The Night Listener : A Novel

said.
    “They don’t know about Jess, do they?”
    “No.”
    “Are you gonna tell ‘em?”
    I shrugged. “What’s to tell? I don’t know myself.”
    “Won’t they wonder, if he’s not here?”
    I told her they might not be coming to the house, that we might just meet somewhere for dinner. But what I was thinking was: Jess could be home in two weeks, and everything could be fine.
    Back then, when the pain was new, I let myself believe that.

     
    THREE

    LIFE ISN’T RADIO

    TWO DAYS AFTER his twelfth birthday, a fortnight before his father was jailed for debt, Charles Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory. There, in a rat-infested room by the docks, he sat for twelve hours a day, labelling boot polish and learning the pain of abandon-ment. While he never spoke publicly of this ordeal, it would always be with him: in his social conscience and burning ambition, in the hordes of innocent children who languished and died in his fiction.
    Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth. And the outcome can’t be called. Some of us end up like Dickens, others like Jeffrey Dahmer. It’s not a question of good or evil, Pete believes. Just the random brutality of the universe and our native ability to withstand it.
    Is that true? I couldn’t say. I do know it was Dickens who sprang to mind when I first heard Pete’s voice on the phone. It was more childlike than I’d imagined, but scrappy as all get-out, like some latter-day urchin pickpocket. The Artful Dodger by way of Bart Simpson.
    “This is Pete Lomax. The guy who wrote that book? My mom said I should call you.”
    Thrown by his voice, and unsure of the tone I should take, I poured out my praise for The Blacking Factory . I was probably stiffer than usual—I’m sure I was, in fact—but I did my best to be specific, citing themes and passages, the rhythm of his language: the sorts of things I like to hear. I wanted him to feel the impact of what he had done, the enormity of it.
    But there was no response at all.
    “Pete?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Did I lose you?”
    More empty air, and then: “You swear it’s you?” I chuckled. “It ain’t Tallulah Bankhead.”
    “Who?”
    “Just…somebody. Why would it not be me?”
    “I dunno. You don’t sound like yourself.” How odd to think that radio had already given Pete some concept of how I should sound, some feel for what “myself” should be. And odder still that he might have noticed the same hollow note that had sabotaged my last recording session. I wasn’t at all prepared for such scrutiny.
    “Life isn’t radio,” I said, condescending shamelessly even as I evaded him. “I’m slightly less dramatic in person.”
    “Oh.”
    “I sound…different to you?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Like…how?”
    “Like hammered shit.”
    I laughed uneasily. “That pins it down pretty well.”
    “No offense.”
    “’Course not.”
    “I just…I can’t fucking believe it’s you.”
    “Well,” I said, after a moment, “you’ll just fucking have to.” Pete released a torrent of childish giggles that belied all the grownup language that had come before. “Sorry,” he said eventually.
    “My mom says I got a trashy mouth.”
    “She’s fucking right.”
    He giggled even harder, then pleaded with me to stop.
    “Why?” I said. “Gimme one fucking reason.” I was enjoying myself immensely.
    Then I heard a muffled clunk, which I took to be the phone dropping. And movement of some sort. And the sound of labored breathing.
    “Pete?”
    Nothing.
    “Pete?”
    “It’s okay,” he said. “Stupid tubes.”
    An image came instantly into my head: a small, ruined body strung up like a marionette, struggling desperately to breathe while I was busy being clever. “God, Pete, I’m sorry.”
    “No. It’s cool.”
    “You sure?”
    “Yeah.”
    I listened for his breathing. It seemed to be regular again. “What happened?”
    “I just knocked the damn thing, that’s all. They’re draining my lungs.”
    “I see.”
    “Sounds worse than it is.”
    “What is it? Pneumocystis?”
    “Yeah. As usual.”
    “What about a prophylaxis? Septra or something?”
    “Not for somebody my age.”
    “Oh.”
    “That shit’s so boring, anyway. Let’s talk about something else.
    Do you have an E-mail address?”
    “I don’t, actually.”
    “But you’ve got your own Web site.”
    “Yeah, but Jess does