Bill Clegg - Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

There is a new landscape of doors — another nurse’s bathroom at school, woods to disappear into, barns to go behind, different friends’ houses with various pitfalls and out-of-the-way places for jumping and panic and eventual relief.

His third-grade class is small. Twenty or so in the whole grade, ten or so in his class. He is there only a few months when a new kid shows up, a girl. She is small and blond and birdlike and instantly familiar — like a sister or a little mother. She has immediate authority over him, but it is gentle and hard to notice. He understands that she is finer and wiser but also that she is part of him. From the moment she joins his class, he defers to her, looks up to her, and even when he is ignoring her, he worries over her approval. Katherine.

She reads. She is always reading. She asks him what he thinks about the books they read for school. In fourth grade, a book about an immortal family and a girl who falls in love with one of its members after she stumbles upon him in the woods behind her house, drinking from a spring; in fifth grade, a big, sprawling allegorical series of books about a handful of English children who must battle the rise of evil in the world. Later, too soon, she leaves Brontë and Dickens in his cubbyhole. He devours them and worries about the words he doesn’t understand and loves them because she does and often sobs at their endings, because for a while he is away, out of time, somewhere he can’t remember himself, and it is a shock, always a sad shock, to come back. She talks about these books, and each time, with each book, she sees more and better and has words that dazzle him to transcribe what she sees. He will steal all those words and use them. To himself, in his reports for school, talking to adults, teachers. With each word he feels a click into a finer self, one more wrinkle smoothed. Her words have a kind of magic, like the garments that carry storybook characters out of their lives. A dress that changes a chimney-sweeping urchin into a princess, a shoe that returns her to the castle after it’s all been taken away. She uses the word desultory in the eighth grade, and to this very day he works it into conversation the way a swimming champion casually mentions his medals.

They find out their families moved to their small town from towns very close to each other. They find out that they were born in the same hospital, seven days apart. He was born first but he inhaled vomit into his lungs and remained in the nursery for a week longer, so they imagine there was some kind of connection forged in those early, fragile hours when parents didn’t exist, only nurses and other October souls screaming to life.

She agrees to kiss him in the eighth grade. It is the day before his thirteenth birthday, and a group, the same group as always — Kenny, Gwen, Adam, Michael, Jennifer — spend the day at the trampoline behind the health food store. Behind the trampoline are the woods, and a long, dark path where they go to make out. On that day she agrees to kiss him, to go down the path, into the woods. It has been discussed during the week and now it is that day, a Sunday, and they’re all there.

She stalls. Or hesitates. Or something. He can never remember. He is frustrated, and he and Kenny and a few others go over to the Nutmeg Pantry to buy candy and soda. She stays, and he’s worried that even when he gets back she’ll refuse to go down the path with him. The little gang leaves, they cross the shopping center parking lot and then Route 7. They buy whatever they buy and head back. He’s slow to keep up, worried that she’s changed her mind or chosen someone else. That he’ll be the only one who won’t go into the woods that day. Everyone crosses back across Route 7 and he trails behind. He makes it to the other side and then everything goes white.

Later, he remembers an ambulance and the voices of the town comforting him. The feeling of being nowhere — between land and sea, life and death, asleep and awake — everything fuzzy at the edges, and coursing through him a great sense of relief, a feeling of flight. Being pulled out, spirited away. He surfaces only briefly from this nowhere and is disappointed when he wakes the next day, fully conscious, in a hospital room, covered in casts.

People talk. They say he and Kenny were playing chicken with the cars. They pass it along as fact and it reaches his mother, who gets very upset. He doesn’t find out about the talk until later, but when he does, he silently agrees with the worst things said, even though he has been told they are not true. He never remembers what happened, but a man from the next town gets arrested for driving with heroin and alcohol in his system. He never finds out what happened to this man.

Katherine comes to the hospital with the others and she brings him books. He reads them — all of them — but which ones, he won’t remember, except for the tale of children who pass through a wardrobe into a world of unimpeachable good and terrible evil, of ice queens and lions; he will remember that one always. Like in so many of the other books she gives him, there is a magic door to step through — a gurgling spring with water that enchants a family into immortality, a golden ring that turns an ordinary Hobbit boy into the hope for all good in his world, a wardrobe that allows children to escape an unhappy house — some ordinary everyday object that acts as a portal into a world humming with wonder.

Because he can’t move yet on crutches, a bed is set up in what his family calls the Backroom. It is a TV room at the end of a long open space that extends from the kitchen and the dining area. The room is two stories high and has a loft with books and games that one can access by a wooden ladder. The far wall of the Backroom has an enormous window that looks out onto an old maple tree that scrapes against the pane and the side of the house. Beyond that, a lawn. And beyond the lawn, the woods. The bedrooms of the house are up the stairs and away from him, and at night he is very much alone. The tree scratches the window, sounds crack from the woods, and a red light blinks on the smoke detector like some kind of evil bead. He will read more and more during this time. Retreat further into himself and feel, in the small bed at the bottom of the large windowed room, breakable.

Friends come and stay the night, teachers bring homework. His mother plays nurse and is attentive to his casts and the physical therapy he’s supposed to do every day. She brings him food and wipes his face, and during the day, when she is around, he feels safe. There is a part of him that wishes this time at home with her would last forever. A month or so later, he returns to school, on crutches, and while he’s relieved to be able to move again, he’s also a little resentful that his old life has resumed, that no one is fussing over and looking out for him.

But before he gets home, before he leaves the hospital, in fact on the first day he gets there, the nurse brings him a bedpan that he is meant to pee into. He is immobile, cannot get himself to the bathroom, and in a flash sees the broken bones as something good, something lucky. A way to somehow shatter the always pattern of fiddling and jumping and upset and relief. Newly thirteen, and there is a little crack in what has up until now been an immovable door. There is, miraculously, hope. He pees into the bedpan and it feels like he’s pissing a thousand shards of glass but his hands don’t fly to his penis. While he is in the hospital he is able to pee without touching himself, every time.

A year and a half later, chubby, hairless, too pretty, and often mistaken for a girl, he goes to Australia as an exchange student. Between that time and the time in the hospital, there are many moments of triumph when he stands before a urinal and pees without the old ritual. There are also many setbacks, times when he has to retreat into a stall and wrestle with himself for nearly an hour. It goes on like this until the spell that will forever remain a mystery to him begins to fade. It starts when he is still in Australia, when hair finally arrives under his arms and crotch, when muscles gently bloom under his baby fat and inches happen, height happens. These developments occur so quietly and incrementally that he doesn’t notice them until he comes home and is at once aware that the energy around him has changed, that people react to him differently. And as all these prayed-for things appear and happen, his old nemesis quietly slinks away. He returns after six months in Australia and never again, not even once, panics before a toilet.