Part 21: James

By the time anyone else in James’s family left their bedrooms, it was ten o’clock and both his fight with Hannah and his doubts about his sanity had pretty much burnt themselves out. What remained were just some dying embers and a general sourness. He was sitting on the porch, holding To Kill A Mockingbird but not really reading it. Around nine-fifty he had decided that the best thing to do was to devote himself to fighting ignorance, and at nine-fifty-two he decided that he might as well kill another bird with the same stone, to use a rather appropriate cliche, and read the book that he would soon have to answer some multiple-choice questions about.

But then, around nine-fifty-five he remembered that Hannah liked this book, too, and wondered if he should read something else instead. But the only other options he could think of were the Bible and a few others (The Catcher in the Rye, Slaughterhouse-Five) that Hannah had recommended (but probably not even read, he silently grumbled.) All his material came from her, that was the problem. And then, at nine-fifty-seven, he had started reading Mockingbird, since it at least had a non-Hannah motive attached to it. But at nine-fifty eight he had gotten to the line, “With him, life was routine; without him, life was unbearable” and had to stop. Since then, he had been railing against his neighbors for staying inside their houses and his family members for not leaving their rooms. Bedrooms were the fenced-in yards of houses, after all. It was all part of the same pattern, the same fake suburbanism that was the opposite of freedom and the cause of all his problems. Including his fight with Hannah - it wasn’t his fault that his parents were such Suburbanites.

Becca was the first to emerge from her room. Just because she doesn’t have a TV in there, James insisted. And sure enough, within seconds the living room TV was blaring some insipid Disney Channel show - about a teenage girl who could do magic or see the future or something. How far things had fallen since he was a kid, when the shows they watched were actually good. This poor generation, they'll never know what they’re missing. It’s not their fault that everything’s just about making money now.

He had a vision of the adults responsible for the show Becca thought she was enjoying: three middle-aged men in suits and one uptight woman in a dress, sitting around a large, rectangular table in an office somewhere, on the twenty-somethingth floor of a skyscraper in a faceless city. There was an easel in front of them, on which they were brainstorming different variations of the same boring crap to sell to suburban children who didn’t know any better. He saw one of the men driving home to his massive house, with its in-ground pool and hardwood floors and perfectly manicured lawn and, of course, a massive fence surrounding the whole thing, and he thought passionately, violently: is it worth it?

His sister was still innocent, after all. She couldn’t see the real forces that were at work all around her, the suburbanism and selfishness and greed that made her comfortable existence possible. She was still in the Garden of Eden. But he had escaped into the real world, the world of knowledge and pain. 

But unlike Adam, he had to endure the pain of reality alone. Who he had thought was an Eve turned out to be - what? Another apple? A fallen angel? No - it came to him in a flash of clarity - she was the snake.

“Good morning,” a voice said, breaking his concentration. She’s the snake, she’s the snake, James thought rapidly, trying to solidify the insight in his memory. It was Susan (he had decided around nine-thirty to call his parents by their first names, at least in his head, to signify that he was their equal now) finally coming out of her cave. She was wearing a bathrobe over her pajamas and holding a visibly steaming cup of coffee. “No computer this morning?”

“Obviously not.”

“I have to say, it’s nice to see you sitting out here enjoying the sunshine. And reading? What book is that?” She tilted her head to look at the cover.

“I go outside all the time.”

“To Kill A Mockingbird? Are you reading that in English?”

“No, I’m reading it in Spanish,” James said, surprising himself with his own wit. That was the sort of line he would usually think of later on.

“Ha ha,” Susan replied, in lieu of actually laughing. “You know what I mean. I remember I hated that book when I had to read it in school, but then when I read it again as an adult, I realized how great it is.” 

A dilemma: how could he respond to that? She had left him with no good options, no way to prove his originality. Liking it, disliking it - both were agreeing with her. He settled for a shrug. “It’s alright.”

“What part are you at?”

“I don’t know,” James said flatly. “Nothing’s really happened yet. So far it’s just a bunch of Tom Sawyer, life-in-the-south kind of stuff.”

“You’ve read Tom Sawyer?” Susan asked, sounding genuinely surprised. She sipped her coffee. Hot coffee on a hot morning struck James as absurd and irrational; plus, of course, it was an addiction.

“Hasn’t everybody?” he replied. This, being a question, couldn’t technically be a lie. He hadn’t read Tom Sawyer, but he felt like he knew enough about it that he didn’t have to. Fighting ignorance would mean reading a lot, of course, but you also had to make sure you read the right books.

“I’m just surprised they still teach it.”

“I didn’t read it for school.” Also technically true.

“You know, Mark Twain’s the one who said a classic was a book that no one wants to read but everyone wants to have read.”

“Yeah, he did.”

“Isn’t it kind of funny that now his books are considered classics?”

“Hilarious,” James said, turning his eyes back to Mockingbird to signal that the conversation was over. Susan hovered on the threshold of kitchen and porch for a few seconds, one more sip of coffee, and then retreated back inside. Always inside, always hiding, James chastised her. He stared at the words on the page without letting them coalesce into any sort of meaning; he wasn’t going to read anymore today, that much was clear, but he had to pretend for a while longer so Susan wouldn’t think she had affected his plans.

As he waited, he listened to Becca’s TV show drown out the sound of birds. The laugh track seemed significantly louder than anything else. How stupid are we that we need to be told when to laugh? Another invention of that soulless quartet in the skyscraper. The four horsemen of the apocalypse. That was from the Bible, too, right? He tried to form his image into a single phrase, to put with his other Biblical lines (which also had to be revised, since Hannah’s role had been recast.)

The four horsemen of the twenty-eighth floor? The four horsemen: something, something, something, and greed? Suburbs and greed?

I thought you were my Eve, but you turned out to be the snake . . .?

An Eve I thought I found, but a snake she was instead. . .?

Fences, suburbs, and greed?

I climbed over Eden’s fence into the great unknown? 

(Great Unknown? great Unknown?)

Now instead of lying laughter, the Truth shall be my home?

The four horsemen of the twenty-eighth floor: TV, fences, suburbs, and greed.

That was good. The rest could wait. Once it was perfect, he would put it in his profile, and then when he finally unblocked Hannah (by tomorrow night, surely - it all had to happen before they went back to school Monday) she would see it and know that he had finally seen her for what she really was. The snake cannot help but recognize its true nature. He had taken her poison apple and turned it into a gift; a tool to make himself stronger and wiser and free; the ultimate triumph.