Natural Elements by Richard Mason

Author:Richard Mason [Mason, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-27142-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

31

The office in which Joan's unexpected savior was being confined for the summer was dingy and ill lit and smelled strongly of rotting fruit. The room owed its atmosphere of sweetly fetid decay partly to the large number of shriveling banana skins in its overflowing bin and partly to the total absence of cross-ventilation. As Joan would learn in the weeks that followed, its occupier's diet consisted almost exclusively of bananas, supplemented by coffee and the vitamin pills that were his concession to his mother's worries. A number of mugs, long discarded, littered the table and shelves, the growths within them heightening the room's resemblance to an amateur germ-warfare laboratory.

The boy himself paid no attention to the microbial clutter. He found a gray plastic chair for Joan, who observed him shyly as she dried her eyes with the scratchy, Council-regulation loo paper he fetched for her. She was not quite sure how to begin a conversation after an introduction as unconventional as theirs.

He was tall, his height accentuated by his skinniness, as though a recent growth spurt had taken him by surprise. A thin layer of pale down covered his upper lip—he could not be more than sixteen, Joan decided—and a crescent of small red spots curved angrily across his pale chin. He had long, bony fingers and his hair was cut close to his head. As he leaned down to pick up a tissue that had fallen from her hand, she saw that the word “Skull” had been painstakingly shaved across his crown, so that its letters glowed scalp white from their background of black bristles.

“Yeah, it's dumb, I know,” he said, catching her eye and indicating his head. “I'm sort of waiting for it to grow out. My mom said I should shave my hair off and get rid of it that way, but I don't want to look like a cancer patient.” His brow furrowed, anxiously. “You don't have cancer, do you, ma'am?”

Joan said that no, to the best of her knowledge, she did not have cancer.

“I only meant it as a joke. No offense intended.”

She assured him that she had taken no offense. “My name's Joan,” she offered, to show that this was true. “What's yours?”

“Paul Dhanzy, ma'am.”

“And what do you do down here, Paul?”

What Paul Dhanzy did each day, in the room that smelled strongly of bananas, depended on his mood—which the indignity of sequestration in a damp and loveless basement did little to lift. Occasionally, in rare but frenzied bouts of concentration, he worked diligently on his allotted tasks; more regularly, once the head of Community Services had ticked his attendance sheet, he minimized the computer database on which he was compiling a painstaking catalog and surfed the Web looking at hardcore pornography. These excursions, though compulsively fascinating, were in other ways unsuited to his sensibilities, and over six weeks he had grown thoroughly weary of them. “I'm cataloging an artifact collection for the library,” he replied. “And when that drags a bit, I read.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.