A boy was passing the time one bleak New England afternoon. Autumn. Rain spewed from the gutters. The creek bed behind his house was drowning under the surge of mud. The previous night’s snow washed away, seeping into the ground, enveloping the dead grass in a pale sludge. The sky screamed in a scratchy grey voice like a narrator from a nightmare.
Inside, the boy sat at the foot of his unmade bed. An acoustic guitar in his lap that used to belong to his cousin, taken away last winter in a car accident. The boy’s fingertips had not yet calloused and he struggled to form the chords his cousin used to glide through so effortlessly.
There was an icy draft in the bedroom. He sneezed and wiped the snot from the back of his guitar with his sweater sleeve. Downstairs it sounded like a bowling ball fell to the floor. The furnace was broken again. The boy strummed a Dmaj7 chord, yawned, and put on his slippers.
He daydreamed about fame. Standing onstage in front of thousands of fans. Boys jumping up and down, fists in the air. Girls, with hands on their hearts, swaying, eyes locked on the boy and his guitar from far away in the darkness of the crowd. Inside his head the sound of rock music swelled. Squealing guitars, the hammer of drums. Inside his room, it was silent but for the the cold whistle of air sneaking through the storm windows.
The boy slid his fingers across the strings of the guitar, pretending to play something he would have to wait five years to be able to pull off.
Feeling the languorous afternoon drag on, the boy searched for distraction. Something to conquer the torpor, the lethargic boredom imposed on his lifeless limbs by this week of grey, blanketing all of New England. He pretended to type on the antique typewriter he found in the attic last summer while looking for a catcher’s mitt. His mother complained that it was bulky and collected too much dust. There was something nostalgic about it that the boy felt drawn to. Like the pictures of his grandparents, young, unfamiliar, and new to America, as a young couple in Atlantic City that he kept in a shoebox under his bed.
The boy did jumping jacks in his robe and slippers, searching for energy. He opened his closet and grimaced at the overflowing cardboard boxes full of old clothes he would never wear again, but yet his mother refused to throw away. He kicked off his right slipper like a ninja. “Hi-yah!” he chanted. The boy made an amateur attempt at a spin kick and knocked over a box of books he found in the back of the garage labelled, “DONATE.” Books of different sizes were peppered across the bedroom floor. Some worn and smooth, some unread and stiff. There was a dictionary, a couple of Hardy Boys books he remembered reading a few years ago, and aged books by authors whose names he had a hard time pronouncing. “Do-stoy-evsky.” Flaubert (pronounced “Fla-ooh-bert”). He wanted to know who Tristram Shandy was and why his life and times should be so interesting.
Underneath a French cookbook he did not bother trying to pronounce was a heavy, hardback book. The color had faded from a once pristine white, to brown, almost gold. He ran his hands over the cover, wiping away the dust. “Grueber’s World Atlas: 1957.” The boy’s curiosity was piqued. Last summer his family went to Atlantic City. He had been to Manhattan once to see Times Square and to go shopping for an expensive suit with his mother. There had to be something more than bright lights and the howling of buses and the erratic honking of speeding taxis.
By chance, he flipped to the south America section of the atlas. He found himself reading about Bolivia. A place he knew nothing about. “Lake Titicaca. Resting on the border of Peru and Bolivia, is the highest lake in the world, sitting at 3,811 meters, or 12,500 feet,” he read aloud. He delicately turned the pages with awe, as if he were holding an ancient treasure, afraid to damage it. He read about a nomadic tribe called the Abelam from Papua New Guinea, whose main source of food came from the harvest of yams that could grow up to thirteen feet long.
Outside, the sun hid behind a grey blanket, but darkness soon overtook the boy’s bedroom. He remained on the floor, wrapped in a wool blanket knitted by his grandmother, reading through the Grueber’s Atlas with a heavy duty flashlight his father gave him on their last camping trip to the White Mountains.
The boy imagined leading an expedition, like Ernest Shackleton in Antarctica, through the unforgiving jungles of Java, pushing up and over its treacherous chain of active volcanoes: Merapu, Lawu, Bromo. From his bedroom floor, he could smell the tobacco from the pipes of old men on the streets of Kathmandu. He could hear the monotone drone of the muezzin’s calls to prayer reverberating through the ancient streets of Istanbul.
A life of adventure presented itself to the boy and he thought he would never be able to sleep another night in his life until he could taste the air from atop the Fitz Roy Range of the Andes Mountains in Patagonia. He imagined contracting malaria from mosquitoes in the dense jungles of the Darien Gap, central Panama. Convalescing for months in a hammock, being treated by a local medicine man, his body covered with local oils extracted from plants, ingesting herbs. Falling in love with a local girl while fishing in a stream, in search of dinner. Wooing her with the aide of the strings of a local, handmade guitar he helped build while ill.
New England seemed so far away.
The boy stood up. The wool blanket remained draped over his shoulders like a cape. He closed the book, but kept a firm grip of it under his arm. The boy hurried to the typewriter, flash light in one hand, the Grueber’s World Atlas in another, wool blanket draped over his shoulders, biting his bottom lip in excitement. He knew the typewriter had no ink, but he pretended to type anyway. “Chapter One: The Egg Hatches.”
