Founder, Installment 4

Chapters 7 and 8

Book II, Chapter 7

Smoke on the Water, July 2006

“Our friend seems to have a great deal of nervous energy,” said Mrs. Ample, right in front of Hugh as if he were a potted plant.

Amelia Warding nodded, smiled at Hugh beside her, and patted his thigh reassuringly, the way mothers do. “I think certain group situations bring out his anxiety,” she said. “But he has lots of ways to burn off energy at home—playing football with his friends, mostly, and riding his bike.”

Lorraine Ample, Hugh’s counselor at Thompson-Merrill Primary School, sat forward with a creaking of her chair springs. She put on her reading glasses and began examining a document Hugh assumed was a list of his various meltdowns in class. Fortunately, Mrs. Ample, referred to by school delinquents as Mrs. Jubblies, was known as a well-intended woman whose greatest fault was sometimes hugging students so tightly they nearly suffocated against her huge bosoms. Fortunately for Hugh, mental health check-ins with Mrs. Ample, however much they could feel like an inquisition, usually proved harmless, if not pointless.

“Hmm,” said Mrs. Ample. “His teachers indicate Hugh is very creative. Have you considered finding some sort of creative outlet for him?”

“Well, he reads quite a lot,” ventured Hugh’s mother. “Though I don’t suppose that’s what you have in mind…”

This caught Mrs. Ample’s attention, and she turned to Hugh with more creaking of her chair springs. “What sorts of things do you enjoy reading, Hugh?”

Hugh sat up straighter now, glanced at his mother, and answered, “Mostly stuff about old wars—famous generals and battles—but also about animals.”

“Well, that’s excellent,” she said.

“And my mum has me read books she likes…” he added, which seemed to discomfit his mother, who now interjected.

“Hugh’s dad and I are great believers in the importance of reading,” she began. “We encourage him to read one book a quarter outside his school work. Last quarter he read Pride and Prejudice. Now he’s working his way through the James Herriot books.”

“Wonderful, excellent,” said Mrs. Ample. She removed her glasses, thought for a moment, and added. “But I also wonder if Hugh mightn’t benefit from a creative endeavor that both channels his energies and calms him.”

“Like art? Or music?” asked Hugh’s mother.

“Exactly.”

Hugh knew right away that his mother would suggest an old-school option like water color painting or cello lessons; but he also knew better than to argue with two adult women at once. So, after their appointment had concluded, when he and his mum were buckling themselves into her Renault, he offered a preemptive suggestion.

“You know, Mum, Gerry learned to play the guitar with Guitar Hero,” he said. “How about that?”

His mother fit the key in the ignition and started the car. “Is that a school program?”

“Nah,” he replied. “It’s a video game.”

She looked ahead as the car warmed up. Sitting beside her, Hugh studied her face to anticipate the eventual response.

Now she turned to him. “I don’t know, Love,” she began. “A video game?”

“Can’t we at least check it out?”

She shifted the car into reverse and, as she began to back out of the parking place, gave Hugh an encouraging smile.

On their way home, they stopped at Cosgrove’s, an old figan department store in East Gloven. There, on the second floor in the Toys and Games section, they explored such creative outlets as William’s Musical Adventure and Mario Teaches Violin, which even Hugh’s mum agreed were more punitive than calming. After nearly 40 minutes of browsing, and a fair amount of cajoling, Hugh prevailed and, ten minutes later, left the store with Guitar Hero in hand. As they emerged onto the sidewalk, his mum looked down at him and confided, “Let’s not mention to your dad how much this cost. Okay, Love?”

The minute they returned home that evening, Hugh set about assembling the game in his bedroom and even learning the Opening Licks numbers—the songs with easy chords for beginners, like “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath, “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” by Joan Jett, and “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple. For weeks after that, he spent most evenings holed up in his room, practicing guitar licks until his shirt was damp with sweat, or until his father poked his head in the door and told him to get to bed or else.

At one point, a couple weeks after Guitar Hero made its appearance, his father asked for an update on how well the game was helping with his anxiety. Mr. Warding had just come home from work and opened a bottle of beer in the living room, when he called down the hallway, “Hughie come in here a second.”

Hugh was in his room reading All Things Bright and Beautiful at the time. Hearing his father calling, he arose from his bed and trudged down the hallway to the living room. There he found his dad tilted back in his blue recliner, his trainers on the floor below him. “Hugh Boy,” said his father, “That guitar game helpin’ with your nerves at all?”

Hugh’s mother stood in the kitchen preparing dinner and turned to hear her son’s reply.

Considering the question, Hugh realized he hadn’t thought much about his anxiety lately, which he took as a good sign—and he told his father as much.

“No panic attacks?” asked his dad.

“Nope.”

Then Hugh’s father laughed and said, “Well maybe ol’ Mrs Jubblies was right,” at which Hugh’s mother shot him a disapproving look.

“And I beat Gerry’s score last night,” added Hugh for emphasis.

“Yeah?” replied his dad with a grin. “Well, that’s just icin’ on the cake, isn’t it?”

That exchange took place in early June, and Hugh’s placid state of mind persisted through the end of the school year and into July. Then arrived July 12, a Wednesday scarcely one week into the dry season, when, to everyone’s astonishment, the skies grew suddenly dark and rain came down in torrents. Hugh had been playing football with some neighborhood friends and got soaked to the bone on his return home from the rec center. After he’d changed into dry clothes and gone to the kitchen for a snack, his mother came in with a mysterious smile on her face.

Hugh swallowed a mouthful of his peanut butter sandwich and asked, “What’s up?”

“Your dad got some brilliant news just now.”

“Yeah? A promotion?”

“Better,” said his mother. “He got a promotion and a big raise—or actually a double-promotion ‘cause they made him a Senior Operations Manager.”

“That’s brilliant, Mum. He deserves it.”

“He made dinner reservations at La Fôret tonight so we can celebrate,” she said. “So don’t make any plans with your friends.”

“A Frannie place?” complained Hugh. “I hate Frannie food, Mum.”

At this, his mother’s expression soured. “Don’t use that word, Hugh. It’s disrespectful. And La Fôret’s a lovely place at the top of Halendana Hill. It’s got amazing views of the city. You’ll love it.”

Hugh knew he shouldn’t resist going to dinner, but his petulant self had, for the moment, seized the steering wheel of his 12 year-old brain. He’d been planning to practice “Smoke on the Water” on Guitar Hero that night and compare scores with Gerry; dinner at a French restaurant 40 minutes outside of town threw a wet blanket on his whole scheme. On top of that, he’d eaten French food twice in his life—at a Gursey restaurant called Normandy—and came away unimpressed both times. He had no interest in heavy sauces, waiters in black vests and bow ties, and menus where every entry was fromage this or bourguignon that.

“French food makes me wanna gerb,” he whined to underscore his point.

Apparently, his mother didn’t appreciate this line of reasoning, nor the fondness he’d developed for south-side slang, so she left the kitchen unceremoniously, calling over her shoulder, “You’ll find something you can eat…”

Hugh understood Bressen geography well enough to know that a drive up the Halendana Hill would take them through a dense pine forest and a number of steep, hairpin turns, so he tried a different line of attack.

“You know I’ll get car sick on that road,” he called after his mum.

Now halfway down the hall, she stopped with her back still to him. “We’re celebrating your father’s promotion…” she said, all amusement now absent from her voice.

Sensing maybe he’d gone too far, he tried the empathetic route. “I know mum, and I’m really excited for him, yeah? But you’d have more fun without me complainin’ about a stomach ache and hating all the food. You could stay and drink wine and talk about whatever…”

“Okay,” she said after a pause. “You’re on your own, then. But I’d better hear you congratulating your dad the minute he walks in.”

Hugh promised that he’d smother his father in praise, then retreated to his bedroom to call Gerry.

Many years later, Hugh came to view that day in July as a series of omens, missed by his younger self but painfully obvious in retrospect: how it rained cats and dogs in the first week of the dry season; and how, after his parents left for dinner, he bit into the chicken sandwich his mother made and tasted a trace of her scented hand lotion on the bread. And then, an hour later, when he took a break from Guitar Hero, he noticed the evening sky. He didn’t usually pay attention to the western horizon outside his window, but that night the sunset stopped him in his tracks. Dramatic cumulonimbus clouds lumbered across the twilight sky—great, roiling, purple-tinged clouds—and where the sun’s rays touched them from beneath, they glowed a brilliant orange, like embers in a fireplace. Uncharacteristically, Hugh stood at his bedroom window for several minutes and watched those clouds slide slowly from east to west. It felt like standing on a beach, bidding farewell to a departing armada. That unsettling sensation of being left behind stayed with him even as he resumed playing Guitar Hero. Then, once again, he lost all sense of time.

The doorbell rang around 10:30. It was only then he realized his parents were at least an hour late. But even as he broke himself away from his game and made his way down the hallway, it did not occur to him to be concerned. Life hadn’t yet taught him to be wary. When he opened the door, however, he found not his parents standing there, smelling of wine and Sole Française, complaining they’d forgotten their flat key, but two Sikstand officers in black uniforms, accompanied by an old lady.

The first of the Sikstand officers stood right in the doorway, tall, square-jawed, with impassive eyes; the other, a much smaller woman with a blonde ponytail, stood behind him as if she’d prefer to be anywhere but 32-C Bannerston Street. The old woman behind them, stolid and gray-haired, eyed Hugh with clinical indifference. The first officer stood so near the threshold that, when Hugh opened the flat door, he was met with the smell of cigarette smoke and a close-up view of a holstered pistol.

Hugh said nothing at first—he just stared up at the first officer, wide-eyed with fear. Then the officer knelt down to Hugh’s level and began talking about a terrible accident on Halendana Hill and how he wished he didn’t have to deliver this news.

After the officer’s first few sentences, Hugh heard very little. Blood throbbed in his ears, his eyes blurred, his knees began to tremble. With every passing second, he felt some terrible force pulling him deeper and deeper inside himself until the three people in the doorway had been reduced to wavering silhouettes.

At some point, the officer directed Hugh back into the living room. Hugh sat down; the old woman sat down; the two officers remained standing, with the shorter one taking notes on a little pad. The female officer asked if Hugh had any adult relatives living in Bressen, to which he replied that he had an uncle, Maghil Warding, who lived in North Campus Augustus. He did not disclose that his uncle drank too much, bathed only weekly, and lived in a converted tobacco warehouse in the dodgiest part of NCA. When the officer asked for Maggie’s telephone number, Hugh went to his mother’s desk and found it in her Daily Planner.

A few minutes later, the old woman, who introduced herself as being from the Child Protection Agency, took Hugh into the dining room to explain with an unpleasant, croaky sort of voice what would happen next. He watched her pale lips moving against her oatmeal-colored teeth and realized after a moment that she, not the officer, was the source of the cigarette smell. The woman explained that a judge would assign guardianship to an adult, most likely his Uncle Maggie, because he was Hugh’s only relative and, barring any unforeseen developments, Hugh would probably go live with Maggie. She talked for a fairly long time, but the longer she went on, the more it felt like she was addressing Hugh from a distant boat while he slowly sank beneath crashing waves.

Chapter 8

Legal Guardian, July 2006

An hour after the Sikstand arrived, Maggie showed up looking faded and threadbare. For several minutes, he stood in the living room talking to the Sikstand officers, his shoulders slumped, his face drawn. Hugh sat next to the CPA woman at the dining room table, half-listening to his uncle’s conversation with the officers. Every now and then one of them would look his way with a poor little bugger expression and whisper something he couldn’t hear. Occasionally, Hugh caught snatches of the conversation.

Car wedged between two trees…

Toxicology report.

Don’t know yet.

As the discussion wound down and everyone prepared to leave, Maggie came into the dining room and gave Hugh an awkward hug that seemed to require all his effort—the only one Hugh could remember receiving from his uncle—a halting, one-armed gesture that seemed as much for the benefit of the CPA lady as for Hugh. I’m not as pathetic as I look, it seemed to say, though Hugh knew better. When Maggie’s face drew close to Hugh’s ear, his uncle whispered with a breath sweet and stale from alcohol, “Go get some sleep, Hughie. It’s been a bitch of a day.”

Then the voice inside Hugh’s head answered to no one,

Day.

Pay.

Hey.

Hugh rose from the dining table and headed for his bedroom, not out of obedience, and not because he could imagine sleeping, but because he had nothing with which to resist Maggie’s request—no energy, no force of will, no emotion at all. In the dim light of the hallway, he watched the white cotton of his socks moving along the hardwood floor where, just hours earlier, his mum had admonished him for not wanting to go to dinner. In his bedroom he found the lights still on and his Guitar Hero controller on the floor where he left it when the doorbell rang. His game was paused on the screen; the rock star with spiky white hair stood frozen in front of the audience. The mid-game score was frozen as well, in a box on the left side of the screen, everything just as it had been before the Sikstand arrived—so perfectly suspended in time Hugh could have hit play in his imagination and slipped back into the world of five hours earlier—before his mother poked her head in his room to say goodbye, before any of it. As quickly as the thought occurred to him, though, the illusion vanished and he grew suddenly wobbly in his legs and lost any notion of where to put his feet, or how to breathe, or what to feel. He didn’t bother undressing—he just turned off the lights and lay on his bed.

A few minutes later, he heard the Sikstand officers saying goodbye to Maggie in the living room, then the CPA woman offering bits of advice to Maggie.

Keep him busy.

Remember he’s probably in shock.

“Right,” said Maggie, as if he were carefully processing her advice. “Right.”

The front door closed with a click, the hallway light went out, and the flat fell silent except for the sound of Maggie shuffling to the kitchen in search of alcohol.

For a long time, Hugh lay awake on the bed, feeling like every emotion, every thought, had been sucked out of him like the guts from a dead fish. Then a surprising and defiant idea took shape in his mind: Maybe this is as bad as it’ll get. A person could survive pain like this—the sort that leaves a life drab and bitter, but doesn’t kill you. He was doomed to be an orphan, it turned out, but he could exist, drop out of school, find a laborer job somewhere, and rent a cheap flat in SoMi, down by the river. There might even be a small inheritance from his parents: a life insurance policy or a savings account. Maybe he could go on assistance; the State looked out for widows and orphans, people said, and he wouldn’t need much to get by.

But there was no way in hell he’d go live with Maggie.

No bloody way.

Outside his bedroom window, the city sounded like it always did—as if no one knew that the parents of a 12 year-old boy died on Halendana Road a few hours ago. The traffic on Bannerston Street moved by with a windy rush. Two men argued outside a pub. A truck accelerated from the signal light, paused, ground its gears, and roared away. Everything just kept going, the entire city one enormous mocking automaton.

Here’s a moment to step back, Hugh could hear his therapist saying, to distance yourself from the situation and evaluate your feelings.

So he tried to imagine holding his own head in his hands—like Hamlet with the skull—inspecting it for damage. But all he felt was empty and dead and terribly fragile—tired but not sleepy, and wary, as if something awful were crawling toward him in the darkness of his room.

There’s a sandwich in the fridge, Love. We’ll be back around 9:30.

His mum had stood in that empty doorway just a few hours earlier, her face smooth and round, her freckled chest rising and falling as she breathed.

As she breathed.

Behind her in the hall, his father hurried by with the car keys in hand. G’night, jim, he called over his shoulder. Ring us if there’s a problem.

When the Sikstand interrupted his Guitar Hero game, the doorbell sounded electric and tinny.

Dee-ding.

Dee-ding.

Just some colored wires and a brass bell.

Now the Sikstand officers were gone and the flat was quiet, but Hugh could still hear that doorbell ringing in the darkness of his mind, and when it did, all his defiant notions of finding a job and renting a flat came crashing down around him. A horrible darkness moved in from the corners of his bedroom until the air felt thin and unbreathable. The deepening darkness seemed to swallow him, the flat, the entire city; an invisible weight settled on his chest, slowly forcing the breath from his rib cage.

Ring us.

Ring us.

Ringy dingy ding us.

The walls crowded closer and the room folded in upon itself until the door to the hallway became a tiny black rectangle leading to a dark hallway and then a dark living room where an old man with paint under his fingernails nursed his whiskey. Beyond Hugh’s room and the flat and the gutters of Gloven, the Bressen river crawled westward to the Atlantic ocean, gray-black and sluggish as a tumid snake. Faceless buildings stood shoulder to shoulder, all in shadow; trees swayed and rustled against the night sky, and on the black river flowed into the vacuum of space.

As the tightness in Hugh’s chest intensified, he started to panic that his lungs, as desiccated as corn husks, had given out. Then his right hand leapt involuntarily to his face and dabbed at the corner of his mouth. A second later it happened again.

Ring us.

Ringy dingy ding us.

Step away from your body for a moment, Dr. Banerjee once told him. Analyze your sensations. What are you feeling?

I can’t catch my breath. I’m scared.

Okay. Remember how we practiced? Now breathe in slowly for four seconds. That’s excellent. Hold for seven, exhale for eight. Good. Feel the rib cage slowly expand and contract. Calm your breathing.

Now, as Hugh’s breathing grew deeper and more purposeful, the pressure on his rib cage relented, but still the voice in his head droned on, Ringy dingy ding us.

At last, prompted by sheer desperation, he did as his father once suggested: He shouted “Stop!” out loud.

And the voice stopped for the time being. He drew a deep breath to gather himself, but when he exhaled, a sob burst spontaneously from deep inside him, and he cried piteously, wretchedly—chest heaving, tears streaming down his cheeks—until at last the sobs attenuated to whimpers and then to silence. Finally, when all the terror and sorrow had poured out of him, he could hear himself breathing in the darkness of his bedroom, as if he had chanced upon his own tragedy; and there he lay for the next several minutes, staring silently at the ceiling.

Eventually, he closed his eyes and tried to sleep; but behind his clenched eyelids he saw himself wandering the streets of Gloven, searching for his parents as if they might be found living different lives in a far corner of the neighborhood. As long as he searched, though, the only face to emerge from the darkness was that of the Child Protection lady, with her pale lips and yellow teeth.

A moment later, Maggie appeared at the bedroom door, glass of whiskey in hand, and asked in a hoarse whisper, “You alright, Hughie?” Hugh propped himself up on an elbow; he could see his uncle’s silhouette in the gray light of the hallway and how the old man looked broken by the terrible new burden he bore. Seeing him standing there, it occurred to Hugh that, when his father died, Maggie lost his only sibling and the one person on Earth who cared whether he had enough money to pay rent, whether he sold another painting or passed away alone, puking blood in his flat.

Hugh nodded automatically, though he doubted Maggie could see him in the dark.

“I know you get anxious sometimes,” Maggie said after a moment.

“Uh huh.”

“Panic attacks?” his uncle asked.

Hugh sniffed his nose. “My dad tell you that?”

Pushing his hair back from his face, Maggie took a drink from his whiskey glass. “He did tell me, ‘cause he knows—knew—I get ‘em, too.” Then, with a tired laugh, he added, “Aren’t we a fuckin’ pair?”