and cracked, her light brown skin beneath them seeming as if something under the surface of it would smell like canned black olives. She pointed at the little, pointed old building with the stained glass, all swelling with organ and song. "I told you I heard singing", she said.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm walking inside."
"You can go, then, but I'm not. You have no idea, Ki, who they even are."
"Just come on, Parker."
Of course I'd have expected something so dilapidated and exquisite would have been home to likewise dwellers--a charming, robust and wholesome race of gnome people in felt clothes and pointed hats, sweet and pure as a cartoon. Not especially handsome, but they would be tender, elite. We would not be allowed; such inadvertently perfect beings would have no use for the irrefutably awkward, which was us, stuck simultaneously at the most awkward point in their lives. I felt sad, too, because I knew that Kirima's affliction was temporary and that someday she would be lovely to everyone. The guilty ache of being selfish like this stung the most, in my chest.
But when we went inside, the faces were not elfin at all, but almost disgustingly human, to the point where you wanted to turn away. Unwisely nourished, atrophied, aged. Possessing strong feelings and not the mental capacity or the social skills to hide them or let them out gracefully, which is the ugliest and most uncomfortable thing of all. If you've ever watched a retarded person cry, then you know what I'm talking about. Vulnerability is nauseating, it makes me want to fucking throw up.
By that point I was feeling pretty shitty about the human condition and even worse about myself, because I was some stupid blond kid in unfashionable clothes, too-tight thermals with planets and race-cars that the kids at school made fun of. That day, my tee-shirt had wolves on it. Given all of this, when we opened up the heavy wooden door and it creaked open just like you'd imagine it would, and every sad backwoods eye in the place, all twenty or so of them, turned and looked right at us, falling silent, I wanted to run for the doorway or fall to the floor. Kirima wasn't scared, though, and she walked down the short, shabby aisle like a bride in hand-me-downs and when she reached the front up there, I almost couldn't breath at all--not through my nose because of my cold and not through my mouth because I felt so awed and terrified.
It isn't that I don't remember what she talked about, because I do, but since it won't come to me word for word I'm not going to try, because that would be like trying to describe the inside of your sternum when you feel sad or a feeling you had when you were four. I could see her, though, as the queen of Alaska, riding a narwhal, cartoon-queen in a parka, the works. She was everything beautiful, then, about religious parents who made you eat dinner at their house. She was everything wholesome and kind about idealistic America, my pioneer in a coloring book. She was Disneyland, minus the mean parts, I guess, and if she hadn't been messed up or if she had grown up right, she wouldn't have had any chance of ever being that at all. And I wanted to say so, but my insides were nowhere near big or colored-in enough yet to know how, and so instead I just started feeling that hot-liquid in the chest feeling you get when you know that you'll probably cry.
But I didn't cry yet, and when I looked up, everyone in the building had stood and they were doing the weirdest thing ever, clapping in time as if she were singing, though she wasn't. Then I remember her ending and the preacher, who looked about ninety, with blinky half-crossed blue eyes and white hair, holding her hand up in his as if she'd become the champion of something.
Afterward, though, I couldn't find her, and when I did she was all the way around the back side of the building, her old shoes hidden in the overgrown brown of it all and her face on her arms up against the brick, crying. I'd never seen her cry before.
I should also mention that on this day, my cat was dying. My kind, wonderful cat who was a year older than me so that I had known him even in my mom's stomach, and now I was fourteen, was dying, and I wasn't even allowed to act sad about it because my brothers would make fun of me. My cat was at the animal hospital that day for about the tenth time in the past few weeks, and something inside of me knew that it would be the last time, the needle would stick and I would never see him again. I had sat on the couch at home that morning, trying really hard not to breath too loudly through my nose, my wonderful sweet cat in his carrying case, about to go. No one had told me anything definite about it, but I knew. I didn't pet him or say bye to him, because my brothers were watching. I acted as if nothing were happening at all.
I sat down next to where Kirima was standing and thought about my brothers. I thought about the time they told me I wouldn't be a nerd anymore if I burnt all my books, and I agreed to--just like that I agreed to, without even fighting it or thinking for a second. I remembered my books loaded into a wooden fruit crate, desecrated and ramshackle in the Radio Flyer wagon, pushed into the yard--Charlotte's Web and The Boxcar Children series and Bridge To Terebithia, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn and that old copy of Catcher In The Rye that I'd only ever skimmed and not quite gotten the jist of yet. I felt vaguely guilty in my stomach and not much else. The match was just about the strike when mom came outside screaming, grabbing my brothers by the wrists, telling them no. She took the rusted handle of the wagon and she wheeled my lovely books back inside.
Thinking about it then, around the backside of the church, I cried, too. I sat there and had a cry as horrible as my cold was. We didn't touch or hug each other. We just cried out there, together; Kirima standing up with her arms up against the building and her face on her arms and me sitting down a foot away from her, my back against the building and my face down on my knees.
I can’t know for sure, but I think Kirima did it because she knew that she’d be going soon. And it was true, two weeks later she would be placed in a different foster home and I wouldn’t see her again. I know she was sad at the prospect of not seeing me, but it was a lot more than that. The weird light in her chest had finally been recognized, and though she’d always known herself that it was there, having it acknowledged out loud so suddenly was jarring. She also knew that as with anything else, she would be ripped away from all of this before she had any real chance to explore or love it. Kirima’s chest was a layer of worn, nubbly cotton adorned with faded dancing apron-cats, then dirty white, and then finally when all of that was cleared away the green shone in a lovely, lovely light. All the other people in the places that we knew couldn’t see it because they were bitter and threatening; they were drown bodies in a lake of their own misguided self-worth and made cold and hard as corpses by tradition. I wanted to tell her that, but I was crying too hard to talk.
I don’t remember exactly, but I think I did it because I was thinking about my mom. Just then was the moment in which I first started to see people in terms of varying combinations of smart and kind. Stupid mean people make up the underbelly of what is, and maybe they like it there or maybe they don’t. Smart mean people run the world, for the most part, and they do the best, because really, who else could run the world and who else ever could do well in it? Stupid kind people suffer the most, quietly abused all their lives by an idealism that they go to bed with each night without the first clue that it’s their murderer, too, and smart kind people are something else entirely.
Smart kind people grow up early and they see exactly what is and they spit in its face--some more quietly than others, but they all do it--and then it all overwhelms them so much that they make mistakes and especially when they are born poor, they are made to live in the image of less than they really are. So the veterinarian at the animal hospital that day was saying “I’d put him to sleep if it were my cat” to a shabby, unfashionably dressed woman who hid her beauty with very short hair the cheapest glasses available, purchased so that my mean brothers and I could eat. He had no idea that the green eyes through those glasses read more and better books than he ever would, because libraries are free, or that she was wonderful. She knew but had given up on trying to make anyone else know, but I wondered once if she had been Kirima.
I told you it had something to do with my mom. The current setup of the world rewards the blindly accepting, the uniform, the quick. It didn’t seem to accommodate wonder at all--unstable childhoods, educational questioning, momentary breakdowns--punishing these feats instead with vague humiliation. I cried then, I guess, because Kirima reminded me of my mom in that way--doomed, at least for the moment, to be viewed as last when she was first by those who were actually last and had the horribly audacity to think the opposite. After we were finished crying, I had so much snot streaming down my face that I felt embarrassed to lift my head up from my knees.
Seven years later, I would show up early-early to see my favorite band play, earlier than the band itself, even. And when the band did show up, I would approach the lead singer, my hero, and ask him what he was reading. When he smiled and told me all about it, I finally felt the same honor that I felt on the day that I cried with Kirima, queen of Alaska. But that was the only other time.
And at home, when all the world beats and spins inside of me in the mornings and my nose bleeds, red into the bathroom sink, I think about her and I imagine her dressed crazy and leading a band, shaking a tambourine and beating a xylophone up onstage, and when she isn’t doing that I imagine her volunteering with sick kids in hospitals and voting in every election she can. She smiles when she does these things, the twenty-something Kirima in my mind, and when her slightly slanted black eyes crinkle and her round cheekbones rise, her teeth jut in front of one another in several spots, crowded and double-rowed in places like a low-income apartment building.
And when the front door of my apartment building shuts behind me, I squint into the sun reflecting off of the bay and the glass of big office buildings. I am still drowsy but the city busses are up, sliding by with their accordion middles, attached on top to the telephone wires by stiff long strings. And my kind, wonderful cat is among them; his face shines from the dips in the telephone wire, the swollen places in which they are pregnant with electricity, he plays the accordions that compose the busses’ midsections, hitting middle C when they go around corners, or perhaps he is someone on the bus itself now. His face is everywhere, feline in appearance but as human as mine in expression, saying I don’t forgive you because I was never upset in the first place, I always knew you loved me and there wasn’t even one thing to forgive. We live together forever as friends.
I imagine the inside of my chest as a small wooden stage. At intervals different creatures take the stage and introduced themselves. The world as a small sphere of blue and green paper mache does dizzy pirouettes, demonstrating how it lives inside of me, the newspaper clippings of which it is composed emanating sad and desperate, or maybe just interesting, through the bright and elementary paint. The world exits stage right and a mystery beast, regal and fierce, takes its spot proudly and tips its hat before becoming feral, but only for a second, bearing its teeth and utilizing its claws in a swift, singular reenactment of how it ripped the inside parts of me in half. It bows then, giving a small nod, and then it is gone. In its place now is a mob, people clamoring atop one another and screaming, gesturing wildly. It is every disapproving look that ever chilled me to the bone, blatant but not quite discernable, as a kid. How come, how come, their little voices cry. It crescendos and then the stage is still and silent, occupied solely by my dad, looking down and pulling on the chain of an old manual yard mower which in turn makes plaintive, lazy, half-mechanical sounds. My dad: what the hell ever happened to that guy, anyway?
Out on the street now, a man selling Real Change newspapers offers one to a girl in dirty canvas shoes. I’m sorry but I’ve barely got a dime myself, she says, before walking into Nordstrom. This man’s teeth are not like low-income apartment buildings, but like rain-soaked cardboard boxes, and his clothes are fished blindly from the donation bin at the Salvation Army. How’s that for a non-ironic wolf shirt?
