stood there for what must have been no more than a minute but it felt like all of time was stretched before me, pulled like Silly Putty in all directions at once. My ears burned and I knew my face would follow. I remember wishing he would just say something, that he’d open his mouth and a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ would make its way out of his garbled brain. I’d heard him speak before, knew he could. But the one time I needed him to, he couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Instead he sat silent and watching and I felt my insides grow hot, like someone had lit a match in my stomach and left it.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Ralph, run around the block one time.’ Tommy let out a small yelp and pulled open the heavy door. Ralph slowly rose and walked toward it, never breaking my gaze as he moved. I hoped then that he would just turn around and run up the stairs instead, decide to watch television or cling to my mother’s skirt as she cooked, anything. See, I’d say, I told you he wouldn’t do it.
But he did. He walked through the door and took the five steps down to the sidewalk, squinting his eyes to adjust to the light. And then I knew it was actually happening, that Ralph was gonna run around the block alone, be outside alone for the first time, and I just wanted it to be over. ‘Run fast, Ralph. Around the block, okay?’ I called. ‘Just fast and around the block.’ But he was no longer looking at me, had turned his eyes to sky and sidewalk.
He had just taken off toward the fruit stand, his arms stiff at his sides but his stride certain in its direction, when I heard my mother bellow my name from upstairs. Tommy shook his head, signaling me to ignore her. But again she called, louder this time and I knew she’d come barreling down those stairs, her legs thick and bowed like a charging bull’s, if I didn’t answer. I stood in the doorway and called to Ralph, but already he was at the corner and had escaped the reach of my voice. Again, my name left my mother’s lips and echoed in my ears. Tommy was now pushing me toward the stairs, knowing we’d both be punished something awful if we were found out.
I took the steps two at a time and found her bent over the television. ‘I wanna move it to the kitchen, Ben. Tired of all this walking back and forth.’ If she had looked at my face for even an instant she would’ve known right then and there what I’d done but she was struggling to get a firm hold of the thing. ‘Come on, try to get the other side.’ It was heavy, that television, the kind built into a wooden console as if it didn’t have a right to exist alone, had to be disguised as a piece of familiar furniture first. It was too cumbersome to pick up but impossible to push. Our difference in size didn’t help either. Even after getting it up, we had to put it down and re-lift every few steps. The sweat stood on her brow and her dress clung to her like cling film. I would’ve felt sorry for her if I wasn’t so worried about the trouble I’d be in if she knew. While we took a break to catch our breaths she asked after Ralph and I told her he was on the stairs with Tommy. I pretended I knew that for certain. Wanted to believe I knew that for certain. Enough time had passed.
When we’d finally moved the damn thing into the kitchen, just as she raised her head and turned her eyes to meet mine, I made for the door. ‘Fetch Ralph and Tommy and come back up here. That’s enough for one day.’ I left without answering, nearly fell twice running, slipped and slid down the last few stairs. When I got to the ground floor, the big door was shut. I stood there a moment, confused, even turned around and looked back at the staircase, somehow expecting to find Tommy and Ralph standing there, waiting. But I was alone.
I pulled open the door and though I’d not been gone all of maybe fifteen minutes, already the light was changing – the way it seems to grow brighter right before it turns purple and disappears altogether. To my right a couple stood, arguing. The man was calling the woman names that to this day I don’t like to repeat and she was swinging at him as he cursed. The man started to turn toward me so I glanced past him toward the fruit stand where a mother paid for a bag of mango slices for her daughter, lit a cigarette for herself. I turned my head in the other direction but aside from a mangy cat rummaging through the trash, the sidewalk was empty. Taxis and cars honked at one another on the street, their headlights coming on pair by pair as the light faded. My chest felt tight and flat, like the whole of the sky was pressing down on it, like I was no more than God’s rolling board.
I stepped out onto the pavement and heard the door slam behind me before I realized that I had no way back in without buzzing my mother. The arguing couple were walking away now and the mother and daughter were crossing the street. I scanned the sidewalk in both directions two, three times and just started running toward the stand, rounded the corner and picked up speed. Everywhere I looked, my eyes sought Ralph, tried to remember what color shirt he was wearing, whether it was blue or green, the one with Batman or the Joker. I began to feel faint and sick like when you eat too much or not enough, like I was full and empty all at the same time.
I ran until I realized I’d circled the block three times and each time I saw new faces and the same faces but with something new about them. A scarred cheek, crooked teeth, sunburned skin. I looked them directly in the eyes, searched for some clue as to where Tommy and Ralph had gone, of who had seen them, who had taken them.
On my fourth time around, the fruit vendor had started to pack up his goods and nodded to me as I passed. With each step I took, what light remained seemed to scatter even faster, eager to leave the world or at least my part of it, and I became less afraid of what my mother would do to me and more frightened for Ralph and what the sorcerer would do to him. I remember wishing that something big would happen, like a tornado or an earthquake, just so it would be bigger than what was happening then. The only thought that kept me from screaming right there on the sidewalk was that I had to keep running. That, and I knew Tommy had to be with him, that Tommy would follow that sorcerer to his dungeon and save Ralph, and Etan too. He’d free them and tie up the sorcerer in their place.
Thirty minutes later, I sat on the kitchen floor, huddled in a corner while police officers went in and out of the apartment, their radios buzzing with codes only they understood. My father had gone out with a search group scouring the neighborhood on foot. Tommy’s parents had returned; his mother stood in the hallway outside our apartment screaming at the cops to go find her son while his father sat in our kitchen with his head in his hands.
Over and over the same police officer kept asking me to repeat the story, how I’d left Tommy and Ralph on the ground floor, that maybe we had opened the door to let in air, that maybe we had taken turns going outside for just a few minutes at a time. The questions kept coming – the same ones with the words rearranged, until my mother turned to the officer and said Stop. But even then she wouldn’t look me in the eye. That’s how I remember my mother to this day, though she’d live another twenty years before dying from too many cigarettes. She kept pressing the thumb of one hand into the palm of the other, pressed so hard I thought she’d push a hole right through. She stopped only to hold up a picture of Ralph the cops had asked to see. ‘No, he’s not blond. It was the light in the photo studio. Made everything look different,’ she kept repeating.
Neighbors showed up in turn at our door offering to pray with us and though I never knew my mother to miss a Sunday mass, she told them they’d be more useful walking the streets, searching. But I prayed anyway. Jumbled together Hail Marys and Our Fathers, promised to give Ralph my toys, to never want another thing again if only he’d appear. At some point, a cop asked me to come down to the landing, to show him exactly where we were playing, to describe who stood where and when. I looked to my mother and though she nodded, still her eyes refused mine.
A few cops stood on the ground level of the building, the door now wide open. I could make out a news truck and reporters, more cops and neighbors. A woman in a red blazer noticed me then and rushed toward the building. The cops quickly filled the doorway and stood between us. Still, I could see her peering over their shoulders as others joined her – a mass of shifting microphones and cameras and voices. The officers ordered them to step away from the door and pulled me back but not before I heard one of them ask if I’d witnessed the disappearance.
