runaway

He ran away from home. Although we were a real city, with 37,000 people, it made the papers. We were in fourth grade. It was 1961, ironically the same year as "Runaway," the hit by Del Shannon. We weren't close friends, but close enough that I went over to his house once, over in the projects. His projects, not ours. What did we do? We went upstairs to his room and looked at his shoebox of baseball cards. No brothers or sisters. Just his mom and him. His mom yelled at him. He hadn't done some sort of chore. Dishes? Laundry? Make his bed? It didn't matter. You could tell she just liked to yell at him. She was making some kind of point, as if to say, This is how we do things around here, kid (me). Don't try to get smart with me. She smoked Camels. But the part I wanted to forget, the thing I didn't want to remember, was the walls. The walls in the hallway were black. At the bottom of the stairs, the hallway that greeted visitors, if ever there was another visitor, was smudged as if charcoal was rubbed over the institutional yellow paint. I imagine he and his mom braced themselves if they came down the stairs too hard and pivoted left to the kitchen or right to the living room. Or the wall was a casual pushing-off point, a way to launch oneself up the stairs. Or they leaned against the wall to put on or take off their shoes or boots. I don't know. I was thunderstruck. I almost blurted out, What's that? Where did that come from? I, who came from an apartment on the other end of the cleaning spectrum. Today people would use the OCD label, but it was just the way it went, the way we were. Saturdays were consumed with my brothers and I sweeping, vacuuming, washing, waxing, scrubbing, vacuuming again to meet Dad's white-glove inspection Army standards. We hated it. But this. The walls. The outer fringes of the wall beyond the opposite steps had handprints, vestigial symbols of origin. These marginal imprints left no doubt as to the source of the fully darkened portion. Hands. I didn't know how to respond. I didn't go home and tell anyone. Who was there to tell? And what was there to say? 

He was gone a few days. There was no manhunt, no panic, no search, but it was on the radio and in the papers. They covered the story as if it were an entertainment, a curious amusement, rather than a dangerous incident. They were flippant. And kids in our class? Nobody said much of anything. Some crude jokes, wisecracks, about his riding a freight train like a hobo. This came from some of the boys, and the girls shushed them. Mrs. Anastasia never said a word. Open your books. Practice your penmanship.

He came back. 

He came back to school on a Monday.

Nobody asked him where he had gone or how, nobody asked him what he did, or why. We didn't greet him or welcome him back. He just sat in his regular chair at his regular, assigned desk, in the second row from the window.

When Mrs. Anastasia read the roll, to which we were to say "present," she got to his name near the end, because of the letter his last name began with.

She got to his name and he didn't say anything.

He was crying; he had been crying all the while.

She went on to the next two names.

"Present."

"Present."
 

paper clip phone bowl

It was here on the desk. Seconds ago. Where'd it go. Where could it go. It didn't just grow legs and walk away. Who took it. Say a prayer to St. Anthony, they say. So I did. Feel the surface of the desk, shake the sheaf of papers. Shuffle the pages. Look and feel on and under the chair, on and under the desk, in my cuffs, in, on, or under my shoes, between the buttons of my shirt, down my bra if I wore one (didn't), in my hair, under the stapler, under the mug, in the mug, in, on, or around the stitching of the rug, the walls, the ceiling. Search all of these once again but ever more slowly and with more concentration and feeling. Then in reverse order. Then randomly. Again. And again.

I have been swept from simple OCD to the shores of insanity.

Fear.

The universe is supposed to make sense. Things don't slip into another dimension. This isn't sci-fi or Harry Potter or Narnia. Objects do not evaporate or disappear. The laws of physics do not permit this. The laws do not stop for one paper clip. Nor does my rationality, its fragile vestiges. Like that time I lost my cellphone. I was in the first row of a theater, watching a ballet rehearsal. The phone was on my lap in the dark. I was shielding the screen’s blue light so as not to distract the dancers, so as not to be caught in flagrante delictu rudely checking inconsequential texts. I stood up. I heard a clunk, the phone falling. I felt around my body, my seat. Where did the phone go. I surveyed the floor, ran my hands under the seats, the scummy dusty grimy floor in front, my row, a cellophane candy wrapper, and the rows in back, places of impossibility, as if the phone were on a magical pogo stick. The fear of personal collapse, order dismantled, structure demolished. Repeat all those tactile and barely visual, slightly auditory, search exercises. My daughter the guest ballerina comes out during a break, after I went back stage and pleaded my case, my fervent wish for a universe with functioning rules, laws, and protocols. I told her of my incomprehensible plight. We spied a ridge in front of us. A slot, a gap running the width of the stage. The crevice had been there all along, a few feet in front of my first-row seat, several inches wide between the fixed floor of the auditorium. A movable stage raised and lowered for the orchestra. The orchestra pit. Of course. And that's where the phone dived, cascading into the deep dark. I couldn't have mailed it into that slot if I had tried. Mind the gap.

Back to the paper clip.

I discover a glimmer of hope — but not for finding the paper clip. As if in a biblical dream, I picture a ceramic tea bowl from Japan sitting in my kitchen cabinet. It was a non-occasion gift from a friend in America, a painter. I rarely drank tea from the bowl because it was too hot to hold. When I received it, I was given a gentle two-minute lecture. “You see that tiny squiggle on the rim? It’s not so much a mistake as a statement. It’s imperfect, unfinished. It’s meant to be.”

Until now, I had forgotten that tutorial on wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic of imperfection, asymmetry, impermanence, incompleteness.

A paper clip. A cellphone. A tea bowl. Me. Who knew we were cosmic cousins. I got up from my chair in front of the desk. Averting my eyes from the floor, the desk, and the chair, I walked into the kitchen, went to the cabinet, retrieved the tea bowl, poured water in the kettle, and turned on the right rear burner.