Seriously, Norman!, page 6
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They left the station, climbing two flights of stairs to the street, then proceeded down three long blocks until they stopped before a tall, tapering apartment tower.
“You see before you the mighty Maestro Building, so called because the great orchestra conductor Puccilonino lived here. I am now fortunate enough to call it home.”
Leonard and Norman tilted their heads back in an attempt to take in the mighty edifice; mostly, all they saw was the ribbing of bricks rising to the clouds, woven through with shimmering, square puddles of windows, many with air conditioners protruding like gray carbuncles.
“Built in nineteen twenty-nine,” Balthazar Birdsong con-tinued as he strode through the revolving door into the lobby, “just before the economic crash that mysteriously ate up all of the world’s money, this building benefited from a decade of Art Deco experimentation and represents perhaps the apotheosis of that style in this city.”
Leonard said to Norman behind his hand, “I have no idea what he’s talking about.”
“Never mind, Leonard,” said Balthazar. “Think of this grand dwelling as a lady and take note of what she is wearing. Ah, here is the elevator. Hop in.”
The three entered and duly took note of the polished metal surfaces all about them, which were etched with lines of entwining roses and tulips, everything sparkling under hidden lights.
“Unlike the other ladies I know,” said Leonard, “this one seems to wear a lot of her jewelry on the inside.”
“Ha-ha! Yes, Leonard, yes. This building is such a lady that she is clothed and bejeweled inside and out.” Balthazar Birdsong hummed a counterpoint to the humming of the elevator as the floors ticked by. “Ah, here we are, twenty-sixth floor. Everybody out.”
“Does this mean we are in the frontal lobe of the lady?” asked Leonard.
“Quite.”
“You live on the twenty-sixth floor?” asked Norman.
“Not quite,” said Balthazar. “I live on the twenty-ninth.”
“Why did we get off, then?” said Leonard.
“Because the elevator only reaches the twenty-sixth. Use your frontal lobes! This way, please.”
Balthazar led them a few steps down the short hallway, then turned left around a corner and left again into a steep stairwell.
“Does this mean we only made it to the medulla oblongata?” asked Leonard.
“Quite possibly,” said Balthazar. “I see, Leonard, that what you lack in particular observation, you make up for in general information. I refer to your knowledge of neural anatomy. Now up you go, three flights.”
“But how did you get all of your things to your apartment?” asked Norman.
“A man has arms to carry, has he not? And hands with which to grasp?”
“And thumbs, unless he is epollicate,” said Norman.
“Quite so.”
Up the three climbed, grasping the brass handrail with their fingers and thumbs, peering out of long, casemented windows on the landings, catching glimpses of a great city rather far beneath them.
“Here we are, floor twenty-nine,” said Balthazar, “a prime number!”
“So is eleven, seven, five, and one, and I noticed the elevator goes to all of those,” said Leonard, panting.
“But all of those do not have all of this,” said Balthazar, opening a door before them. He waved the boys into a room filled with light; there was so much light that they could only blink and hold their hands before their faces.
“I should have warned you that there is always a bit of a visual adjustment to be made. Leonard, Norman, please make yourselves at home, so long as making yourselves at home means treating everything about you with great care and respect. I, meanwhile, will busy myself with the making of a coffee Viennoise. Would either of you two like one?”
“Ah, no thank you,” said Norman, looking for a safe place to sit down, one without anything too tempting or delicate within elbow range.
“Suit yourselves,” said Balthazar.
Leonard, on the other hand, tripped and scuttled to the nearest of the shelves lining the walls, where, after a momentary pause to take in its contents, he began to pick up and put down in very quick order every object he could reach.
“What’s this, some kind of bomb?” said Leonard. “Is this a mousetrap? This is disgusting, where did it come from? How did you get this? What is it? Norman, come look at this.”
Balthazar appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Let’s play a little game of epoche. You describe something, an object from my shelves or maybe an object you make up, or you describe something you remember, and then I’ll tell you what I think it is. Leonard, you first. Speak up, please. I’ll be in the kitchen.”
“Okay, it’s white, hard, about the size of my fist. It’s got two pieces, lots of holes, and where the two pieces come together, there are lots of sharp spikes.”
“Elementary, my dear Watson. That does exist. And I have one: It is a cat’s skull.”
“From the Catskull Mountains?”
“No. No, the one in your hand dates from the last century and was discovered in the wild outskirts of the city of Chicago.”
“Eeeeeyaaaah!” said Leonard, gingerly placing the cat skull back on its shelf.
“Norman? And please do not karate-chop the cat skull, Leonard.”
“Right,” said Norman. “It’s the size of your hand. It’s heavy, it’s a short octagonal prism of glass mirrors faced inward. One of the walls is made of a two-way mirror.”
“That’s not on my shelves,” said Balthazar.
“I know. It’s not on any shelves. It’s just in my brain. It’s a perpetual light-motion machine. The light can get in, but it can’t get out, it just rolls around inside for all eternity.”
“Marvelous! Come, we’ll take my coffee Viennoise and your hot chocolates, which I took the liberty of making for you, onto the terrace.”
Balthazar emerged from the kitchen with a tray heavy with cups and dishes and whipped cream and cookies and chocolate bars.
Leonard and Norman followed him onto the terrace, which on this day was breezy but not cold, where, along with a metal table and chairs, they found two cages. The first housed a white rat; the second, a crow.
“May I introduce my companions? Watson, the rat, and Crick, the crow.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Leonard, sitting down. Norman stared happily at everything around him. The three—the five, including Watson and Crick—sat facing out over a corner of the building, the great stone-and-steel city of New York and the Hudson River before them. Norman and Leonard gazed upon a hundred buildings, with their thousands of windows, countless terraces and roof gardens, and water towers.
Balthazar said, as he passed around the chocolate and cookies, “My mission as your tutor, and I now include you, Leonard, in this as well, is to get your heads and noses out of your textbooks and back into the clouds where they belong. Toward that end, I have brought you here, to give you a leg up, if I may so put it, to offer you a little cloud remediation, to help you with strategies for how to look at clouds more clearly and easily, making this not a chore but a natural part of your day. I will increase your cloud aptitude by two hundred percent at the minimum. How will you succeed in life if your head is not in the clouds? Toblerone?”
Norman and Leonard stared in disbelief, and not just at the offer of Toblerone—delicious Swiss chocolate, if you did not know—to which, after a moment’s hesitation, Leonard helped himself.
Norman said, at last, “You know, you’re supposed to be helping me to pass the Amalgamated Academic Independent City Schools Test,” himself now breaking off a chocolate triangle.
“Oh, yes, yes, yes, and yes, we’ll deal with that when the time comes. But not now. Now is the time to look at the sky, or, if you prefer, the firmament.”
This sky was indeed, in the truest sense of the word, marvelous. Above them drifted an armada of enormous, oblong, fluffy cotton balls. Nearer the western horizon, the cotton balls appeared to be piling up onto one another, while above and behind all of these, white wisps were smeared across the blue.
“Let us see what species of clouds we have today,” said Balthazar.
“I thought ‘species’ meant ‘animals,’” said Norman.
“I can tell we have not reached the S section yet, have we? ‘Species,’ as any third-grader with only a smattering of Latin knowledge could tell you, means ‘kinds.’ We are most used to this word when we speak of animal kinds, or plant kinds, due to the familiar classification system devised by Mr. Linnaeus, the great scientist and Swede. Just as a chef needs an overview of his pantry and spice rack before he bakes fabulous confections, we scientists need an overview of what is in the world before we bake our fabulous theories. Linnaeus chose the word ‘species’ because it means ‘kinds.’ Now let us consider the kinds of clouds we have today.”
“Fluffy, normal clouds,” said Norman.
“Yes. Fluffy, normal clouds, not too high up, looking like they just stepped out of a fairy tale, these are cumulus clouds. Moreover, if they are wider than they are tall, as are these, then they are cumulus humilis, the best-natured cloud there is.”
“How humiliating,” said Leonard.
“Well, yes, but perhaps ‘how humble’ is more apt. Now look at this.” Mr. B. turned his head and pointed with his left hand. “To the east you can see these same clouds marching off to the horizon almost in formation, in lines. This is cumulus humilis radiatus.”
Balthazar put down his coffee cup and passed an ancient pair of binoculars, which he had produced from under the table, to Leonard. “Here, have a look through these. Revel in the splendor of a cumulus humilis profile.”
As Leonard, and then Norman, peered through the binoculars, a puff of breeze began to rattle the now empty cups on their tray and Crick looked up from gnawing his foot.
“Ho, ho, what have we over here?” said Balthazar, turning in his chair to look in the opposite direction. “You see there, cumulus no longer so humble—in fact, tall and beginning to bunch. These are cumulus congestus. And should they continue to bunch they may even become the mighty and sometimes terrible cumulonimbus, bringer of not just April showers but April thunderstorms.”
Watson burrowed in his litter.
“I shall tell you much more, many grand things about the great cumulonimbus in good time, but not today. As I have no wish to return either of you to the bosoms of your families wet and bedraggled, we will go now. Leonard, will you please carry Watson, and, Norman, you Crick, please, and I shall carry in the coffee things.”
The two boys, the rat, the crow, and the tutor prepared to move inside as the wind tickled and teased the yellow awning that hung along the wall above them.
As Norman picked up Crick’s cage, he happened to glance directly across the narrow street at a terrace he had not noticed before. It was close enough for Norman to recognize, with a jolt, like the banging of your head on the bottom of a desk when you have just bent over to look for a dropped pencil, his own father, who—Norman thought—should have been somewhere on the other side of the world.
Norman set the cage down carefully and picked up the binoculars. He was not mistaken. There was his father, seated comfortably in a white deck chair, with a straw hat on, in a blue-and-white-striped shirt and black pants, with a large glass of something tan colored in his hand, presumably beer. He was talking animatedly with another man, who was partially hidden by a potted evergreen. Norman could see the other’s gesticulating hands, which, as they at last came to rest, revealed something unique about themselves, something that created in Norman a condition of dread which he could not name. As for the condition of the bodiless hands, Norman could name it precisely, for they were not only without a body, they were both without thumbs.
Norman stuttered under his breath, “He’s e . . . poll . . . i . . . cate!”
yabba dabba what?
Why was Norman’s father not in Celebes and the Moluccas, nowhere near Celebes and the Moluccas, about as far away from Celebes and the Moluccas as you could get, drinking beer (presumably) with a man with no thumbs?
Norman sat, his dictionary in his lap, and brooded.
Maybe his father had come back early from his trip to have lunch with the man with no thumbs, the epollicate mystery man. Why no thumbs? Maybe this E.M.M. had lost his thumbs in a freak bowling accident. But why both thumbs? Norman did not know why both thumbs. He had been showing off, perhaps, demonstrating two-handed bowling with overweight balls, and both his thumbs had stuck and then just gotten yanked off by the tremendous force of the balls he was using. Norman thought that was it. And then maybe he was a world champion bowler in spite of having no thumbs, having heroically overcome his handicap, and was now a beacon of hope and courage for young bowlers all over the world. What was more, he was probably a motivational bowling speaker, which would explain why his father was having lunch with him: He was motivating his dad. Norman nodded to himself. His dad had lost his confidence in bomber salesmanship; he was no longer a bombastic bomber salesman but a diffident bomber salesman; and he had come back to the city for a quick, one-on-one, motivational meeting with the E.M.M. That was most definitely probably it, thought Norman.
Satisfied, Norman flew Alfred the Great around above his head, watching him through slit eyes.
“I can fly,” said Alfred the Great. “Now I’m Super-Great! Wait till my archrival, Knut Knutson—King of the Danish assassins—sees this!”
“Norman!” shouted Emma. “Norman Normann! Stop playing with that stupid doll or staring into space or reading the dictionary or whatever you’re doing and come over here. There’s something I want to ask you.”
Emma sat on a bench outside the dance studio where she and Norman awaited the end of Anna’s tap-dance class. Leonard, spending the weekend with his father, was unavailable for any fun.
Norman jumped down from the high windowsill at the end of the hall where he was perching.
“What is it?”
“Listen,” said Emma. “This is in the instructions on the box of my new fingernail polish: ‘Brush on evenly from the eponychium to the tip of the nail.’ Huh? What the heck is a epo-whatever?”
“Eponychium. The quick of the nail,” said Norman.
“What’s the quick of the nail?”
“The bottom part, toward your hand.”
“How did you know that? And who thinks of these things?”
“I don’t know, must’ve read it someplace. Maybe in the dictionary.”
“Ooooh, must’ve read it in the dictionary. No more Looney Tunes cartoons for me, Mummy, I’d like to read the dictionary. Oh, Mummy, what have you there? The Complete Archie Comics, Volumes One through Four? No thank you, I’d rather read the dictionary.”
“What can I say? It’s my tutor, he makes me.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot.”
Norman sent Alfred the Great into a power dive. “When is my mom going to pick us up for lunch? I’m starving.”
“After Anna’s tap class.”
“When’s that?”
“When she’s all tapped out.”
“Ugh.”
“Wanna know what she drinks when she’s thirsty?”
“Tap water?”
“How’d you know? You know what they’re gonna play at her funeral?”
“‘There Is a Bomb in Gilead’?”
“No, stupid. ‘Taps.’”
“Oh?”
“Forget it. It’s ‘balm,’ not ‘bomb,’ by the way.” Emma scrutinized her left hand, holding it close to her eyes and then out and up, and then rested it again in her lap. “You’ve got bombs on the brain.”
Norman sat down next to Emma on the bench. He considered sharing his worries about his dad, but then realized she would answer something like “So? My parents are always gone and never where I think they are. Welcome to the club.” Instead, he said, “I’m so starving I could eat a firlot of Ring Dings.” Which was true.
“Firlot of Ring Dings? What’s a firlot of Ring Dings?”
“About one and a half Winchester bushels.”
“Winchester bushels? What’s a Winchester bushel?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t gotten to the Ws. Anyway, I could murder a firlot of Ring Dings.” Norman crossed his legs and put his chin in his hand. “You will never believe what my mother was wearing this morning.”
“Goody. Fashion news.” Emma began to paint the nails of her right hand.
“Well, I’ll start with her shoes. White sneakers. She always wears white sneakers, with lime-green footies. Then she’s wearing pink sweatpants things, with elastic around the ankles. Then, and this is the beautiful part, she is wearing, I think it’s called a twinset, a shirt and a sweater together, made from eponge—this weird stuff with fuzzy balls sticking out all over it. It’s mostly pink, too.”
“What else?”
“I don’t know. By the time I had really studied the fuzzy balls, my mind was so overwhelmed I couldn’t take any more in.”
Just then Norma Normann stepped out of the elevator at the other end of the hall. She appeared to be covered in fuzzy pink balls.
Immediately behind her, the figure of a man appeared. Silhouetted against the light of the high window at the end of the hall, he looked, strangely enough, like he was covered in some kind of outlandish armor. At the same time, the doors leading to the dance studio were flung open and the sound of fifteen girls cavorting in tap shoes, like the noise of a million quarters dropping through a million soda-can machines, burst forth, not unlike one of the bombs on Norman’s brain.
Mrs. Normann, the man, and Anna converged on Emma and Norman, and all spoke at once.
“Anna!”
“Norman!”
“Mrs. Normann!”
“Emma!”
“Anna!”
“Norman!”
“Emma and Anna!”
“Mr. B.!” shouted Norman.
For indeed, it was he. “Greetings, greetings,” he said. “Anna and Emma, I believe? Lovely to meet you, I’ve heard such interesting things about you from my cousin Mr. Kreidewand. He can’t recommend your charms too highly. I am Balthazar Birdsong.”
