‘I usually walk in the woods.’
He was on the point of telling him about the times he lay down on the riverbank to scream into the night, but restrained himself.
‘What’s the matter, don’t you like sleeping?’
Homer considered the question.
‘Well?’
‘It’s not that I don’t like it. I can’t.’
‘You can’t?’
Homer shook his head ruefully.
Kurt cracked his knuckles. One of those tics of his. One of the most frequent, Homer was later to learn.
‘It’s because of the people.’
Kurt looked at him.
‘The different people, I mean.’
‘And how long is it since you last slept?’
‘It’s eighteen years.’
‘What’s eighteen years?’
‘Since I last slept.’
‘Eighteen years?’
‘Eighteen.’
Kurt cracked his knuckles. ‘Fuck. Some problem you got there.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Don’t you wish you could sleep sometimes?’
‘Yeah.’
Kurt sighed, gazed at a point far away in the night and said: ‘What you need is to find a system.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I have problems with people too, Boddah.’
‘Homer.’
‘Yeah, sorry. Homer.’
The rainy scent of the night grew more intense. ‘You have problems with people too,’ Homer prompted.
‘The different ones, I mean.’
‘The different ones.’
Kurt didn’t continue.
‘The different ones,’ Homer repeated.
‘Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you. Isn’t that right?’
It was, indeed, dead right. ‘Yeah,’ said Homer.
‘I was an alien too, when I was a kid,’ said Kurt. ‘I was convinced my dad and mom weren’t my real parents. I thought I was from another planet. I wanted to be from another planet. Real bad. At night I’d stand at the window and talk to my real parents. My family in the skies. My real family.’
This guy really seems to know the score, Homer said to himself.
‘And I thought there must be thousands of other alien kids. Kids from another world who’d been dropped off all over the place by mistake. I hoped I’d meet one of them, sooner or later. Maybe I did, I’m not sure. Maybe all kids are aliens, when they’re born. Then they change.’
‘They become different,’ concluded Homer.
‘Yeah, that’s about it.’
Homer waited for the boy to get to the point. But after a lapse of time that might have been a couple of minutes - an eternity when you’re waiting for someone to say something - he began to suspect that he wasn’t going to get to any point and was going to spend the rest of the night gazing into the darkness. Without saying anything else.
‘What I need is to find a system,’ said Homer, in an attempt to spur him into speaking again.
‘What system could help against tough love? No money, no home. Die of hunger, die of cold. Die of nothing. Punk.’
‘Tough love?’ Homer was losing the thread.
‘It’s a way of dealing with negative types. Suppose you’re aggressive or antisocial. Okay, so they tell your mother to apply tough love therapy. It means she cuts off all your supplies. Food, money, help, affection. Everything. It’s supposed to make you change your attitude.’
‘Does it work?’
‘It works with the people it works with. You don’t sleep, right?’
Homer nodded.
‘It wouldn’t work with you, then.’
Homer wasn’t sure he had quite understood. ‘Yeah, but what about the system?’
‘I told you. Punk. The bridge, the poisonous fish, the night. What system could help against that? Curl up in a fucking corner and die. That’s the only system.’
‘I meant for sleeping,’ Homer hazarded.
‘Oh yeah. Sleeping.’ Kurt seemed to have forgotten the point from which their conversation had begun.
‘You mentioned a system.’
‘I did?’
Kurt shrugged as if to say that it wasn’t his fault if that’s what he had understood.
‘So you want to sleep?’
Homer didn’t reply, but it was easy to see what a state he was in. Kurt felt sorry for him. If ever he might have met a kid from another world, that kid was Homer. He cracked his knuckles. Then he stood up, put his hand in the pocket of his faded jeans and pulled out a little glassine pouch containing something that looked like powder. He dangled it in the darkness between thumb and index finger.
‘The system.’
He set off for home at daybreak. The sky in the east was the color of steel, and the silence itself was a thinking presence that had momentarily brought the whole world to a standstill.
The silence seems deeper now than at any time of night, thought Homer. Maybe that’s because silence is invisible when it’s dark. This was one of those rare moments when the present was absolutely pure, stripped of any sense of before or after. For as long as that steel light lasted, time would simply float, a cork on the viscous calm of the river.
He walked homeward feeling sick at heart, as if he had just said a tearful goodbye - something he had never actually done in his life - as if he were abandoning everything that surrounded him. The agitation aroused in him by his meeting with Kurt formed a stark contrast to the stillness of the dawn. As he walked along with his hands in the pockets of his sweatpants, the fingertips of his right hand caressed the plastic pouch. The system. He tried to retrace the course of those sleepless years in his mind, but couldn’t. They were a continuum, and a continuum is difficult for the memory to get a hold on. Especially when
