The Complete Gary Lutz by Lutz Gary;

Author:Lutz, Gary;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tyrant Books
Published: 2019-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

THE BOY

The boy was raised in a city that had the look and feel of a state capital but in fact was not even a county seat. The buildings—big, brutish granite piles—gave everybody the wrong idea. Travellers would see the castellated skyline from the highway, sheer off at the exit, park their cars, then climb steep steps to what they hoped, despite the absence of signs, of plaques, would prove to be a mint, a museum, a monument. Once inside, they would find themselves in cramped, fusty living quarters. Somebody—an old woman in a housecoat or a bed jacket—would look up from a sofa and say, “Let a person sleep.” The boy, on the other hand, did not have the look and feel of anything big or promising. You couldn’t look up his name in books. Even as a child, he had always remained many removes from himself. Wherever he stood—near the swing set on a playground, say—he was never inarguably there, but his absence was always firsthand. His absence, in fact, was so commanding, so convincing, that people around him were often confused about just exactly where they too now stood. Obviously, his parents must have caught on very early to the unexampled form of ventriloquism the boy had evolved, a ventriloquism that entailed displacing not just his voice but his entire flute-thin body, and they made the necessary adjustments—sudden half-steps or about-faces—in their own strides. That’s why people thought they walked funny, that’s why people thought they looked funny together as a family.

One day, well gone in childhood, the boy sat at the kitchen table and watched the father solder together two wires on the boy’s tape recorder.

The tape recorder was of the old, reel-to-reel type.

The father was not especially good with his hands. In fact, the soldering iron—the risk that its use introduced into his life—was a terror. More important, the father was unforgiving. He was so unforgiving that he gave in, time after time, doing everything for the boy out of a big, banging spite. With every splenetic dab of the soldering iron, the father thought he was defecting from a deductive scheme that always runs: Father, Mother, Son.

The boy was convinced that by destroying his playthings he was accomplishing something similar.

Walking home from the high school he attended at the other end of the city, the boy would often linger in a park near the very tallest of the buildings. Crestfallen tourists would on occasion approach him. Once, a long-throated, heavily talcumed woman asked, “Have you a pen on your person?” The boy slued around slowly and exaggeratedly, as if to see whether there was a third party involved, an attendant bearing supplies. There was only his own angled, outbound body and, at a respectable distance, her own, the globulet of a tear glissading down her cheek. The woman moved on. There were plenty of men in the park whose pockets were full of pens and whatever else there might be a call for.

One day

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