Chapter Twenty-Three
TWENTY-THREE
Now that the train is moving again, Ted feels envious of all the people living in the houses it passes, because they’re already home. He gets slightly annoyed at people saying that the world rushes past outside the train windows, because it’s the train that’s doing the rushing, the world is standing still. Ted gets annoyed at quite a lot of things, which always amused the artist. He used to tease Ted by saying that he “hated adventures,” but of course that isn’t true. Ted loves adventures, he just absolutely doesn’t want to participate in them. He wants to be one of the people in the houses, reading about adventures in a book, like a normal person. He wants to hear the artist’s sleeping breath at the other end of the room. He wants to be home.
He falls asleep, just for a couple of minutes.
“Do you want one?” Louisa says when he wakes up, unless perhaps it’s her voice that wakes him? He opens his eyes and reluctantly drags his brain back to reality. It’s dark out now, he can’t see any houses anymore, just trees. Louisa lands on the seat next to him as if the law of gravity has just discovered her, she’s holding two cans of Coca-Cola. It suddenly occurs to Ted that she must have been quiet for a long time for him to fall asleep, which is a pretty big compliment to him, because she babbles when she’s nervous. He no longer makes her nervous.
“How… how did you pay for those?” Ted wonders, glancing at the cans. It’s the most diplomatic way he can think of to ask the question.
“You’re wondering if I stole them?” Louisa says, affronted.
“No,” he lies.
“I’m not a thief!” she hisses.
“Okay,” Ted says, slightly sheepish.
“I got the money from your bag when you were in the bathroom earlier,” Louisa goes on, as if she’s now expecting an apology.
“So… you stole my money?” Ted asks.
“It isn’t theft when you’re friends!” Louisa exclaims, as if the very idea is shocking.
Ted isn’t sure how to respond to that, seeing that this too is a compliment. Louisa offers him one of the cans of Coca-Cola, because real friends offer you half of what they’ve bought with your money, but Ted declines. It isn’t as if he doesn’t have to pee enough as it is.
“Are we nearly there yet?” Louisa asks.
“No. There’s a long way to go,” Ted replies.
“So tell me more, then,” she asks.
“About what?”
“About the janitor and the skulls. About the painting. About… everything.”
Ted closes his eyes lightly, opens them heavily. He thinks about his friend and sighs:
“He was like you, he didn’t think he could paint either.”
Then he tells the whole story about the janitor and the skulls, the way the artist once told everything to him. It isn’t entirely straightforward, because the story starts with a lie: that people can’t fly. Most of the rest of us get fooled, but the artist was lucky, because that spring when he was fourteen he met the janitor. And the janitor had had the truth revealed to him by his mom when he was little: “All children are born with wings,” she had whispered. “It’s just that the world is full of people who try to tear them off. Unfortunately they succeed with almost everyone, sooner or later. Only a few children escape. But those children? They rise up to the skies!”
The janitor had grown up feeling lost and different, rejected at school, never normal like other children. But his mom always reminded him: “You feel strange because you still have your wings, rubbing beneath your skin. You think you’re alone, but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’ And then you won’t feel lost anymore. You’ll realize that you’ve always been able to speak a secret language, one that has no boundaries, because you have no nationality. Art is your homeland.”
His mom always thought her son would end up an artist, but she was wrong, he changed the world instead. Because one day he became a janitor and repeated his mom’s words to a fourteen-year-old who would come to be known as “C. Jat,” and nothing inside the fourteen-year-old was ever the same again.
“But that isn’t where it all started, not really,” Ted says suddenly, correcting himself. “It actually started with a dog! Well, no, it really started with a broken foot. No, hang on, that isn’t true either. The foot wasn’t actually broken. I mean…”
He takes a deep breath and pulls himself together. Sorting the memories as if they had been lying on a windowsill in a cross-draft.
“It started one day in the spring of the year when we were fourteen,” he eventually recalls.
Ali had found a bottle of dish soap in her dad’s hall closet, because a dad who liked having fun also liked having parties, and if you had parties a little too often, you also had to mop the floor after someone had a bit too much fun. So Ali had taken the soap to school in her backpack, Joar had cut a hole in a fence and used the wire to make a ring, then he and Ali and the others spent the afternoon blowing bubbles in an empty part of the school stairwell. They had slipped about, laughing and chasing each other down a hallway, until Ali slid into a gang of older boys and girls who snapped irritably: “What are you doing? You fucking idiot!”
The older boys and girls shoved Ali aside like she was a pile of leaves. When they walked past Joar, Ted, and the artist, one of the girls cast a disgusted glance at their stained clothes.
“They stink like they’re homeless,” she hissed to her friends as they went around the corner.
Joar took this very badly, because he was covered in soap, for God’s sake, his clothes had never been cleaner! Ali snorted:
“Did you see that girl’s hair, it was perfect! How does she get it to look like that? Does she sleep standing up or what? Do elves fly in through her window every morning and sew her clothes onto her body?”
“Elves can’t fly, you idiot,” Joar replied confidently.
So an argument broke out between him and Ali about whether or not elves had wings. Ali was convinced that they did. Joar was sure they lived in the forest and had bows and arrows. Ali muttered something to him, possibly involving the words “stupid donkey,” so they had a fight. As usual. They were interrupted by a shriek, but it wasn’t from Ali or Joar, it came from the stairwell. It turned out that the girl with the perfect hair had slipped and fallen, because some idiot had left soap all over the steps.
And that was how it all started. Coincidence.
The following day the girl with the perfect hair came to school with a pair of crutches. “My foot’s broken!” she told the teachers very seriously, because she had quickly realized that was a way of getting out of gym class. Because the girl with the perfect hair hated gym class because you had to share a changing room with girls who weren’t perfect, and that could be contagious. So her foot was broken for two whole days, until she sadly suffered sudden memory loss because a cute dog walked past the window of the cafeteria. The girl with the perfect hair ran out to pet it, but forgot to take her crutches with her.
It was, in her defense, an insanely cute dog. Even Ted, who felt much the same about dogs as the girl did about gym class, had to admit that. It looked like a teddy bear made of flesh, which might not sound very cute, but it really was. Either way: this was a school, and if there’s one thing everyone knows about schools, it’s that a pair of crutches left unattended in a room will, sooner or later, end up on a roof. Which some of the classmates of the girl with the perfect hair and the not-so-broken foot quickly accomplished.
That’s why a very old man who worked as a janitor at the school had to climb up and get the crutches. This was in the spring, but no one had told winter, so the temperature was still below freezing at night, and there was still ice on the roof. So the elderly janitor ended up in the hospital after falling and breaking his foot for real.
And that was how a young man who would change the world got a job as a temporary janitor.