He walked up to the landing and stared through the coloured glasses.
Mr. Koberman strolled by below, on the sidewalk, on his morning exercise. He walked straight, cane looped on arm halfway to elbow, his straw hat glued to his head with patent oil.
Mr. Koberman was a blue man walking through a blue world with blue trees and blue flowers and — something else.
There was something about Mr. Koberman. Douglas squinted. The blue glass did things to Mr. Koberman. His face, his suit —
There was no time to fathom it. Mr. Koberman glanced up just then, saw Douglas, and raised his cane-umbrella as if to strike, then put it down swiftly and hurried to the front door.
‘Young man,’ he said, coming up the stairs, ‘what were you doing?’
‘Just looking.’
‘That’s all, is it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Mr. Koberman stood, fighting himself. The veins stood out on his face like small, grey wires. His eyes were deep black holes.
Saying nothing, he went downstairs for another walk around the block.
Douglas played in his sand-box in the backyard for half an hour. At about nine-thirty he heard the crash and the shattering tinkle. He jumped up. He heard Grandma’s slippers scuffing in the hall, hurriedly, then scuffing back to the kitchen. The screen door swannged open, on its wire-spring restrainer.
‘Douglas!’
She held the old razor strop in her hand.
‘I told you time and again never to fling your basketball against the house! Oh, I could just cry!’
‘I been sitting right here,’ he protested.
‘Come in here! See what you done!’
The great coloured window-panes were tumbled in a rainbow chaos on the upstairs landing. The basketball lay on the ruins.
Before Douglas could even begin telling his innocence, Grandma struck him seven stinging whops on his rump. Screaming Douglas leaped like a fish, and wherever he landed he was whopped again! He sang an age-old song to his wild dancing.
Much later, hiding his mind in a pile of sand in the sand-box, like an ostrich, Douglas nursed his pain. He knew who’d thrown that basketball to shatter the coloured windows. A man with a straw hat and a stiff umbrella, and a cold, grey room. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He dribbled tears in the sand. Just wait. Just wait.
The thin, tinkling shuf-shuf-shuf noise was Grandma sweeping up the glittering debris. She brought it out back and cascaded it into the trash-bin. Blue, pink, white, yellow meteors of glass dropped brightly down. Grandma looked broken-hearted.
When she was gone, Douglas dragged himself over to save out three pieces of the precious glass; pink and green and blue. He had an idea why Mr. Koberman disliked the coloured windows. These — he clinked them in his fingers — would be worth saving.
Mr. Koberman worked nights and slept all day. Each morning at eight he arrived home, devoured a light breakfast, took a brief walk around the block, then climbed primly upstairs to sleep soundlessly throughout the day until six at night, when he came down to the huge supper with all the other boarders.
Mr. Koberman’s sleeping habits made it necessary for Douglas to be quiet. Not being quiet by nature, frustration set in on him like a growing abscess.
Resultantly, when Grandma visited next door at Mrs. Eddy’s or bought groceries at Mrs. Singer’s, Douglas would vent his repressions by stomping up and down stairs beating upon a drum.
Golf-balls, rolled slowly down the steps, were also delightful. Followed by a quick shuttling of the house killing Indians and flushing all the toilets three times in succession.
After three days, Douglas realized he was getting no complaints. On the fourth day, after Grandma was gone to the store, he yelled outside Mr. Koberman’s door ten minutes straight, without criticism.
Then, and only then, did he dare to try the door, carefully, and open it.
The room was in half-light, the shades drawn. Mr. Koberman lay on top of the covers of his bed, in sleeping clothes, breathing gently, up and down. He didn’t move. His face was motionless.
‘Hello, Mr. Koberman.’
The colourless walls echoed the man’s regular breathing.
‘Mr. Koberman, hello!’
Bouncing the golf-ball, Douglas advanced. No response. He yelled. Still no answer. Mr. Koberman lay like a papier-mâché dummy, not complaining, his eyes shut.
‘Mr. Koberman!’
Douglas searched the room with quick eyes. On the bureau rested the wooden eating utensils. This gave Douglas an idea. He ran and got a silver fork, came back. Picking the tines he held it close to the sleeping face.
Mr. Koberman winced. He twisted on his bed, groaning, muttering bitterly.
Response. Good. Swell.
Another ting of the fork. Mr. Koberman twitched in a nightmare of vibrations, but could not wake up. He didn’t look as if he could, even if he wanted to.
Douglas remembered about the coloured glass. He drew a pink shard from his pocket and stared through it at Mr. Koberman.
The clothes dissolved off of Mr. Koberman. The pink glass had something to do with it. Or maybe it was the clothes themselves, being on Mr. Koberman. Douglas licked his lips. He could see inside Mr. Koberman.
Mr. Koberman was — weird inside.
Very weird. Very interesting.
He was beginning to enjoy himself when the front door banged. Grandma was home.
Douglas had to come downstairs, frustrated, trying to look innocent.
When a slow heavy tread filled the hall, and a thick mahogany cane thumped in the cane-rack, that always meant Grandfather was home for the day. He arrived from his newspaper office each night, shortly ahead of the boarders, at five-fifteen, a copy of his own newspaper folded into his black coat-pocket along with a pink peppermint stick to be used expressly for spoiling Douglas’s dinner-appetite.
Douglas ran to embrace the large stomach that was Grandpa’s main defence against a vigorously long life-battle with circumstance. Grandpa, peering down over the cliff of that stomach, cried, ‘Hello, down there!’
Seated in the great morris chair, his spectacles attached, Grandpa scanned the paper with a keen eye.
‘Grandma cut chickens again today. It’s fun watching,’ said Douglas.
Grandpa kept reading. ‘Chickens? Again? That’s twice this week. She’s the chickenest woman. You like to watch her cut ‘em, eh? Cold-blooded little pepper, Ha!’
Douglas felt the subterranean laughter explode down through the huge old bones, echo out on Grandpa’s vibrant knee-cap.
‘I’m just curious,’ said Douglas.
‘You are,’ rumbled Grandpa, pursing his lips, scowling. ‘I remember that day when the young lady was killed at the rail station. Didn’t bother you a mite. You just walked over and looked at her, blood and all.’
‘But, why shouldn’t I look?’
‘Doesn’t it make you sick?’ Grandpa put the paper aside.
‘No.’
‘Queer duck. Sensible, though. Stay that way, Dougie-boy. Fear nothing, ever in life. Life’s full of things not worth fearing. Bodies are bodies and blood is blood. The only bad things are those we make in our minds.
We teach each other fear. We learn certain reactions to certain stimuli. Death, for instance. Orientals deem it fairly fine and honourable to die. But some European cultures have trumped up sassafras about death being a dark horror. Why — ‘
He stopped blinked, swallowed, and laughed.
‘What am I saying? You don’t understand one word — ‘
‘Sure I do. Go ahead, Gramps. It’s fun.’
‘Funny duck. Your father raised you funny. But then, him being a military man, and you so close to him ‘till you come here last year.’
‘I’m not funny. I’m just me.’
‘There — ‘ Grandpa nodded, ‘you have a point! There’s no norm among humans, not really. Certain cultural norms, perhaps, but individual norms, no, no.’
This seemed like the moment ripened on the tree of time for picking. Douglas picked.
‘Gramps, what if a man didn’t have no heart, lungs or stomach?’
Grandpa was used to such questions. ‘Why, then, I guess he’d be dead.’
‘No, I don’t mean that. I mean, what if he didn’t have a heart or no lungs or no stomach but still walked around? Alive.’
‘That,’ rumbled Gramps, ‘would be a miracle.’
‘Besides,’ said Douglas, swiftly. ‘I don’t mean a — a miracle. I mean — what if he was all different inside? Not like me.’
‘Oh, I see. Umm. Well, he wouldn’t be quite human then, would he, boy?’
‘I guess not,’ Douglas stared at the watch-fobbed stomach. ‘Gramps. Gramps, you got a heart and a brain and lungs, Gramps?’
‘I should live to tell you!’
‘How do you know?’
‘Uh — ‘ Gramps stopped. ‘Well,’ he had to laugh, ‘tell the truth, I don’t know. Never seen them. Never been to a doctor, never had an X-ray. Might as well be potato-solid for all I know.’
‘How about me? Have I got a stomach?’
‘You certainly have!’ said Grandma, in the parlour entrance. ‘Cause I feed it. And you’ve lungs, because you scream loud enough to wake the crumblees. And you’ve dirty hands, go wash them! Dinner’s ready. Grandpa, come on. Douglas, git!’
She tinkled a little black lacquered metal bell in the hall.
In the rush of boarders streaming downstairs, Grandpa, if he had intentions of questioning Douglas further about the weird conversation, lost his opportunity. If dinner delayed an instant more, Grandma and the potatoes would develop simultaneous lumps.
The other boarders, laughing and talking at the table, Mr. Koberman silent and sullen between them — this attitude being attributed to liver trouble by Grandma — were put into a silent stasis by Grandfather who cleared his throat and spoke about the recent deaths in the town.
‘Save that for later, when we drink our coffee,’ said Grandma.
‘It’s certainly enough to make a newspaper editor prick up his ancient ears,’ said Grandpa, carefully eyeing them all. ‘That young Miss Larsson, lived over across the ravine, now. Found her dead three days ago for no reason, just funny kinds of tattoos all over her, and a facial expression
