Tours of the Black Clock

21

I JUST KNOW I’M doing something wrong, and it’s about this time I’m beginning to have an idea what it is. I’m big. At eight I’m two years bigger than normal and getting bigger yet. In a couple of years I’ll be bigger than my father, and in a couple of years after that I’ll be bigger than either of my brothers. It’s a bigness that’s gross in this family, it calls to their attention how much at odds I am with them. My hands are big and my feet are big, I have long arms. I have this big face, this large open face, that leads people to the conclusion I’m a bit of an idiot. It’s a bigness that conveys brutishness without any compensating intelligence. I mean, I come to understand all this later. Now I’m only eight. But I already sense that I’m not only at odds with the family but sometimes my own nature, and later I’ll understand the ways in which my own nature’s at odds with itself. When I lie in bed at night reading all the books from Alice’s library downstairs, I like to think it’s the act of a small boy, I trick myself into thinking this right up to the moment I rip the book down the binding. It just happens, I’m lying there reading and the bigness just comes out, the bigness that the act of reading means to deny, it comes out in my hands and there I am on my bed with half a book in each hand, and pages flying around my head. Then Henry runs downstairs to tell Alice I’m tearing up her books. Later I’ll come to read with the books propped against the bedpost, untouched by me, at arm’s length from an uncontrollable bigness.

As it happens I’ll make use of the bulk later. As it happens I’ll learn to hide in it sometimes, move it others. I’ll use it to beat any fool to a near faretheewell, and for a few minutes I’ll have an especially good time doing it. And if I appear stupid to some then I’ll use that too, to beat them as well, people who presume themselves pretty sharp and presume they speak a language someone like me can’t understand. Except I do understand, and by being the tourist of their lives I become the spy of their secrets; you’ll see what I mean. Of course sometimes it helps to drive the point home a little, drool at social events or occasionally let one arm jerk wildly at my side for no reason at all. People turn from these displays, and when they do I’ve become so big and stupid as to be invisible.

At the age of eight I sit with my family through edgy dinner conversations. Food drops into my father’s gut like paratroopers to French soil almost twenty years later, all of which I can see at any moment I like from one of the nine windows in my bedroom. At eight I’m not yet a lost cause, I’m still trying to make a decent impression on life. Trying and trying, and all they can do at the dinner table is look at me as if to say, But where in God’s name did this lug come from? Alice and Oral and Henry. My father just tramps along in the wake of his appetites, meat and potatoes and beans, oblivious to us. As I’ll come to learn, it’s a way he has with all his appetites, the forbidden ones most particularly.