Brock Clarke - The Happiest People in the World

“Like shit,” Kurt said, and then he waited to be reprimanded for his language. His mother and his father would have done exactly that. But Henry just looked at him, quizzically, the way he sometimes still did when confronted with the American vernacular.

“And then I come here and talk to you and feel better,” Kurt said. He felt about Henry the traditional way you feel about your mother’s boyfriend, and also your guidance counselor: you didn’t want to trust him but ended up doing so anyway, although always with an eye toward returning to your original feelings. But the more time went by, the more distant those original feelings seemed, the more Kurt genuinely liked and trusted his almost stepfather, and the more he liked and trusted Henry, the more guilty he felt about his father being so lonely. “And that makes me feel worse than shit,” Kurt said.

Henry frowned. “Worse than shit?” he asked. “Can one have that feeling?”

Kurt shrugged. “One can. I can. My dad can.” Then he stared baldly at Henry. Sometimes he did this when the subject of his parents came up. Kurt did not really believe Henry was the cause of his parents’ breakup. Kurt knew, mostly because they’d tried so desperately to hide it from him, that his parents had been in the process of breaking up ever since he was old enough to pay attention. Still, sometimes he liked to stare accusingly at Henry to see whether he could make Henry act guilty. He never did. Kurt stopped staring. “I feel sad for him,” Kurt said.

“He has you,” Henry said.

“Ugh,” Kurt said.

“He has his brother,” Henry said, and Kurt said, “Ugh,” again, and this time Henry seemed to almost laugh. His uncle Lawrence was of course a well-known freak, but Henry’s almost laughing made Kurt turn perverse and want to defend his uncle.

“Uncle Lawrence isn’t so bad,” Kurt said. He remembered a conversation his parents had had once, back when they were still married. Kurt’s mother had been getting on his father’s case for the way he treated his brother during one of their regular Sunday cocktail hour arguments. “You act like you don’t even love him,” she’d said. “Oh, I love him,“ his dad had said. “I don’t think that I trust him, but I do love him.” “Although I don’t think that I trust him,” Kurt said now to Henry. And then he stared baldly again at Henry, just for kicks. But Henry shocked him this time by answering his stare, out loud.

“You can trust me, Kurt,” Henry said. And wow, Kurt wanted to hug him right then. Instead he said, “Ugh,” one more time and then got up to leave the office. But before he reached the doorway, Kurt turned and looked back at Henry.

“That was a good talk,” he said, and Henry nodded gravely, as if he somehow knew it was the last good talk they would ever have.

Just before three o’clock, Henry looked up and saw a stout, dark-bearded, sleepy-eyed man standing in the doorway. On the door, which was open, was a sign that read MR. LARSEN, GUIDANCE COUNSELOR. On the other side of the cramped room was a metal desk, and on the other side of that was Henry himself. The stranger looked at the sign on the door and smirked. Then, still smirking, he looked at Henry’s face, and most carefully, too, like he was committing it to memory, like a traveler might read an itinerary, which, of course, in Henry’s case would have said Skagen, then Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, Saint Petersburg, Paris, London, and so on and so on until finally here, in his office at the Broomeville Junior-Senior High School in Broomeville, New York.

“Larsen,” the man finally said. “That’s a Danish name.”

In response, Henry did what by now came naturally: he frowned. Because this was what you did as his patient, or student, or whatever you called the person who came to see the guidance counselor: you uttered a declarative sentence. And this is what he did as your guidance counselor: he frowned to let you know he disapproved of the inaccuracy of your declaration. Whereupon you tried again. This was Henry’s method, for which he was famous throughout the school, and into the town of Broomeville, too, a declarative sentence that, had he heard it, would not have caused him to frown. In fact, just before the stranger appeared, Henry had sat down with Pete Schuyler, a crooked-toothed tenth grader who’d gotten into a fistfight after the football game against Lowville the Friday before. It was Monday, and the cut below Pete’s left eye was still raw, still glistening with ooze. The fight had been with a senior at Lowville High, and when Henry asked Pete about the reason for the fight, Pete said, “Because he was a retard farmer.”

Henry just frowned in response, as Pete must have known he would, as most anyone in Broomeville would have known he would. “If you’re from Lowville, then you’re automatically a retard farmer,” Pete protested. “Everyone knows this. It’s just common knowledge.”

Henry frowned at that, too. He knew he was locally famous for his frown, for his method, and didn’t mind, because after all, he had been internationally famous for something else, and that, he had minded. That, he still minded. Now, Henry was forced to think of the other people who might mind learning about his international fame — oh God: Ellen, Kurt, not to mention the stranger, who might do more than just “mind.”

“Larsen, that’s a Danish name,” the stranger had said a few seconds earlier. The stranger then repeated the statement. But before Henry could respond again with his famous frown, someone said, “Mr. L.?” A second later, Jenny Tallent stepped into the office. As usual, everything about Jenny seemed to be wrong on purpose. Her hair was cut lopsidedly and dyed a color somewhere between red wine and mud. Her pants were black and baggy, and off one of the belt loops hung a chain that wasn’t attached to anything. She was wearing a heavy, oversize black hooded jacket even though it was an unusually warm October afternoon; there were two strings hanging from the jacket on either side of her neck, and one of them was considerably longer than the other and looked wet. Henry guessed Jenny had been sucking on it, again. Her ears weren’t pierced, nor was her nose or either of her eyebrows or her lips, but there was a metal rivet lodged in the left side of her neck, at the center of a tattooed bull’s-eye. The bull’s-eye and the rivet seemed to do something to the stranger. He got up and, without saying any last thing to Henry or any first thing to the girl, walked briskly out of the office.

“Who was that guy?” Jenny asked. Normally, her bull’s-eye and rivet spooked him, too. But just now, he didn’t think he’d ever been so relieved to see anyone in his life.

Help me! Henry said to Jenny in his mind. Shut up! he said to himself in the same place. He’d been telling himself to shut up for two years, since he first moved to Broomeville. That he’d managed to do so was a major part of his happiness, not to mention his method.

“I don’t know,” Henry told Jenny. Before she could ask him any more questions, he said, “What going on, Jenny?”

“Principal Klock sent me to tell you: baseball .” She said “baseball” the way the stranger had said “Danish”: “Larsen, that’s a Danish name.” The stranger had said it twice: the first time he’d spoken in Danish, and the second in English, even though Henry had understood the Danish perfectly well.

Wednesday, October 6, 2011, 11:32 p.m.

From: undisclosed sender

To: undisclosed recipient

Subject: Broomeville

My first encounter with ”Mr. Larsen” in his office was interrupted by one of his female students. Nothing to worry about. I will visit Larsen again tomorrow and begin the next stage of our plan.