‘Those are. From cattle, I think. Some people eat them. I guess they’re supposed to be very good but I haven’t been that brave myself yet.’
‘No,’ said Kevin. ‘I mean real brains. Like you got in here.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘People’s brains.’
I paused. I had seen human brains before. When I was a biology student in college there were some pickled in formaldehyde up on a shelf in the science building. There’d been pickled babies up there too.
‘I have,’ Kevin said before I could comment. ‘They’re all red and sort of yellowish and bumpy. Like that spaghetti.’
‘Hmmm.’
‘Does that make you sick?’ he asked, studying my face carefully.
‘Is it supposed to?’
‘Does it?’
‘It’s not one of my favorite things to think about, if that’s what you mean,’ I replied.
He was still regarding me very closely. It was a penetrating expression and I could not tell what he was trying to glean from me. Then he looked back at the book. ‘I couldn’t eat spaghetti,’ he said. ‘Not if it looked like that – like brains, all squashed out.’
I nodded.
Relaxing a little, he sat back. ‘Let’s turn the page,’ he said. ‘Let’s look at something else.’
But mostly the days of October were a quiet time. The frantic first weeks when I had tried so desperately to get Kevin to talk passed and we grew familiar with one another. I learned his fears and how to ease them. He weathered my moments of restless impatience. I started bringing him things from the outside, things he liked to do, like paper-and-pencil puzzles and coloring books. I brought him candy bars and magazines and things he hadn’t seen in years. He talked to me mostly of little things, of all the personal minutiae he had saved up over so many years of silence.
Slowly, slowly we managed to creep out from under the table. It was not a fast change at all. I just kept moving back, a fraction of a step a day and Kevin, intent in conversation, would move toward me. Eventually we were both outside the perimeter of the tabletop, and once we were, we stayed. Kevin still couldn’t rise from the floor. He always had to remain there where he could dive for safety if he needed to. But under normal circumstances, he stopped finding it necessary to hide all the time.
The fear began to drop away from him too. Once inside the small white room, when the door to the outer world was shut, I noticed he would sit in a fairly relaxed position and talk to me with great animation. He then would look for all the world like any other sixteen-year-old might look. However, should someone appear at the door or a noise occur outside the room somewhere, the fear would leap up and hood him. His face would go pale, his pupils dilate, his breathing quicken. And he’d go silent. That never changed. He relaxed a little but he always remained alert, always wary.
I had brought him a joke book. Elephant jokes. They were horrid ones, so awful that you couldn’t even groan convincingly when you heard them. But Kevin relished them all. He had quite a sense of humor for a kid in his circumstances, more than I often encountered. So it was fun to joke with him. At the moment his favorite story had to do with frogs in blenders, and I had heard it at least twenty times, so I brought him the elephant joke book.
I had snatched some pillows from the therapy room down the hall. Pushing them up against the radiator under the window, I leaned back while Kevin sat cross-legged and read me the jokes. There must have been about thirty pages in the book with a joke or two per page. Kevin read them all to me and when he had finished, he went back through and read again the ones he liked best. They were so dreadful that I couldn’t even remember the answers the second time through, so I entertained him by making up my own, equally horrible.
‘Where’d you get this?’ he asked me when we finished.
‘Out at the mall. In one of those little cardshops.’
‘Do they have others?’
I nodded. ‘Not elephant jokes. But other ones with jokes in them.’
He regarded me for a moment. ‘Would you get me one? Another one?’
‘Yes, maybe. Later on. They cost a lot of money for their size. But I’ll get another one when I can.’
He continued watching me. It was a bright day and the morning sun flowed through the window. It grazed the side of his face and illuminated his eyes. Even in the sunlight, his eyes were a true gray. There was no other color in them at all.
And still he watched me. ‘You don’t hate me, do you?’ he asked softly.
‘No, I don’t hate you.’
A curious half smile touched his lips. ‘I didn’t think you did.’ His gaze wandered from my face. He looked above me to the window. Then slowly he rose up on his knees to see out. He stayed that way a minute or two before dropping back down.
‘You know,’ he said and then paused. He flipped through the joke book. ‘You know, I talked to you.’
I nodded.
‘I talked to you. I wanted to talk to you.’ He looked up. ‘You see, I knew you didn’t hate me.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘I knew that. Even from the beginning. You didn’t hate me and I could tell it.’ The strange half smile was back, and once again he looked over my head to the sunlight. It was in his eyes but he didn’t squint. It bathed him. He sat and stared into it like a lean Buddha.
‘Kevin,’ I said, ‘may I ask you something?’
He looked back to me.
‘How come you talked? How come you decided to do it at all?’
He sighed and gazed into the sunlight. ‘Well, I talked to you because I said. Because I knew you didn’t hate me. I said that.’
‘But why’d you decide to talk at all, after all these years?’
He was silent. He remained silent so long that I thought he wasn’t going to answer me. He just stared into the sun.
‘I used to have a cat,’ he said at last. ‘But it’s dead now. It’s in the ground. It’s just bones and dirt.’ He regarded me. ‘How can I talk about that?’ He looked back into the sun. ‘How can I not talk about it?’
There were two matters with Kevin that were going to have to be tackled sooner or later. First was Kevin’s hygiene. I realized right from the beginning that part of his difficulty with cleanliness was tied to his numerous fears. For instance, he was so afraid of water that there was no hope of getting him into a bathtub. However, lack of good hygiene made him generally so unpleasant to be with and so unattractive that I felt it should be given some priority. Beauty may be only skin deep but the judgments founded on it tend to go a lot deeper, whether we wished
