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His slippers are always by the bed. Sometimes, when he can’t sleep, he puts them on and then takes them off. He can do it very quickly. They have elastic in. They cut into his ankles. “Damn fine thing,” Howard had said, when he gave them to him. The elastic, not the shoe. He’d not had anything like that before. The hole was smaller than his foot, but his foot still went through.
No, that was the first pair. He cut them up to see how they worked, and then panicked when he couldn’t make them like they’d been when they were new.
“Some things, once they’re broken, that’s it. Can’t be fixed.” He crouched down next to him, and took them away.
They weren’t broken. They just didn’t fit the same.
He gave him a new pair. The old ones had been green, but these were blue.
They are not comfortable. They have rough soles. Everything in the house is so clean. The maids clean the floors, and even ask him to move when he’s lying on the floor when they want to clean it. There are no carpets. The floor is always very cool, even when it’s hot outside.
He hit his head on the floor once, when he was running. It had felt very hot, then. His head, not. He’d slipped. His feet were sweaty. There was a noise.
There’s a lot of glass. It’s always hot outside.
If the glass shatters, you can get new glass. They can replace that. Easier than brick. The glass is so clean, too. Like it’s barely even there. He never forgets that it’s there, though. Howard almost did, once. Inches from smashing his face. “Hey, look,” he’d said. “Look at how big that cloud is.”
He hadn’t been looking at the cloud. He’d been somewhere beyond the glass. Trying to be.
One of Tony’s first memories is Howard pushing him into the water. It was green. Pool water, Tony knows now, is usually closer to blue.
When he was four, Howard had taken him to Norway. He had a book about the North Pole that he read on the plane. “One day,” Howard had said to him. It had lots of pictures. A lot of white, and not much else, except for when something bright appeared in the sky.
“What is that,” Tony had asked. The book was bigger than his face, it slipped from his lap as the plane tilted. He gripped it. Howard rattled a glass. “Why does the sky look like that?”
Howard leaned over. The plane smelt stale. There were screens over the windows. The screens didn’t keep the light out. Tony wondered what the sky looked like, and how far away the lights were. In the picture. How far back they were from the sky. Or whether that was the sky. But it looked wrong. Somebody had done something to it. Like when Howard had been trying to fix the television and later that day the tube inside had blown, and the picture had gone the wrong colour, and then there was so much smoke and soot and then Howard said, “I’d been thinking we needed a bigger one anyhow.”
It had been midway through a song. Tony’s head had felt wrong when it ended like that.
In the water, he’d felt like he was full of soot. Up his nose. “Open your eyes,” Howard shouted, as he pulled him out of the water. “Open your eyes. Look where you’re going, for god’s sake.” Tony gasped. Howard waited for him to gasp again, and then he put him back in the water. It had hurt to open his eyes. He didn’t have his own goggles yet, but later on Howard bought him a pair of those too. But he remembered how to swim. He kicked his legs. He could see a light ahead. When his head broke the water, he saw the light above. It flickered. There weren’t any windows. He padded around the room, and looked inside Howard’s crates. There were tubes of paste, tins of crumbly fish. A map on the wall, like the map in Tony’s bedroom but with circles around places like the Mojave desert. The map was purple. His feet were wet. The room wasn’t very warm. There wasn’t a door.
He had to go back the way he’d come in.
He learned how quickly he could run. He wondered how hard he’d have to run at the glass for it to break. The kitchen looks out over the pool. Maria’s never been in the pool. “Darling,” she said, once, when Tony was dripping green water all over the shiny floor. She wasn’t talking to Tony.
Tony runs in his bare feet outside, sometimes. He washes his feet in the pool before he goes back inside. They try to keep the outside clean too, but the dirt keeps coming from somewhere. He owns five books about the North Pole, now. He saw aurora borealis the second night they were in Norway. Howard took a photo, but it looks weird. Like a smudge on a plate.
“It’s astronaut food,” Howard had said to him, once, the first time they visited the room together.
Tony’s real first memory was watching astronauts on the television. “What’s happening?” he asked.
“That’s the moon,” Howard had said. The moon was dirty. The sky wasn’t blue like it was on earth. There wasn’t a sky. It was just in space. Space was nothing.
“I didn’t know people could go to the moon.”
“Nobody did,” Howard said.
“Darling,” Maria had said, that day in the kitchen. She was looking at Howard. Howard had told her that she should come swimming with them after dinner. “There are some things you can’t solve.” She pressed a hand to his head, and then said, “You’re cleaning up.”
“What do we pay the maids for?” Howard said. He had the paper open on his knee. It had a big splash of water on it, sticking the pages together
“Can we have astronaut food for dinner?” Tony asked.
“Not yet,” Howard said.