A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip by Kevin Brockmeier Read Free Book Online Page B

if he were passing him a note in class and go, “Hey, if the others start telling lies about us, like you were putting me down or I was putting you, we won’t believe them, will we?”
    In his Goon voice Thad answers, “What did that kid want with you anyway?”
    “Kid?”
    “When the rest of us were on that bus-looking thing that flipped over in midair, and you said if you rode it again you’d throw up—you know, that
kid
.”
    “Him.”
    The ride was called the Kamikaze. Kevin had been lyingnext to it in the gravel when a boy’s face had appeared above him like a pale moon.
    “He just wanted to know if I was all right. I told him my head was spinning but yeah. He called me mister.”
    Thad strips the batter off a pickle with his teeth. “Wouldn’t it be badass if we could float alongside the rides and pretend nothing special was happening? Like if we were just sitting there all la-di-da with our legs crossed, swooping around and around. People would fucking
freak
.” His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat. “These pickles, by the way? Totally disgusting.”
    It is an interesting expression,
la-di-da
. Kevin repeats it a few times.
La-di-da. La-di-da
. The wind gusts between the trailers, and a cotton candy cone goes somersaulting over the black extension cords, and from the far back of nowhere a memory comes to him, a few seconds of radiant filmstrip in which he is standing over a busy street, his eyes locked on a sunlit concrete ledge where an orange peel rocks back and forth like a baby’s cradle. How old was he? he wonders. Where did it happen, and when? Was he alone? No, no, wait, he was holding the tail of someone’s shirt, wasn’t he? That shirt, he thinks—it is like a gap in a puzzle. If only he could remember whose it was, his life would fit together without a single missing piece. Would snap flat and turn into a picture. Would look the way it does on the box. For the rest of the day, he feels as if he is on the verge of understanding something momentous, something he knew long ago, knew to his bones and then forgot, a hundred years before he was alive.
    The morning after the fair, he wakes on a pallet of blankets on Bateman’s floor. The birds are calling to each other in twos and threes, and he lies there listening to them, testing himselffor the sense of enlightenment he felt, or nearly felt, behind the food stand. It is somewhere nearby, burning its slow way toward him. And the next day, and the next, whenever he stops watching TV or reading comics for a while, letting his mind go clear and quiet, he can feel it fluttering inside him, thinning away little by little.
    It is another two weeks before it vanishes completely. And what has he lost? Maybe nothing. He no longer knows. By then it is Halloween, and he is walking through CAC in a blond wig and a gingham dress, wearing a bra stuffed with balled-up hand towels.
    He is one of eighty or ninety kids in costume. He catches a junior named Wesley Walls saying, “The few, the proud, the umpteen,” and stores the line away to use with his friends, none of whom are there to hear it. Instead, crowded into the foyer and the gymnasium, are airline pilots and Draculas and three older girls dressed identically as flappers. There is a big gray battering ram of an eighth-grader in a lab coat and corpse makeup. There is a Cyndi Lauper and a Madonna and a Judd Nelson or a Judd Hirsch (Kevin can never remember which is which: the one from
The Breakfast Club
). And there are the usual cheerleaders and football players and drill team girls, costumed lazily as themselves. But no one else is gathering the same looks he is. He notices people turning as he passes—teachers, seniors even—their attention breathing lightly all over him. The tickling sensation he feels could be pleasure or it could be embarrassment. It’s hard to tell.
    Craig Bell corners him outside Bible and asks, “Exactly who are you supposed to be?”
    He adjusts his cowboy hat. “Dolly