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  “No, no,” the man muttered haltingly, but Michael was not yet done. The paper parasol disappeared, and out of the jacket came a whole string of objects: a fan, a watch, more colored silks, sausage links, and again the rubber duck—quack, quack!—in the man’s face. He shied again, turning redder, while Michael mimicked the tilt of his head, the hunch of his shoulders, even his acute discomfort was exaggerated into farce, moving the crowd to further hilarity.

  The victim shuffled confusedly, first looking about as if seeking help, then hiding under the umbrella as if shielding himself from closer scrutiny. Michael circled him once more, tapped him on the shoulder; the man turned, Michael popped around and lifted the back of the umbrella. Peekaboo! The man was not amused. He turned in greater agitation, hindered by this whitefaced fool who was making a fool of him. His bony elbow forced itself up between them as if to ward him off, but Michael slipped his own arm companionably through the offered crook, describing formulae, hypotheses, theorems. They were two nuclear physicists, devising between them the atom bomb.

  Now Michael was admiring the man’s neckwear, a shoddy cravat, horrendously knotted. He used the end to wave bye-bye, then pantomimed the arrival of a Great Idea. He was the magician again, making abracadabra passes. From his tunic flashed a pair of scissors, and with a knowing nod to the spectators he clipped off both ends of the tie an inch below the knot, tossed the pieces away, then did more abracadabra. The tie, supposed to be magically restored, was—oh dear—not. The painted-on mouth turned down in a parody of the Greek mask of tragedy. Michael shrugged, grimaced, shot an imaginary bullet through his brain. Miming profuse apology, he yanked out and offered a brand-new tie; furious, the man rejected the offer. Michael patted his shoulder, pillowed his head on it.

  “Never touch me.”

  The voice was softly sepulchral, wind-breath carrying dead leaves. Momentarily flustered as the man tried to make his way past the encroaching crowd, Michael hearkened to the rasping sound. Its resonances hanging in the stillness of his inner ear gave warning, one Michael palpably felt, yet imprudently chose to ignore.

  He moved quickly after the strange old man, flinging himself onto the pavement to impede his passage, then coming to a crouching position to do his frog bit: feet spread flat and wide, eyes bulging, mouth stretched into a great frog-mouth, tip of the tongue protruding slightly at the corner, jaw, neck, chest swelling as he hopped back and forth before the perturbed and halted figure, japing his indignation with ridiculous frogginess.

  As if better to inspect this very quality, the man bent closer, angling the umbrella over them like a canopy, isolating them from the onlookers so that beneath that black dome there was only himself in quick consultation with the would-be frog. Michael was perplexed; behind the ridiculous fake nose, transcending the demeanor that both attracted and repulsed him, he recognized a look of contemptuous pity, not unmixed with compassion, the look one gives an incorrigible little brother in trouble again through his own foolish fault.

  Michael—and this had never happened to him before—was intimidated; he felt somehow diminished. In the man’s bearing there was reproach, an absence of humor, an unequivocal gravity. For in trying to force the man to recognize himself, Michael had fatally recognized something in his own person, though of what this might have been he was at present unaware. Yet he felt neither chill nor premonition, but some intuitive flash, in which he perceived his fellow, his counterpart, his other self. Surely the old man felt it too.

  The man gazed down. His soft-hoarse voice spoke in a tone of deep intimacy.

  “Are you then a frog?”

  Leering, mouth opening and closing, cheeks puffed, Michael felt obliged to give a froggy nod.

  “Very well. Be a frog.”

  Somewhere beyond the black scallop of the umbrella the city sounds suddenly stopped. Michael acknowledged something akin to a thrill, a limpid rush through his limbs, a docility, as the man now described a half circle around him, Michael still hopping, the man raising the umbrella in the fashion of a stage curtain and making his way among the nearest spectators, the crowd parting before him, Michael hop-hop-hopping after, twisting his head grotesquely, still hopping, hands dangling between his flexed, straining thighs, the frog-leer still contorting his face, the crowd trooping after, hooting in amusement, thinking it all part of the act.

  With aplomb the man proceeded across the street. Michael hopped after him, along the sidewalk toward the fountain, where more onlookers gathered, all watching as the man came, followed by this ridiculous whitefaced frog-fellow, and Emily slowly trailing the crowd, clutching her flute. Though she could not tell what it was, she knew something was drastically wrong, saw Michael hop-hop-hopping, saw the old man pointing to the rim of the fountain, bidding Michael-the-Frog to hop up there and from the ledge into the water, and there was Michael knee-high in water, with that horrid face, the crowd still laughing, applauding as the man disappeared among them, leaving Michael-the-Frog ridiculously hopping-jumping-splashing in the algaed fountain, while two policemen came running and shouting for him to get the hell out of there. But he did not, or would not, or could not, for though the fun had ended he discovered to his horror that the frog business had not.

  The cops waded in after him and dragged him to the fountain’s rim and pulled him over it, half strangling, onto the sidewalk. Michael felt something rising in his throat, a mess of fluids in which floated the remains of his breakfast, which came roiling up and spewing forth uncontrollably onto the pavement, while, realizing something strange and awful was happening and not knowing what, the watchers stood back. Then, with foam and spittle hanging from his lips and the water drenching him cold and a terrified uncomprehending look in his eyes, he formed himself into some fetal creature as yet unborn and toppled slowly to one side and over, where he lay hunched and hugging himself in a ghastly shivering ball of pain, while his thoughts raced on into a chaos he could in no way imagine imagining.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Slide Show

  MICHAEL’S CONSCIOUSNESS HAD SEPARATED into compartments, each of them operating independently of the others. One of them knew exactly where he was, on the slope of grass just inside Central Park, and of course Emily was with him. He could see the half-drained muddy pond, the subway construction in progress at the Sixth Avenue entrance, and beyond the treetops the towers of the apartment buildings along Central Park West. He could hear traffic noises and people’s voices, birds, the clip-clopping of horses’ hooves, all the sounds normal to that part of the city. He could see and hear and even move, if he wanted to, yet after opening his eyes and briefly returning Emily’s anxious smile, he shut them and lay still and wet on the grass, trying to establish lines of communication between the various compartments, trying to put this confounding experience into some kind of recognizable frame. Visions from his past paraded across the backs of his eyelids like slides, and he kept clicking through them, looking for the ones he needed. At the same time, there were sensations to take into account: the grass he was lying on, the smell of it, the poisonous taste in his mouth, the jackhammer blood in his head.

  That’s it. It wasn’t the grass that was reminding him of his aunts’ little farm in Ohio, but the pain in his head. The time he was playing baseball in the back pasture, squatted down behind the batter’s box with the thin, tiny glove he pretended was a catcher’s mitt, and he lunged upward, forward, to snatch a wild pitch, and the unaccountably swinging hickory bat caught him a vicious clout alongside the temple. Laid him out like a plank while he saw stars and tried not to puke.

  That’s not it, that’s not enough. There was more to this dismaying episode than a suffering head. True, he found something familiar in the way his brain felt as though it were trying to beat a path out of his skull, but his general wretchedness transcended even the most memorable, monumental headache. The blur of images whirred on, then jolted to a halt. He was kneeling in the road, tears were stinging his eyes, and Charlie was lying there in front of him, be
autiful and still.

  Charlie was his magic cat. One afternoon when Michael was standing on the front porch of the farmhouse, concentrating hard on his magician’s table and box, determined to make one of his old stuffed animals disappear and reappear, he looked up and got his first glimpse of Charlie: sprinting up the dusty drive, heading straight for him like some urgent messenger. Charlie bounded across the front yard, flashed up the steps, and came to a sudden stop on the edge of the porch, staring solemnly at Michael with his penetrating yellow eyes; Michael dropped to his knees, sat on his heels, and stared back in admiration and wonder; it was love at first sight.

  From that moment the two of them, boy and cat, took their places in one another’s lives as though they had made reservations. They walked together in the woods that edged the farm, sat together beside the little creek, slept together in Michael's bed. Michael slept deep and hard, seeming to fuse with the bed, but no human could fling himself into the act of sleeping so voluptuously as Charlie did, stretching and twisting his strong, lithe body into dozens of impossible, comic positions. On cold days, Michael would walk around with Charlie draped across his shoulders like a stole, his bushy gray tail slightly twitching, his four white-tipped paws relaxed and dangling. Michael made a dark blue cape for Charlie, pinned a cardboard moon and some cardboard stars on it, and solicited Charlie’s assistance in the magic performances he sometimes gave for his aunts and their friends. Charlie couldn’t always be counted on to take his cue, but the wise gravity of his owlish face and the elegant way he wore his cape never failed to enhance the proceedings. Michael carried on experiments outside the house, trying to make Charlie appear before him by saying his name softly, or just by closing his eyes and concentrating, and more often than not he would open his eyes to see Charlie marching purposefully toward him.

  And then one day, as suddenly as he had come, Charlie was gone, though what remained of him was present enough, lying at the side of the road like a piece of litter. The car that snapped the life out of him had left only a single mark along his lower jaw, and his hind legs were drawn up tightly as though gathered for the saving spring he didn’t have time to make. When Michael saw Charlie’s body, he felt the same surge of joy he always felt at the sight of him, but this soon gave way to horror at the dull yellow glaze of Charlie's eyes and the unnatural angle of his neck. Bewildered, overwhelmed by grief, Michael’s entire consciousness compressed itself into a single desire: to will Charlie back to life. The contest was unequal: the ferocious, unequivocal, passionate will of a fourteen-year-old boy against the laws of nature, biological necessity, the ultimate destiny of every living thing. Charlie’s long, thick fur stirred, fumbled by the breeze, but for the first time there came no responding purr to Michael’s stroking, no answering pressure against his fingers. His effort had been absolute, prodigious, exhausting, futile. His skull seemed fissured, his eyes felt like sticky pulp; he had experienced as never before the intensity and helplessness of his own will. Charlie’s beloved body was stiffening under his hand.

  “Charlie,” he said, remembering the pain of that moment.

  Somewhere above him, Emily was saying his name. Part of his consciousness struggled upward past the insistent images, while the rest, unsatisfied, strained to pull him in deeper. He opened his eyes and saw the pale triangle of Emily’s face gazing down at him, her dark hair falling across her cheeks, her eyes blinking with consternation and unspoken questions. Her fingers made light circles at his temples, as if she knew without being told that this was where the pain was. Somehow her knowing irritated him, as her questioning would irritate him. Why didn’t he like her asking, or knowing, or having seen, having witnessed the event? It was true, he wished she hadn’t been there, that no one he knew had been there. He wanted to keep it to himself.

  He smiled at her as convincingly as the circumstances allowed. He was dimly aware of some people standing nearby, whispering and pointing. One of them had a camera and was snapping off shots. “I’ll be all right soon,” Michael said. “I just need to rest for a few more minutes.”

  Emily leaned closer to him, nodding wanly, and he shut his eyes again. And there it was, without warning, the primal image of his life: he was sitting on one of the molded blue plastic seats in the bus station in Toledo, the soles of his shoes hanging a good ten inches above the bright linoleum floor, and his mother was leaning over him, stuffing something into his jacket pocket. “Stay right here, Mikey,” she said. “I’ll be back soon.”

  Michael touched bottom with this memory, and the recoil jack-knifed his upper body. Propped unsteadily on his elbows, he looked at Emily, whose eyes expressed about equal proportions of panic and relief. “That was quick,” she said hopefully, pressing the back of her hand against his forehead. “Are you going to be okay?”

  Never again, he thought. “Sure,” he said, more dazed than glib. “At least, I think so.”

  “What happened back there?” It was a logical question, and Emily's tone was almost casual, but he could tell she was frightened. “What was going on?”

  He grunted, shrugged, and lay down again. “I don't know,” he admitted, feeling foolish.

  “You must know. That frog bit—what did you think you were doing?”

  How could he say? How to explain? Or even if he could come up with an explanation that would satisfy Emily, how could he explain it to himself? He’d been doing what he always did, having some fun, trotting out the old reliable frog routine. Frog footman from Alice in Wonderland. But then there was this man, this Queer Duck, and that moment, that small, single, private, unfathomable moment of darkening illumination when the umbrella lowered over the two of them, and the voice, strangely bland, without rancor or even irony, asking, “Are you then a frog?” with something archaic in the phrasing, or was it merely a European turn of speech, the thinnest trace of an accent? And then, this wild compulsion to play a frog, to hop and hop and not stop hopping, to grimace and pop his eyes, no longer by any volition of his own but because having been bidden to be a frog he was obliged to accept utter and unequivocal—

  Subjugation.

  Michael knew, though he didn’t say it, couldn’t say it, that that was what it had been. A form of subjugation. It wasn’t that he’d allowed himself to be a frog, not that merely, but that he’d allowed himself to give in to the will of another. The old man had exercised some incredible form of mastery over him. In that moment, he had become enslaved!

  He drew up his knees, locked his hands behind them, and bowed his head, like a long-distance runner after a particularly draining race. “We can talk about it later if you want to,” Emily said softly. “Let’s just get out of here. Are you up for that?” On the path by the pond were a man and a woman with a dog, all three of them looking at him. Michael thought about what he must look like still in his mime makeup, wrecked now—smeared whiteface, smeared mouth, smeared eyes. Doesn’t take much to gather a crowd in New York. All you've got to do is paint yourself white, become a frog, and nearly drown in a public fountain.

  “Probably,” he drawled, as though calculating the odds. “I’m fine except for my head and my stomach and a few other places.”

  She patted his abdominal muscles lightly. “That was an amazing display of virtuoso vomiting, but it was lucky, in a way. Those cops were going to make trouble, but when they saw how sick you were, they just carried you over here.”

  The small talk went on, so small that Michael was able to contribute his fair share without engaging more than a fraction of his brain. The rest was free to search for clues to this incomprehensible mystery. How was it possible to do such a thing, to say Be a frog and cause it to happen? Not really a frog, of course, that was ridiculous, but to make him continue playing at being a frog, so that he lost control of his being, his self? Leaving him overwhelmed, controlled not by any impulse of his own but by some unknown force outside himself? He searched his memory for the crucial moment, the point of surrender to a power he could not comprehend and would never ha
ve believed were it not that he knew without a doubt that it had held him in its sway. He felt hungover, as though from a deadly intoxication, one enormous bender.

  “Where’s my kit?”

  “Behind you.”

  The parasol, the fan were sodden, the silks a disaster. The rubber duck eyed him wetly. He picked it up, then tossed it aside. “What a mess. Jesus, we forgot to pass the hat.” No passing the hat, no dough. A free performance courtesy of the Queer Duck.

  The light glimmered through the summer-weary trees, long slashes of a reddish yellow, with ribbony purple shadows, larger ones cast by the apartment fronts at the far side of the park. Higher up, the elegant towers where the rich dwelled rose against the sky in a wash of gold. Out on the muddy surface of the half-drained pond, purple ducks glided by ahead of rippling silver wakes. Quack, quack, queer ducks. He heard a frog—ga-dunk, ga-dunk—a big one, he thought. Aunt Priss used to say they had a catarrh in their throats; he thought she’d said “guitar.” Frogs with guitars in their throats.

  But maybe now he was just imagining frogs.

  Ga-dunk. Little frog in a big fountain. He didn’t want to think about it now. He’d think about it tomorrow. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he would just bury it, pack it away and never have to worry about it again. He shook his head. Fat chance.