acting weird!” my brother complained. My mother came in, and I opened the mangled manual. This was just another thing that would make me stand out in class. I closed my eyes to hold back tears. I was always the weird kid. The others had colorful backpacks and new clothes while my brother and I had big flannel shirts with brown patches on the elbows and patched oversized pants that hid our shoes. Our backpacks were made by cutting a leg off my father’s jeans, chopping it in two, sewing one end shut and putting a drawstring on the other. All the kids had pointed and said, “What’s that?” and the next morning my father had walked into the kitchen with one naked leg, hollering, “What the fuck happened to my jeans?” My mother had turned red with strangled laughter and told him, “Oh, I thought you didn’t use that pair anymore.”
Now he undressed by the kitchen door and prowled into the living room in his underwear. He glanced about like an animal in a box, and my mother retreated to the stove. He sat in his chair and turned on the TV.
“You should pay attention to the news,” he told us, interrupting our homework. “It’ll teach you everything you need to know.”
We joined him in learning how the United States could deploy nuclear missiles from thousands of underground shelters joined by tunnels beneath the desert. The commentators discussed the importance of surviving a first strike and what had changed since Brezhnev’s death. My father grumbled and said, “Things were getting better until he screwed it all up.”
A little later, he proclaimed the ayatollah “a mean son of a bitch” and said, “Maybe Reagan can clean up the mess Carter made. That guy didn’t know his head from his ass.”
“If World War III starts,” my brother asked, “can we capture a tank and can I live in it in the backyard?”
My father looked sharply to where we lay before the TV.
“Well,” he said, “okay, I guess that’s fine.” But he kept studying my brother.
I tried to picture the camouflage tank beneath the apple tree and wondered if I should ask for one too, but I could tell from my father’s face that he thought my brother’s request was weird.
I carried my book into the kitchen and sat across from my sister, who was coloring horse pictures. She wore bell-bottoms and a plaid shirt, her blond hair in a barrette.
My mother looked at me and her blue eyes saw right into my head.
“What’s a nuclear missile?” I asked to distract her.
“Oh, that’s hard to explain,” she told me. “It’s a terrible, terrible thing, and it could kill all of us. It will probably destroy the planet someday.”
But she didn’t explain the way she usually did. She just stared into the bubbling spaghetti sauce, seeing this future.
“The world,” she said more quietly, “is a terrible place. It’s not so bad for boys, but girls have to be strong.”
My sister looked up. She was seven, and I wanted to tell my mother to be quiet.
And yet I longed to see the fierceness of the world revealed, to witness it at last.
✴
THE ENTIRE CLASS was laughing at me. It was the day before Christmas break, but they still made fun of the lunches my mother packed. Usually, to hide my sandwiches, I ate them from inside my brown lunch bag, like a wino swigging from a wrapped bottle.
“Show it,” they were saying. They had chips, PB&J, and cookies. I took out two crumbly slabs of bread with six inches of lettuce and tomatoes piled between.
“Oh,” I said as the tomato slices slid free and the bread broke and the lettuce spilled onto my desk. The children howled. To make my accident appear intentional, I lowered my head and snuffled about like a cow, gobbling from my desk. Kids were falling out of their seats. I sat up, making bovine eyes and working my jaw with a ruminating motion.
Mrs. Hand swatted the back of my head.
“Cochon,” she scolded, and the students fell silent.
During recess, when I spoke about levitation, the kids were doubtful, having seen me imitate a cow. Only Guillaume was enthusiastic. He was getting better at moving sheets of paper propped against the wall. He talked until his face turned red and spit gathered at the corners of his lips, and even I wanted to knock him down.
I explained that my mother had said I should build mental powers slowly, by meditating with a candle. She’d set one up for me, and when I’d concentrated, the flame had wavered considerably. Guillaume sputtered that he would try this, though his parents didn’t let him play with fire.
No one else cared. They were taking stock of my unzipped fly, my lopsided shirt, my shoelaces trailing in the dirt. They trickled away as I rambled—great wars, mutations, superpowers. I felt that if I talked enough, something amazing would happen.
“You have to focus,” I said. “It takes time.” I said all sorts of things.
“Maybe you aren’t the right type,” I told Matthieu as he turned away.
“The right type of what?”
I had no answer, and he snorted and wandered off.
For the rest of recess, I followed the path around the playground, walking backward. Each time the wind gusted, I leaned back into it, trying to see if it would hold me up.
✴
ON CHRISTMAS DAY, my father returned, smelling of pine sap. He’d shut down his lots and stripped his rain gear at the door without speaking to my mother. He turned up the heat that she kept low since, as I’d heard her complain, he didn’t give her much money for gas and we’d once run out and had to warm ourselves around the stove. He sat in his chair wearing boxers, and stared at the TV as the anchorman mentioned the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There was a clip showing men outside a church, all wearing sandwich boards printed with The End Is Near.
At least when the end came I wouldn’t have to go to school, and my life would be like The Chronicles of Narnia. Maybe I’d do things my father had, catch huge salmon that took hours to reel in or drive a truck without brakes, crashing into things that people no longer needed.
“Did you like school?” I asked him.
“I didn’t go for very long,” he said, his eyes on the TV. “I had to work, but my brother and me, we’d walk my sisters to school and beat up kids who bothered them on the road.”
“Where are your sisters now?”
He didn’t answer, just stared at the TV, sitting tensely, as if he might jump out of his chair and run forever.
“Can I stop going to school and work with you?” I asked.
He smiled faintly, almost sadly, and said, “Someday.”
I wanted him to tell me a story about what we’d do. If I could think about the future, then each boring day at school wouldn’t be so bad. But he said nothing, and I sprawled on the rug and watched the news, which felt more serious even than school. With his eyes locked on the screen, he inhaled slowly through his mouth, the way I did when my nose was plugged. I wondered if he breathed like this because of something to do with his nose.
“Bonnie said your nose isn’t real,” I told him.
“What?”
“She said doctors gave you a new one. How did it get broken?”
He hesitated, cheeks scrunched up, though I kept my expression curious and unafraid. It wasn’t easy, but it worked.
“Someone hit me,” he said.
“Why?”
“It’s a long story. I was coming out of a … a bar, and they were waiting for me, and they … they hit me in the face with towing chains.”
“What’s