The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [52]
And perhaps it’s this newfound respect for surfaces that keeps Ursula from asking too many questions of Javier or digging too deeply into his problems. She’s never once commented on his trembling hands or runny nose. Eskalith, she found out, is a brand name for lithium, used to treat bipolar disorders, but she hasn’t asked him about his condition. She never asks about his past, either, anymore. The stories he makes up about his childhood have become a running joke between the two of them. One day he’ll tell her his parents were underwater archaeologists and go on to describe how he rode a pair of dolphins across a bay in the Adriatic to school each day. The next he’ll say his parents were jewel thieves who trained him at an early age to climb walls using suction cups and to outwit alarm systems. But whatever his childhood was like, she knows now that what directly followed it was far from ideal.
Only minutes ago he told her the story, after she woke him from a bad dream. He has bad dreams often. In the middle of the night comes the sound of his distress, nothing like his waking voice: a soft, high-pitched whine, repeated with each breath, like the whimper of a crying dog, anxious, bereft, and helpless, one of the sadder noises she’s ever heard. Waking him from his nightmares has become so habitual for her that she can now do it practically without waking up herself. She shakes him gently, tells him it’s OK, then holds him while they both return to their dreams without another word. But tonight when she shook him, his eyes opened and he began to talk. He told her how he ran away from home at sixteen and has been on his own ever since—how he just started walking one day and kept walking all night, crisscrossing streets, avenues, bridges; and how by morning he found a highway that he walked alongside all the next day; and how at dusk a truck stopped to pick him up; and how he slept then and woke up far from home. He told her how he bummed around the country for five years after that, living in squat houses, picking up menial jobs, making a friend or two, then growing disillusioned with the place or the people and picking up and moving on to repeat the process somewhere else.
She was half asleep as he talked, and his words flowed over her, alchemizing instantly into imagery, the way words tend to do in that state, so that by the time he’s finished and has gone back to sleep and she is fully awake and begins trying to recall more exactly what he said, she finds that her mind has misplaced his words somewhere and is filled instead with hazy images of dilapidated rooms in busted, postindustrial cities, of bus stations, construction lots, fast-food kitchens, dark basements with folding cots. She concentrates, now, and some of the words come back to her, and she remembers his talking about his strange journey less in terms of physical settings than in terms of the simultaneous progress going on inside him: how the nature of reality was changing before his eyes, the flashes of luminescence, people beginning to glow like stained glass at sunrise, suffused with color and light, meaning and beauty, an ecstatic vision he couldn’t understand or control or maintain but that spurred him ever onward from one place to the next.
His quest eventually brought him back to Mid City, where he found a new squat house and moved in with a bunch of street punks much younger than him. He got a library job at the university and began auditing courses, searching for the start of something, some great project to which he might commit his life. And then one day he saw Professor Lacouture walking across the campus and was impressed by the cut of his suit and the confidence of his gait. So he began attending the man’s lectures and learned how every