CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
When he dropped the barbell on the floor, everything in the room vibrated, including the thing on the wall.
The general opinion was that working arms two days in a row was a futile effort.
If the muscles were constantly broken down, they’d never repair and grow.
This was common knowledge, and knowledge he’d abided by for a while.
However, after the past three days, he no longer felt bound by basic laws of biology.
Such rules were for the common man, and he had since transcended to a higher plane in both body and spirit.
The mirror in the gym ran floor to ceiling. He had paid for it with money his mother had left him when she died, money she had told him to save for a house. He had indeed used it for a deposit on a house, and this gym was the centerpiece.
He looked at his sweaty physique in the mirror, but not out of vanity.
Vanity was to compare yourself to the next man to see if you were better.
He looked to see if he was still there. Some days he didn’t know without a mirror.
Some days he opened his eyes in the morning and couldn’t say what to do with his hands until he stood up and saw them in the bathroom.
Ten more minutes, he thought, then I’m done.
When he was a boy, he had watched a lot of television. His mother had worked two jobs and there had been no money for childcare. He had liked Mr. Rogers most of all, because Mr. Rogers spoke slowly enough for him to keep up. The other shows had gone too fast.
When Mr. Rogers had taken his cardigan off and hung it up, he had taken his own cardigan off and hung it up.
When Mr. Rogers had changed his shoes, he had changed his shoes.
He had not done it to be funny. He had done it because Mr. Rogers seemed to know how to be a person, and he himself did not know how to be a person, and copying the people who knew seemed like the sensible thing.
When his mother had come home and found him at the table in his cardigan and sneakers at midnight, doing the things Mr. Rogers had done that morning in the order Mr. Rogers had done them, she had cried.
He hadn’t understood why. He had written on his notepad that he was merely being good, and then his mother had cried harder.
Later she had taken him to a man in an office who gave him pictures to colour, and the man had told his mother words like spectrum and high functioning.
There had been a time in his life when his shoulders had been the shoulders of a coat hanger and his arms had been two pieces of string.
The boys at school had called him scarecrow.
He had been called other names too. He had written them down in a notebook once to see if there was a pattern and he hadn’t found one.
All he knew was that he had several things wrong with him, and it was all amplified by his unnatural height.
By 15, he was six-foot-four, and a career in basketball would have been the obvious route, if only he had an athletic bone in his body.
Maybe now, after a year of anabolics and obsessive workouts, he could finally make it happen at age 38.
Basketball remained a pipe dream, and so he moved into a different career. As a kid, his mom had said, ‘With those hands, you could make anything. Seamstresses and sculptors the world over would give anything for hands that big.’
It was true. His hands spanned close to twelve inches. He could conceal an entire house brick in them, although palming objects served little purpose as his lack of dexterity didn’t lend itself well to acts of conjuring.
His mom had been the only person in his life who had ever been right about anything to do with him. She had died when he was nineteen.
After her there was a stretch he didn’t think about much, because nothing in it had stuck.
He had latched onto a foreman at a tire yard for a year.
He had latched onto a woman at the post office who had been kind to him and had eventually asked him, gently, to please stop coming by.
None of them had filled the shape. He hadn’t known what the shape was. He had only known the shape existed.
Then, odd jobs came by. People would ask him to stop by their establishments to teach classes, despite his handicap.
The classes were fine, and people – especially the older crowd – were receptive.
However, it soon became apparent that he was hired not for his skills, but for his freakish appearance.
The tall man, the human sideshow gaff, half man, half yeti. He was a novelty that business owners could roll out for a car crash-style exhibit, and people would pay for the privilege. The world might be a hundred years removed, but the Victorian freakshow never ended.
It was here at these classes, however, that something occurred to him. It should have occurred to him years ago, but he’d never put two and two together. Something he’d noticed was that, despite his unconventional looks, people talked to him.
And they talked a lot.
Sometimes his classes would descend into one-on-one teaching sessions, and it was in those sessions that people would reveal things that he’d never dream ask about.
He didn’t understand why people would be so forthcoming about their anxieties, especially to someone like him, and it took a lot of research for the answer to arrive.
He likened it to a church confessional. In a confessional, people sat in a wooden box and spoke through a grille to a man on the other side – a man they couldn’t see.
They did not see his face. They did not see his eyes.
The grille between you was the freedom. They could tell the wood things they couldn’t tell people, because the wood was not a person to you, even when you knew there was a person behind it.
He was the wood, and at the end of his grille, these people’s confessions went nowhere.
He could not have repeated a tenth of it back if a priest had ordered him to.
The words went past him the way water goes past a rock.
The rock did not keep the water. The rock was just there for the water to break around.
It was a comfortable thing to be, and it was the first thing he had ever been comfortable being.
And then one day, during a class, a man in chains had been brought past him in the corridor outside the workshop, and he was the biggest man he had ever seen apart from himself. The man in chains had looked at him, ‘Hello, son. What are you doing in a place like this?’
Nobody had called him son since his mom had passed. Nobody had ever asked him what he was doing anywhere.
Over the next year, he’d found ways to be in the same place at the same time every week, just so he could spend time with the fellow giant.
From there, their friendship grew. The big man had talked at him, and while he hadn’t understood every word, he remembered every word. He could still recite the conversations now, years later, in the order they had happened.
But before long, the other giant was taken from him.
That time in his life felt aeons ago, but he hadn’t forgotten the silent promise he’d made to his new friend.
The list had been four names long when he had started.
It was one name long now. He had written the four in the back of the notebook his mother had given him for his tenth birthday; the same notebook with the names from school in the front, and he had crossed three of the four through with a single ruled line each, as the man in chains had taught him.
The fourth name was still there.
After the fourth there would be no more. He and the thing on the wall could go somewhere quiet and stop. That would be enough.
Then he went to the bench, and picked up the phone, and dialed the only number he ever dialed, to tell his new mentor it was almost finished.