Chapter Twenty-One
TWENTY-ONE
So Ted tells her.
“Joar was always told that he was the sort of boy who went looking for trouble, but that was hardly ever true. He often got into fights, but not because he went looking for them, but because if you started a fight with Joar, you were the one who was in trouble…,” he begins.
Then he tells her how all the school bullies had a go at Joar, and how badly they regretted it. He says that when Joar’s eyes darkened, it made Ted think of one of his comics, where a man ended up in prison and was threatened by the other inmates. That was a bad move on their part, because they didn’t know how dangerous the man was until he fixed his eyes on them and said: “None of you understand. I’m not locked up in here with YOU. You’re locked up in here with ME.”
The only thing that saved the bullies’ lives that year was probably the fact that Joar’s old man beat him senseless every time the principal called home after a fight, and the fact that Joar’s friends couldn’t bear that. Every time Joar defended the people he loved, he got hurt worse and worse, love would be the death of him one day. So his friends begged him to stop. Which forced Joar to be creative.
“If that hadn’t happened, the painting would never have been what it was. Art is coincidence,” Ted says.
Louisa strokes her cockroaches, repeating the words quietly to herself:
“Art is coincidence. Fish would have liked that.”
Then she nods at Ted to go on. So he explains that in the spring, just before the summer when the picture was painted, Joar found out that a gang of older girls were bullying Ali. They wrote on her locker that she was ugly and disgusting, as if that was why they hated her, but the truth was the complete opposite: they hated the way their boyfriends looked at her. The older girls did all they could to get the boys’ attention, but Ali, who did all she could to escape it, got it for free. They could never forgive her for that. So one day, the meanest and most popular girl in the gang had a simple idea: she pretended to be nice, and made everyone in the line for lunch step aside for Ali, just so they could call after her, “Let the little poor girl through, she doesn’t get any food at home! Look at her clothes, her family treats the dump like a mall!” The whole cafeteria laughed. As Ali ran out, they threw coins at her.
Naturally Joar’s initial suggestion was that maybe he should make a nice new jacket out of that girl’s face, but Ali wouldn’t let him. So Joar did something better. The next time he saw the girl in the hallway, he called out cheerily: “Hi, Red!” She didn’t understand a thing, but the next day he did the same thing: “Hi, Red!” After a week, her friends angrily caught up with Joar, yelling: “Why do you call her Red?” Joar stared at them in surprise: “Don’t you know? Because she blushes so easily. Haven’t you seen how red her face goes at the slightest little thing?”
Joar wasn’t big on difficult words, so he had probably never heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy, but no one understood the meaning better. That girl had never blushed before then, but if all your friends tell you why you’re called “Red,” it happens. Soon the girl would blush if she so much as saw Joar, then she started blushing just because she was arriving at school, and soon even her friends were calling her “Red” behind her back. She never called Ali a little poor girl again.
One evening not long after that, Joar, Ali, and the artist were sitting in Ted’s basement, eating heated-up lasagna and reading comics. They were discussing which superpower they’d like to have, and the responses were predictable. Joar wanted to have super strength so he could protect his mom; Ali wanted to be able to talk to the dead so she could communicate with her mom; the artist wanted to be a shape-shifter who could change his appearance so then perhaps he could be what his mom wanted him to be: like all the other children.
Ted sat in silence, hoping he wouldn’t have to say what he wanted his power to be, and he was lucky, because Joar asked him to say “something smart” instead. That meant that Joar wanted to hear quotes from superheroes. So while his friends lay on the floor, so close together that only dreams could fit between their bodies, Ted read out some of his favorites: Spider-Man’s “With great power comes great responsibility.” The Flash’s “Life doesn’t give us purpose. We give life purpose.” Wonder Woman’s “Which will hold greater rule over you? Your fear or your curiosity?” Then he thought for a little while, searching his memory for the words, before he came out with Iron Man’s “Heroes are made by the paths they choose.”
The fourteen-year-olds lay in silence on the floor, resting in each other’s breath for a long time, before Joar said tentatively: “Can you do that one… the one I like?”
He didn’t often sound as vulnerable as that. So Ted replied gently, because he knew exactly which quote Joar meant, it was from Beta Ray Bill: “If there is nothing but what we make in this world, brothers, let us make good.”
Joar closed his eyes as if he was really trying to memorize it. He wasn’t scared of death, because he had never expected to live a long life. He knew that happiness existed, but not for him. He believed in Heaven, that good people lived forever, just not that he was one of them. All he wanted was for his mom to be safe and for the artist to have a big life.
Later that evening Ted tried to explain what an “antihero” was, and Joar suddenly got very angry, because “anti” meant “opposite,” for God’s sake. So “antihero” must mean “villain.” Ted said that an antihero was a good person who sometimes did bad things, but Joar thought it was the other way around, and a villain who does good things is still a villain.
“My old man taught me how to fish. He taught me to repair car engines. And once upon a time he made my mom fall in love with him, he didn’t beat her at the start! But evil is evil, you can’t fucking balance it out with a few good deeds, it isn’t a fucking soccer match!” he roared.
Then Ted said the kindest thing anyone had ever said to Joar:
“You’re nothing like your old man.”
Joar shook his head and whispered:
“You don’t know what it’s like. When I hit people, I don’t feel anything. I don’t even regret it.”
“You never start fights, you never hit anyone who’s weaker than you…,” Ted tried, but of course he knew that was a lie, because almost everyone was weaker than Joar.
“I have to get home,” Joar muttered quickly, looking at the time.
“Tomorrow!” Ted called after him in the darkness, but Joar didn’t answer.
Twenty-five years later Ted falls silent on the train. He realizes he may have said too much, more than he was prepared for. He nods toward the box of ashes and says to Louisa:
“Joar tried to save everyone he loved. It was like he knew he had a clock inside him, counting down to destruction, so he was in a hurry to fix everything for… all of us.”
“Because of his dad?” Louisa nods gloomily, more a statement than a question.
Ted nods too. Takes a deep breath.
“Yes. But he never called him his dad. Just his ‘old man.’ He needed a way to describe him that was different from what the rest of us called ours.”
Then he goes on to say that people who had never seen violence close-up, never lived under tyranny, might have asked Joar why he didn’t call the police about his old man. As if the police hadn’t already been to the apartment a dozen times because the neighbors had complained about the noise. But no one dared testify against that man, Joar’s mother didn’t dare leave him, and Joar didn’t dare leave his mother. What could the police do? Lock the old man up forever? Because if not, the world wasn’t big enough for Joar and his mother to run away when he got out again. Tyrants can’t be beaten, only destroyed, and no help was on its way.
“Real life isn’t like comic books,” Ted says there on the train, almost as if he feels ashamed.
“No,” Louisa says, looking down at her sketch pad, because of course she knows all about that.
Then Ted glances at her, unable to bring himself to tell her the other thing Joar had decided, apart from making the artist famous: in August, Joar’s old man would be on vacation, and before then Joar was going to kill him, or die trying, and then he would either be in prison or in his grave. That was why he was in such a hurry that summer, obsessed with the artist becoming famous. Because he knew he was running out of time to protect him.
But Ted doesn’t have the heart to tell all that to Louisa, not yet, possibly more for the sake of his own heart than Louisa’s. So instead he says:
“The next day, when we went to school, Ali realized that I had never said what superpower I wanted. So she asked, and I lied and said I wanted super speed.”
“Why did you lie?” Louisa wonders.
“Because I was afraid I’d cry if I told the truth.”
“What would you have wanted to say?”
“I wanted to be able to stop time. So my mom would never lose my dad, so Joar wouldn’t get beaten by his old man, so… so I would never run out of people.”
Twenty-five years later he still wishes the same thing, that he was fourteen years old and that the world was full of broken clocks. He blinks hard, takes off his glasses, they’re wet. He feels shame creeping up his spine as his vision blurs. He should never have said that last bit.
“Are you okay?” Louisa asks cautiously.
“Yes,” Ted manages to say, but his chin is trembling.
No one tells you when you’re young that when you’re middle-aged, you can’t cry attractively anymore, the slightest little emotion can make you look like you’ve fallen through ice.
“You’re not having a stroke, are you? Your face looks pretty chaotic,” the teenager tells him.
Ted runs his hands over his cheeks and wants to say: Love is chaos . But instead he mumbles:
“Sorry, I haven’t thought about those days for a long time, I got… nostalgic.”
She looks concerned, the way you do about very, very, very old people, but then she smiles:
“I liked the superhero quotes.”
Ted tries to regain control by breathing through his nose, then he nods toward the box of ashes and smiles back weakly:
“He liked Batman best: ‘I wear a mask. And that mask, it’s not to hide who I am, but to create who I am.’?”
Louisa covers her face with her hair again at that.
“Fish and I liked Batman. He was an orphan as well.”
Ted glances down at her sketch pad, then points and asks without thinking first:
“Are those butterflies, there above the cockroaches?”
Louisa suddenly snatches the pad away, as if Ted’s hand were an unsteady glass of milk. He looks away, shamefaced.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
“They’re not finished yet!” she snaps, angling the sketch pad so he can’t see.
Ted sits in silence, marinating in his own clumsiness for a long while. Then he says quietly, down toward the box of ashes:
“Sorry. They just reminded me of his. Before he painted the skulls, he often used to draw butterflies. He liked anything with wings. Birds, dragons, angels…”
She hides her pad and mumbles:
“Tell me more. Just… don’t look while I’m drawing.”
So he looks out the window and talks about spring.
They were still fourteen. Joar hadn’t found the competition yet, and the artist hadn’t started painting the picture, but in many ways the work of art had already been started. One day when the snow had just started to melt, Ted got into trouble. There was a boy in his class who, for all the obvious reasons, was called “Bulldog.” One afternoon he forced Ted inside a locker and left him there for a whole class period. When Ted was eventually released, half the school was standing there laughing because they could see he’d been crying.
When Joar found out what had happened, his eyes turned so black that they looked hollow, but Ted whispered desperately: “If you kill him, that doesn’t make you a hero, it makes you a weapon.”
“Who said that?” Joar asked, furious.
“Superman,” Ted said, wiping his cheeks.
Joar didn’t respect many authority figures in his life, but not even he could argue with Superman. So instead of fighting, he calmly sought out Bulldog in the schoolyard and said: “I heard you’re going round bragging about stuffing a guy into a locker? I think you’re lying!” Bulldog tilted his head to one side, as if the thought were too heavy for his brain, then he snapped: “What the hell do you mean, lying? Want me to show you?” So he led Joar to a locker, but Joar just grinned: “You’re going to put me in there? I’m the shortest person in the whole eighth grade! You’d never get someone as tall as you in there! So are you lying or what?” So Bulldog lost his patience and put his head and one leg inside the locker to prove how spacious it was. Two seconds later it was clear that he might not have been a liar, but he was definitely an idiot. He banged on the inside of the door as Joar put a padlock on the locker, and it took more than half an hour before the janitor managed to cut it off. When Bulldog emerged into the hallway, someone at the back of the giggling crowd of teenagers called out: “Look! He’s peed his pants! Bulldog isn’t housebroken!”
On the train Ted cleans his glasses again, on both sides of the lenses, even though only one side is wet.
“Fish was the same as Joar,” Louisa suddenly says beside him.
“In what way?”
Louisa’s pencil scrapes sadly against the paper, like the sharpened blades of a pair of skates on fresh ice. Not drawing, but dancing.
“Fish didn’t think she was a hero either. She always said that I was the main character in our story.”
“Perhaps she was right?” Ted says encouragingly.
Louisa’s jaw moves sadly from side to side.
“No, she wasn’t…,” she mumbles, but someone opens the door to the carriage at that moment and her words get lost in the noise.
“Sorry?” Ted says.
“Nothing, forget it,” Louisa quickly whispers and stares down at her sketch pad, then swiftly changes the subject: “What happened to Bulldog? Did he get his revenge?”
“What makes you think that?” Ted wonders.
“Bullies always have small hearts but good memories,” she replies.
The train still isn’t moving. Ted looks at his watch, for the first time in his life he wants time to go faster, only someone who still has all their people left wants to stop time. He replies slowly, because the memories are coming in fits and starts, like water from a frozen pipe:
“I asked Joar not to protect me anymore. I really did. Obviously I knew that Bulldog would try to get back at him for that business with the locker. If Joar was going to get beaten by his dad for protecting someone, I told him it shouldn’t be me. Do you know what he said?”
They had walked home from school slowly that spring day, Ted and Joar side by side, which hardly ever happened. Joar had nodded to the artist who was walking ahead next to Ali, although they weren’t really walking, they were trying to see who could run the ugliest. The artist won, declaring that he was imitating an artichoke on ice.
“Look at that happy idiot!” Joar grinned. “When he’s happy, the whole world is… good. When he draws, everything is… damn, then everything’s good! That’s why I have to protect you, Ted. Because the only thing I can do is fight, and when he’s grown-up he won’t need me anymore. But he’ll need you.”
Ted had never heard anything more ridiculous in his whole life.
“Why would he need me?”
Joar turned and said:
“Because loyalty is a superpower.”
On a train that isn’t moving Ted’s glasses are still rocking.
“Is that another superhero quote?” Louisa asks.
“In a way,” Ted nods.
Louisa says nothing for a long time before asking:
“Joar came up with it himself, didn’t he?”
Ted nods again.
“You’re right, then. It counts as a superhero quote,” she says, then asks: “What happened to Bulldog?”
“He and Bulldog fought in the schoolyard the next day until they were both bleeding,” Ted says.
Bulldog started the fight, Joar finished it. Bulldog fought like a madman, but Joar fought like a whole gang. When Joar got home his old man broke the radiator with him. Joar couldn’t even play soccer the following week, he was limping so badly, but he still didn’t regret a moment.
Because that day when Bulldog was shut in the locker and the janitor had to cut the lock off, the janitor’s sleeves slid up, revealing his tattoos: skulls. That was the first time Joar saw them, and he would never forget it. Because without the janitor, nothing would have turned out the way it did. When you’re fourteen years old, a single person can be like wind beneath a butterfly’s wings.
“Art is coincidence, love is chaos,” Ted says.
Louisa thinks that Fish would have liked that too.