windows between the cafeteria and the hallway, and smashed into the reinforced shatterproof windows of the nurse’s office. He became caught in the chicken wire, several feet off the ground, and hung there, bleeding.
And there in the cafeteria—it was weird. All the tables and chairs, all of them, were tipped over and scattered to the periphery of the room. And alone in the center lay Myron, unconscious and totally naked.
They never found more than a few strips of his clothes, although the air was filled with wisps of cotton and loose, tumbling threads.
2.
Mystery explosion rocks Westfield high school, everybody said. The explosion wasn’t what caught on, though. It was the mystery. What kind of explosion could propel one student through a window, blow all the clothes off another, and scatter chairs and tables without even damaging, some scuff marks excepted, the floor? Henry Clay High School, Westfield, Pennsylvania, had a genuine unexplained phenomenon.
The school nurse got to Myron first. She hadn’t even seen Garrett, who was, after all, several feet off the ground and partly obscured by chicken wire and broken glass. She ran to Myron, covered him with her shawl, and ran back to her office to call the police, who had already been called by others. When she returned, Myron was surrounded by teachers. “Give him air,” she shrieked, not sure what else to do. She then ran back to her office, saw Garrett stuck in her window, and fell over. When the ambulance came, it took Myron and a hyperventilating nurse (Mrs. Botchel, the newspaper said) to the hospital. Garrett, now awake and screaming, had to be cut out of the chicken wire, and required a second trip. This is why reinforced windows are dangerous, incidentally.
Myron had no memory of what had happened. His attempts to explain are perhaps worth recording, if only in paraphrase. He had felt a pressure, and he had felt a lack of pressure, and then he was aware of looking at two opposite sides of the room at once, and then everything had gone dark. He was covered in bruises, dismissed as superficial because they faded quickly. Nothing else was wrong with him, and the police, although puzzled, could hardly pin a trashed cafeteria on one scrawny kid. So after an overnight (for observation), Myron was free to go. He had made quite a hit that night among the hospital staff, who were compassionate people desensitized from their internships in the burn ward and pitied the ugly little boy; they took turns showing him around, and his happiest moments came when touring the newborn ward. He had to wear a surgeon’s cap and mask, and no infant screamed when it saw him.
The Horowitzes, on hospital orders, told their son that he should take it easy, and, at the sheriff’s suggestion, encouraged him to try to remember what the devil had happened. He was out of school for a week. (Garrett, in case you care, which I don’t, recovered almost completely, but began wetting the bed compulsively; perhaps he’ll recover his dignity in time. He also remembered nothing, or said he remembered nothing, after a certain point. “I heard air rushing, and I was looking at the dark,” was all he could say.) Myron spent his week reading adventure novels on the couch, and eating cookies.
Most of this information was in the local news, accompanied by wildly inaccurate speculations about an explosion. Everyone assumed, of course, that Myron and Garrett had just been walking amiably by, innocent bystanders to some kind of occult phenomenon. The mystery was a slim sidebar in a couple of national papers, which was where I read about it. So I packed up an overnight bag, a gun, a thermos, and an extra can of gas, and I called Alice.
At his parents’ request, Myron’s return to school was a quiet affair. “Let’s act as though nothing happened,” they may as well have painted on a bedsheet banner and hung in the front hall. Lunch tables the custodian moved to the gymnasium temporarily. In the lunchroom, workmen got paint on their coveralls.
If I may be permitted a moment of melodrama (which is after all the idiom of my chosen profession), there were two smoke-filled basements in which Myron’s return to school caught a sinister eye. One of them was in Baton Rouge. The other was in Westfield, Pennsylvania. Unlike Myron, Garrett Bercelli was not without friends. Three or four of them had gone to visit ol’ Garrett in his hospital