Werewolves in Their Youth. Michael Chabon

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      She surveyed the wreckage of my father’s home laboratory –a little ruefully now, I thought – and then looked at me. “I guess it must seem to you like I’m being kind of mean,” she said. “Eh?”

      I didn’t say anything. She held out her hand to me. I grabbed it and tugged her to her feet. She lifted the Captain Morgan carton and stacked it atop a Smirnoff carton filled with commercially prepared reagents in their bottles and jars; there was a further crunch of glass as the upper box settled into the lower. She hoisted the stacked boxes to her hip and jogged them once to get a better grip. One carton remained on the floor beside the workbench. We both looked at it.

      “I’ll come back for that one,” my mother said, after a pause. She turned, and started slowly up the stairs.

      For a minute I stood there with my hands jammed into my pockets, staring down into the box at my father’s crucible tongs, at his coils of clear plastic tubing, at his stirrers, pipettes, and stopcocks wrapped like taffy in stiff white paper. I knelt down and wrapped my arms around the carton and lowered my face into it and inhaled a clean, rubbery smell like that of a new Band-Aid. Then I lifted the carton and carried it upstairs, through the laundry room, and out into the garage, trying to fight off an unsettling feeling that I was throwing my father away. The rear hatch of our Datsun was raised, and the backseats had been folded forward.

      “Thank you, sweetie,” said my mother, gently, as I handed her the last carton. “Now I just have to load up a few more things, and then I’m going to run all this stuff over to Mr. Kappelman’s office.” Mr. Kappelman was my father’s lawyer; my mother’s lawyer was a woman she called Deirdre. “You can just stay here, okay? You don’t have to help me anymore.”

      “There’s no room for me anyway,” I said.

      Most of the space in the car was already taken up by packed liquor boxes. I could see the fuzzy sleeve of my father’s green angora sweater poking out of one carton, and, through the finger holes in the side of another, I could make out the cracked black spines of his college chemistry texts. Stuffed into the spaces among the boxes and into odd nooks of the car’s interior were my father’s bicycle helmet, his clarinet case, his bust of Paul Morphy, his brass wall barometer, his shoeshine kit, his vaporizer, the panama hat he liked to wear at the beach, the beige plastic bedpan that had come home from the hospital with him after his deviated-septum operation and now held all his razors and combs and the panoply of gleaming instruments he employed to trim the hair that grew from the various features of his face, a grocery bag full of his shoe trees, the Montreal Junior Chess Championship trophy he had won in 1953, his tie rack, his earmuffs, and one Earth shoe. There was barely enough room left in the car for the three boxes my mother and I had dragged up from the basement. I helped her squeeze them into place, audibly doing more damage to their rank-smelling contents, and then my mother put her hands on the edge of the hatch and got ready to slam it.

      She said, “Stand clear.” I flinched. I guess I must have shut my eyes; after a second or two I realized that she hadn’t closed the door yet, and when I looked at her again her eyes were scanning my face, darting very quickly back and forth, the way they did when she thought I might have a fever.

      “Paul,” she said, “how was school today?”

      “Fine.”

      “How’s your asthma?”

      “Good.”

      She took her hands off the lip of the hatch and crouched down in front of me. Her face, I saw, was still buried under the thick layer of beige frosting that she applied to it every morning.

      “Paul,” she said. “What’s the matter, honey?”

      “Nothing,” I said, turning from her unrecognizable face. “I’ll be right back.” I started away from her.

      “Paul –” She took hold of my arm.

      “I have to go to the bathroom!” I said, twisting free of her. “You look ugly,” I added as I ran back into the house.

      I went to the telephone and dialed my father’s number at work. The departmental secretary said that he was down the hall. I said that I would wait. I carried the phone over to the couch, where I had thrown my parka, and took my daily box of Yodels from its hiding place inside the torn orange lining. By the time my father took me off hold I had eaten three of them. This didn’t require all that much time, to be honest.

      “Dr. Kovel,” said my father as he came clattering onto the line.

      “Dad?”

      “Paul. Where are you?”

      “Dad, I’m at home. Guess what, Dad? I got expelled from school today.”

      “What? What’s this?”

      “Yeah, um, I got really mad, and I thought I was a werewolf, and I, um, I bit this girl, you know – Virginia Pease? On the neck. I didn’t break the skin, though,” I added. “And so they expelled me. Can you come over?”

      “Paul, I’m at work.”

      “I know.”

      “What is all this?” His breath blew heavy through the line and made an irritated rattle in the receiver at my ear. “All right, listen, I’ll be there as soon as I can get away, eh?” Now his voice grew thick, as though on the other end of the line, while he held the receiver in the middle of his blank little office in Rockville, Maryland, his face had gone red with embarrassment. “Is your mother there?”

      I told him to hold on, and went back out to the garage.

      “Mom,” I said, “Dad’s on the phone.” I said these words in a voice so normal and cheerful that it hurt my heart to hear them. “He wants to talk to you.” I smiled the conspiratorial little smile I had so often seen her use on her clients as she hinted that the seller just might be willing to come down. “I think he wants to apologize.”

      “Did you call him?”

      “Oh, uh, yeah. Yes. I had to,” I said, remembering my story. “Because I got expelled from school. I have to go to Special School now. Starting tomorrow, probably.”

      My mother put down the hoe she had been trying to squeeze into the back of her car and went, rather unwillingly, I thought, to the phone. Before she stepped into the house she looked back at me with a doubtful smile. I looked away. I stood there, behind her car, gazing in at all my father’s belongings. My mother had said that she planned to take them over to his lawyer’s office, but I didn’t believe her. I believed that she meant to take them to the dump. I hesitated for an instant, then reached in for my father’s laboratory notebook. He had always been more than willing to show me parts of it, whenever I asked him to; and naturally I had taken many furtive looks at its innermost pages when he wasn’t around. But I had never really comprehended its contents, nor the tenor of the experiments he’d been performing down there in our basement over the years, although I had a general sense of disappointment about them, as I did about his whole interest, professional and avocational, in the chemistry of mildews and molds. Yet even if there was nothing of interest in his notes – a likelihood that I still could not fully accept – I nonetheless felt a sudden urge to possess the notebook itself. Perhaps someday I would be able to decipher its cryptic formulae and crabbed script, and thence derive all manner of marvelous pastes of invisibility and mind-control dusts, unheard-of vitamins and deadly fungal СКАЧАТЬ