Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

It must have been right after the quarter break, because the surface of the desk had been scrubbed, the efforts of untold taggers, graffiti artists, music aficionados, and lovestruck daydreamers scoured away. What remained was a relief map, pencil indentations like zit scars on the faded, tattered wood. And three new scribblings. Two were heavy and primitive. But the third: that one had been detailed, accomplished, in its way: the face of a giant skull like an orbiting planet; braces running down its continent of teeth, acting as railroad tracks for a speeding, out-of-control train.

Kenny's aesthetic may have veered toward the intergalactic and superhuman, his sense of humor may have favored the subtle and whimsical, but it had been impossible for him not to appreciate the tiny skulls billowing from that smokestack, the bony arms flapping from the passenger cars’ windows. And by the end of the period, the side of his own hand had been smeared with lead: the skull planet's orbit now broached by a space cruiser, all eight of the pilot's eyes focused, with an appreciation that bordered on glowing, upon that runaway train.

Two days later,Kenny had stared, with a dumbfounded awe, at the space cruiser's wing, and the pre-Renaissance corpse. Taking a knee, the corpse doffed its cranium.Ooze leaked from its open skull, forming the gelatinous word: WOW.

Half-afraid the sight would disappear if he looked up, Kenny had tried to wrap his mind around the fact: he had been answered.

So it began: a guarded castle stormed by zombie minions; a bikini babe wielding nunchakus to keep a shadowy dragoon cadre at bay. There were barriers, sure, there were interruptions and sabbaticals. The class didn't have a seating chart, for one thing. And the odds of Kenny getting to class in time to take that seat weren't great in the best of times. Also you had the mornings Kenny could not manage to escape from the seductive comforts of his fold-out couch. You had the times when he managed to get out and dressed, but couldn't spark the FBImobile's ignition fuse in time to make second period. And days when driving to school simply took too much energy. You had those couple of instances when Kenny had stopped at the Food King along the way to school, and had been distracted by the video poker machines. You had all those days, and you also had the fateful morning when Kenny had left his mom's place and discovered his old man, across the street, passed out, naked, in Mrs. Nguyen's year-round nativity scene, and Kenny had to get the poor sot out of there before Mom saw and lost her shit. All these distractions, and also the fact that whenever Kenny did successfully make it to second period, when he actually was fortunate enough to commandeer that seat, even then, a good half to two thirds of the time, the dumb bastard on the other side of this fun-house mirror, he'd come down with his own case of classroom attendance deficit syndrome, or himself had been unsuccessful in negotiating the politics of desk residency, which was to say, the desk would look exactly like it had the last time Kenny had left it, his most recent addition still untouched, a bride at the sacrificial altar.

It was just aggravating enough to give Kenny another excuse to stay in bed, another reason to let himself get distracted, to not try so hard, although, eventually, whether it took three days, a week, or sometimes even longer, Kenny would make it back to that aisle seat. And, eventually, a new series of black lines would indeed greet him there, impressed upon the wood.

Like this, slowly, gradually, with all the attention and intensity of missionaries in a new frontier, the glum confines of this physical realm had been transmogrified, turned into the expanding domain of the super-natural and otherworldly: a hobgoblin gleefully administering a superwedgie to a superhero, who flew warp speed through the rings of hell, rushing to get Satan his pizza before the clock struck twelve; a radiation-mangled, spider-armed giant with a hockey mask and a fried-chicken bucket on his head blasting guitar at such volume that an invading army of robots was carried away (some hanging from the bottoms of the notes, others trapped inside the independent universe that each chord happened to be). Kenny'd used ripped pages from blue book test primers as his tracing paper, devoting the bulk of the period to copying out the latest skeleton and mongoloid addition. He'd spent the rest of his school day coming up with rough sketches of possible responses. Stretched out on his stomach across the floor of his dad's trailer, stretched out in his mom's living room, stretched out in front of his aunt's television, he'd recognize a few things, little quirks — which comic books might have influenced the artistic sensibilities of the other guy: those billowing clouds, for example — straight out of that totally excellent graphic novel Ruthless Punishers, Dominant Visitors. Those posed skeletons — inspired by a particularly infamous episode of Mutant Skinheads in Love.

Each discovered reference was simultaneously chilling and calming — this guy stealing from Kenny's favorite artists, using techniques Kenny himself utilized. It was more than a little odd. But more than a lot compelling, too. So Kenny would refine his artistic ideas, playing with and expanding on themes, scribbling out a mural on the surface of a pawn shop envelope, then turning over the envelope and starting over and following a different path of possibility, choosing and then honing and then perfecting an image, preparing it for the desk, all while fading away from and returning to the matter of whoever was doing the other drawings, this strange, plunging sense of inevitability taking hold — almost as if Kenny could reach out and touch the answers, as if he possessed knowledge he did not want to admit he possessed, knowledge that was not rational, but intuitive.

With a hesitant hand — a hand that Kenny eventually had to steady — he'd finally inscribed the bandana onto that desk. He'd then wrapped this drawn bandana around the bulbous head of an extraterrestrial being, whose face he'd portrayed as twisted, concentrating on the task of turning half-pike atop his airbound, rocket-powered skateboard.

Exactly twenty-four hours later, he found, carved into the wood like a series of knife thrusts, a zombie. With a mess of hair pouring down the front of its bony skull, the zombie worked feverishly at its own sketch.

In the front of the auditorium, the jayvee track coach was announcing, from his sports page, the results of the fourth race at Santa Anita. The kid in the next seat continued using a protractor to chop out a line of blow. Kenny remained in his cage, overcome with inarticulate wonder.

Thus, amid the undefined fissures that, on a daily basis, drifted through that dilapidated school, the exiguity of a rapport had blossomed. Slowly. Tenuously. Nobody else knew. If they knew, they did not care.

A private duel between anonymous gentlemen. A hothouse tango of clandestine imaginations. Floodgates opening, riptides sweeping across the woods, even the hot piece of ass who taught Dish Drying 101 made an appearance (on all fours, barking like a hound); openings created to be filled, challenges tendered to be met, with Kenny lobbing a metaphorical softball down the pike specifically so he could admire how far into the upper deck his counterpart would knock the thing, and then with the dude responding, making an entombed reference he had to know Kenny would understand; every square inch of the kidney-shaped desk being covered, a palette of squiggles and lines that every passing day was muddled further — you'd stare and see sludge, this world of shit; at last, your eyes would zero in, focusing on a specific object, that one little jewel, the key to untold dimensions.